Giannandrea said Apple had focused on reducing hallucinations in its models in part by using selected data. “We’ve invested a lot of energy into training these models very carefully,” she said. “So we’re pretty confident that we’re applying this technology responsibly.”
That training wheels approach to AI applies across Apple’s offering. If it works as promised, it should mean that Apple Intelligence is less likely to fabricate or suggest something inappropriate. In its blog post, Apple stated that testers found its models more useful and less harmful more often than competing device models from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. “We’re not going to take this teenager and tell him to go fly a plane,” Federighi said.
Apple’s long-awaited tie-up with OpenAI will also keep ChatGPT at arm’s length, with Siri and a new writing assistant called Writing Tools only tapping it for certain complicated queries and with the user’s permission. “We will ask you before entering ChatGPT,” Federighi said. “From a privacy standpoint, you’re always in control and you have complete transparency with that experience that you leave Apple’s privacy realm and you go out and use that other model.”
Apple’s deal with OpenAI would have once seemed highly unlikely. The startup has seen a meteoric rise thanks to the brilliance of its chatbot, but it has also repeatedly courted controversy with legal battles, boardroom drama, and its relentless promotion of powerful but unreliable technology. Federighi stated that Apple could incorporate Google’s flagship Gemini model at a future date, without offering further information.
Apple has been ridiculed for moving more slowly than its competitors in building generative AI, and has yet to reveal anything as powerful as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, but the company has published some notable AI research, including details of the multimodal enterprise models that run on devices.
Apple once seemed to have the lead in using AI for personal computing, after launching Siri in 2011. The assistant made use of recent AI advances at the time to more reliably recognize speech and sought to convert a limited range of voice commands into useful actions. on the iPhone.
Competitors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft soon followed suit with their own voice assistants, but their usefulness was fundamentally limited by the challenge of parsing the meaning of complex and ambiguous language. The large language models that power programs like ChatGPT represent a significant advance in the ability of machines to handle language, and Apple and others hope to use AI to update their personal assistants in several ways. LLMs could make helpers like Siri better able to understand complex commands and hold relatively sophisticated conversations. They could also provide a way for attendees to use software by writing code on the fly.
“They committed to personal, private, contextual AI,” says Tom Gruber, an AI entrepreneur who co-founded the company that developed Siri, which was acquired by Apple in 2010. Gruber says he was happy to see the demonstration use cases. of the company that emphasized those characteristics.
Other observers say Apple’s announcements amount to an effort to match the competition without risking too many mistakes. “What Apple is great at is offering great new capabilities and showing us new ways of doing things,” says David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School. “None of the things announced seem like that, which is not surprising because they are catching up.”
Yoffie says Apple’s focus on data privacy and security was not surprising given the concerns people have about sharing data with programs like ChatGPT. “Generative AI is a complement to the iPhone,” she says. “I think it’s important that they show that they’re not behind the Android world, which I think they did today.”
Still, generative AI is, by definition, unpredictable. Apple Intelligence may have performed well in testing, but there’s no way to account for every result once it’s unleashed on millions of iOS and macOS users. To deliver on its WWDC promises, Apple will need to give AI a feature that no one else has achieved yet. You need him to behave.
