Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, had well-developed strategies for generative AI when Apple finally announced its own push in June. Conventional wisdom suggested that this entry was late and old-fashioned.
Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time and has been quietly preparing for this moment for years.
That’s part of the message I got when talking to key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the world of technology known as Major Product Launches. Less publicly recognizable is Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea, who previously led machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke with Greg “Joz” Joswiaksenior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple. (These conversations helped me prepare for my meeting with Tim Cook, which I did the next day.) All executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite AI’s enormous disruptive potential, Apple was going to handle this revolutionary technology with the same clarity and thoroughness for which the company is known. To paraphrase a song by some musicians who also formed a company called Apple, the Cupertino team was always waiting for this moment to arise.
“In 2015 we were doing intelligence, like predicting what apps you would use next and helping predict routes on maps,” Joswiak says. “We don’t always talk about it publicly, but we were there and at the forefront.”
In 2018, Apple poached Giannandrea from Google, a move Cook told me showed Apple was anticipating the coming transformation of AI. The company created a new senior vice president position for him, an unusual move for Apple that broke with its traditional hiring norms. Upon arrival, Giannandrea was surprised to see how much Apple was already exploiting cutting-edge AI in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature that you use every day, many, many times a day to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it actually works,” he says. “There’s a lot of deep learning going on privately on your phone just to get that feature working. But for the user it simply disappears.”
Federighi says experimenting with OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, which launched in 2020, sparked his imagination. “Things that seemed on their way to becoming possible suddenly seemed eminently possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to leverage Apple-style technology.”
Apple soon had several teams working on Transformer-based AI models. So when ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022, there was no need for Apple to put together an internal working group to develop AI products; work was already underway to create features that would similarly “just disappear.” “We have ways to bring together functional expertise across the organization to achieve larger product transformations,” Federighi says. “When it came to taking a bigger step publicly, we pulled together a lot of those threads, in a way that’s very familiar to us at Apple.”