A few months from now, your iPhone will know you very well. You can tell yourself to talk to it and tell it to find that picture from Easter, the one with the bunny dressed up and the dogs dressed as eggs, and send it to your wife and in-laws. And then Siri will do it all without you needing to lift a finger. Thanks to a suite of new AI features from Apple, Siri will soon know who your wife and in-laws are, know what’s in all your photos, and fulfill almost any request you make on your iPhone.
It’s not supposed to be scary, according to Apple. Company Just announced Apple Intelligence, a deeply integrated set of generative AI features that will launch this fall with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Instead of jumping to the edge of the uncanny valley — as other AI companies have been doing — think of the Pope or Promise in a puffer coat image. Recreate the super intelligent assistant from the movie his — The AI Apple is offering is trying too hard to be super friendly.
Apple avoided referring to its new software as AI throughout a keynote presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference at Apple Park in Cupertino on Monday. It’s not AI, the company seems to be pushing, it’s Apple Intelligence, which is meant to avoid annoying things like misinformation or unchecked data collection. The new Apple technology aims to combine the personalization of AI with the privacy that the company has long built its reputation on. Sure, Apple can do the horrible things that competing AI models do out there, but the company promises it’ll just be super safe and helpful.
It’s great marketing, which makes sense. This is Apple we’re talking about: Since the second Steve Jobs era, the company has specialized in joining new product categories while its competitors have come up short and outmarketed everyone. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch – all these products appeared a few years late and still dominate the market.
“AI personalization is Apple’s strategy,” said eMarketer senior analyst Gadzo Sevilla. “The company’s understanding of the consumer technology space and how users interact with their devices gives them an advantage over standalone AI apps and services for which privacy is an afterthought.”
So the privacy thing is what will make that personalization strategy work. After all, personalization is AI’s superpower. If it knows you very well, an AI model can predict what you want and make your life easier. But until now, companies like Google and OpenAI have relied on aggregate data stored on servers to train those models. If users trust Apple to handle their data securely, they will use personalization tools and give up more data to make those tools work better.
But at a more fundamental level, Apple’s entry into the AI race will force its competitors to change their strategy. This could mean that Google and OpenAI start taking privacy more seriously. This may mean you use more AI. Corporations are increasingly excited about how AI can help them make more money, we’re still discovering how technology fits into the average person’s daily life. Did Apple just figure it out for us?
It depends on whether people actually use Apple Intelligence. It’s a simple proposition, though, since the new technology will be baked into Apple’s new operating systems, which are free to download on iPhones, iPads and Macs. The catch is that you need to buy Apple’s latest generation device to work with Apple Intelligence.
Still, Apple Intelligence is designed to change the way we use the company’s devices through an ambitious set of features focused on automation, personalization, and text and image generation. And all of this is built around a new privacy standard, which will become the core of the friendly-not-intimidating tone Apple is trying to strike.
You can finally start using Siri
At the heart of all these new features is Siri. Since launching in 2013, Siri has enabled you to do basic things like the score of a Mets game (they’re probably losing) or the weather forecast for next week.
Now, a revamped version of the voice assistant looks to offer something close to full automation, making it much easier to type to speak requests and saving effort on doing little things. You can just tell your iPhone or Mac to do things, like send your wife that cute baby picture, and it’ll be done. You can ask your new computer assistant to play its latest episode Today, explained Or find the fastest way to Rockefeller Center during rush hour traffic.
Apple says the technology will rely on a semantic index that can analyze a variety of attributes to understand everything from the files on your device to your relationships with your contacts. Again, these new features aren’t supposed to feel scary. They are more automated and more personalized.
This also applies to new text and image generation features. A new system-wide feature called Writing Tools offers many ways to check grammar and adjust the tone of anything you write, from emails to texts to work presentations. Apple Intelligence will also suggest replies to your emails and summarize notifications based on what it thinks is important to you. On the image front, you can create cute pictures of your friends using a new tool called Image Playground, or quickly create new memory videos based on what’s in your photo library.
Again, this is happening on all devices; You are not sending these images to some random server. The generative AI features also seem a bit bland and even cartoonish – perhaps purposefully so, to avoid the appearance of AI misinformation. This is a good thing since the growth of realistic AI-generated content is a new and driving one A dangerous wave of misinformation. So don’t expect any fake pope-in-a-puffer-coat images using Apple Intelligence.
Device details are important to enforce Apple’s privacy promise. Apple has built its reputation on protecting the privacy of its users’ data and keeping that data on physical devices rather than sending it to cloud servers where it can be mishandled. The catch is that the most advanced AI features require a lot of compute power, which is why interactions with products like ChatGPT happen on remote servers. That data is then stored and used to train the model to become stronger.
This sort of thing is described by experts in the field as a Privacy nightmare. Apple, however, has a solution to this problem in a new form A service called private cloud computing. In fact, for more complex tasks that require sending data to a server, Apple will simply send your data to its own super-secure servers. Otherwise, the data never leaves your device and your baby’s photos are safe.
“You don’t have to hand over all the details of your life to someone to store and analyze them in the AI cloud,” Craig Federighi, the Apple executive who oversees iOS and macOS, said in a keynote presentation at WWDC on Monday.
You can get scary AI if you want
In true Apple fashion, though, there was a “one more thing” announcement at the end of it all.
If you’re not satisfied with Apple Intelligence and its milquetoast approach to AI, Apple has partnered with OpenAI, making it easy to access ChatGPT through Siri and Apple’s new writing tool. In some cases where Siri may not have all the answers, for example, the assistant will suggest you send queries to ChatGPT and even confirm that you want to share your data with OpenAI servers. You will also have the option to use ChatGPT to create text and images in the document. Federighi too Confirmed plans to provide access to more third-party AI modelsAfter the keynote in an interview, with Google Gemini.
Apple is late to the AI race — OpenAI Blew the world’s mind With ChatGPT in 2022, when Google And Microsoft Launched their version of deeply integrated AI tools a few months ago. But Apple’s patience in not rushing into new technologies has paid off in the past. The company sees our collective concern about increasing AI security, even among the engineers building the technology. And now, it seems to be responding to all the chaos with a characteristically clean and aggressive version of AI.
If it succeeds, Apple may be able to convince its millions of devoted customers that Apple Intelligence will improve their lives and make their jobs easier, without all the scary risks we hear about. This means that millions of customers will have to buy new Apple devices to access Apple Intelligence. And why wouldn’t they? It’s not the big, scary AI. It’s just fun and friendly Apple Intelligence.
