San Jose, California: Apple has defended its decision to leave most iPhone owners behind as it pushes ahead with newly announced AI-powered features that will only be rolled out to future iPhones and the latest generation of premium models later this year.
Head of AI John Giannandrea said the move was driven purely by technical reasons, explaining in a live interview on “The Talk Show” podcast on Tuesday that AI software requires more powerful hardware.
He acknowledged that AI models could theoretically run on older phones, but argued that they would be too slow to be of any practical use.
Earlier this week, Apple announced its AI offensive with a range of “Apple Intelligence” features for iPhone users, including assisted email editing, personalized emojis, and an upgraded Siri that leverages the intelligence of ChatGPT.
However, Apple plans to include these features only on future iPhones and on more expensive models of the iPhone 15 late last year.
For Mac computers, there's plenty of headroom, and any of Apple's own M-series chips, which Apple has been using in place of Intel processors since 2020, would be sufficient.
AI features will also work on iPads with M-chip systems. In addition to the chip, RAM memory capacity also plays a role, said Craig Federighi, head of software.
Apple, which markets itself as a privacy-focused company, says it has sought to move as much computing work as possible on devices for data protection reasons, but this also puts greater demands on performance.
At the same time, the company developed a procedure for encrypting and transmitting the tasks to Apple's servers, after which the data should disappear entirely from the cloud. “We do not use user data to train our models,” Giannandrea said.
A new feature coming in updates such as iOS 18 later this year will also allow the generation of images from text prompts. However, unlike many other services, Apple AI will not generate artificial photos due to concerns that users might create deepfakes. – dpa
