In a few months, your iPhone will know you really well. You might ask your iPhone to find Easter photos, pictures of babies dressed as bunnies and dogs dressed like eggs, and send them to your wife and in-laws. Siri will do it all for you, without you having to lift a finger. Thanks to a suite of new AI capabilities from Apple, Siri will soon know who your wife and in-laws are, what's in all your photos, and be able to fulfill nearly every request you make of your iPhone.
According to Apple, this isn't creepy. The company just announced Apple Intelligence, a set of deeply integrated generative AI capabilities that will be released this fall in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Rather than teetering on the edge of the uncanny valley like other AI companies do, think of images of the Pope in a puffer coat or the promise of recreating super-intelligent assistants from the movies. she — Apple's AI is clearly trying hard to be friendly.
During its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote at Apple Park in Cupertino on Monday, Apple avoided even calling its new software AI. The company seemed keen to stress that it wasn't AI, but Apple Intelligence, to avoid evoking fears of misinformation and unchecked data collection. Apple's new tech aims to blend the personalization of AI with the privacy that the company has built its long-standing reputation for. Sure, Apple might do some creepy things that rival AI models do, but the company promises it's extremely safe and useful.
This is great marketing, and it makes sense. We're talking about Apple. Since the second Steve Jobs era, the company has specialized in entering new product categories after competitors couldn't keep up, then out-marketing them. The iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and more, all of these products came out years late, but still ended up dominating the market.
“AI personalization is Apple's play,” said Gadjo Sevilla, senior analyst at eMarketer. “The company's understanding of the consumer tech sector and how users interact with their devices gives it an advantage over standalone AI apps and services where privacy is an afterthought.”
So privacy concerns are key to making a personalization strategy work. After all, personalization is like an AI superpower: if an AI model knows a user very well, it can predict what the user wants and make the user's life easier. But so far, companies like Google and OpenAI have relied on aggregated data stored on their servers to train these models. If users trust Apple to handle their data securely, they'll use the personalization tools and give up even more data to make those tools work better.
But on a more fundamental level, Apple's entry into the AI race will force competitors to change their strategies. It could mean that Google and OpenAI start taking privacy more seriously. It could also mean more use of AI. While companies are increasingly hoping that AI can help them grow their bottom lines, we're still figuring out how the technology fits into the everyday lives of ordinary people. Has Apple figured it out for us?
That depends on whether people actually use Apple Intelligence, but the suggestion is easy, since the new technology will be built into Apple's new operating system, which can be downloaded for free on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. The catch, however, is that you'll need to buy Apple's latest generation devices to use Apple Intelligence.
Still, Apple Intelligence aims to change the way you use its devices through an ambitious set of features centered around automation, personalization, and text and image generation — all built on new privacy standards that will be key to the friendly, non-intimidating vibe Apple is trying to project.
Maybe I'll finally start using Siri
At the heart of all these new features is Siri, which since its release in 2013 has been able to do basic things like tell you the score of a Mets game (which they're probably losing) and what the weather will be like next week.
Improved voice assistants offer something approaching full-scale automation, making it incredibly easy to voice your requests and taking the hassle out of minor tasks you might otherwise do yourself. Just ask your iPhone or Mac to do something, like send a cute baby photo to your spouse, and it will do it. You can also ask your new computer helper to play the latest episode of Netflix. Today's explanation Or figure out the quickest way to get to Rockefeller Center during rush hour traffic.
Apple says the technology uses semantic indexing, which can parse different attributes of the files on your device to understand everything from the contents of a photo to its relationships with contacts. Again, these new features aren't creepy — they're just more automated and more personalized.
This also applies to new text and image generation features. Writing Tools, a new system-wide feature, checks the grammar and gives you different ways to adjust the tone of everything you write, from emails to texts to work presentations. Apple Intelligence even suggests replies to your emails and summarizes notifications based on what it thinks is important to you. For images, you can use a new tool called Image Playground to create cute photos of your friends or quickly create a video of new memories based on what's in your photo library.
Again, this is all done on-device, not sending your photos to some random server. The generative AI feature looks a bit bland and cartoonish, which is probably intentional to avoid the impression of AI-generated misinformation. This is a good thing, because the proliferation of realistic AI-generated content is giving rise to a new proliferation of dangerous misinformation. So don't expect to see fake images of puff-coated popes being created using Apple Intelligence.
On-device details are key to making Apple's privacy promises work. Apple has built its reputation on protecting users' data privacy and keeping that data on the actual device rather than sending it to cloud servers where it can be mishandled. The problem is that the most advanced AI features require huge amounts of computing power, which is why interactions with products like ChatGPT happen on remote servers. That data is stored and used to train models to make them even more powerful.
This is widely pointed out as a privacy nightmare by experts in the field. However, Apple presents a solution to this problem with a new service called Private Cloud Compute. Indeed, for complex tasks that require sending data to their servers, Apple will only send it to their own highly secure servers. Otherwise, your data will never leave your device and your baby photos will remain safe.
“You shouldn't have to hand over every detail of your life to someone's AI cloud to be stored and analyzed,” Craig Federighi, Apple's executive in charge of iOS and macOS, said during the WWDC keynote on Monday.
If you want scary AI, you can get it.
However, in true Apple fashion, there was one more announcement at the end.
For those who aren't satisfied with Apple Intelligence and its timid approach to AI, Apple has partnered with OpenAI to make ChatGPT easily accessible through Siri and Apple's new Writing Tools. For example, if Siri doesn't have all the answers, the assistant will suggest sending a query to ChatGPT and ask if you want to share the data with OpenAI servers. There's also the option to use ChatGPT to generate text and images in documents. Federighi also confirmed plans to offer access to more third-party AI models, including Google Gemini, in an interview after the keynote.
Apple has been late to the AI race. OpenAI wowed the world with ChatGPT in 2022, while Google and Microsoft rolled out highly integrated versions of their AI tools a few months ago. But Apple's patience with new technology has paid off in the past. The company has watched as our collective anxiety about AI safety grew, even among the engineers building that technology. And now it seems to be responding to all that chaos with its characteristically clean and benign version of AI.
If this works, Apple might convince millions of its loyal customers that Apple Intelligence can make their lives better and their jobs easier without the very scary risks we keep hearing about. It also means that millions of customers will have to buy new Apple devices to get access to Apple Intelligence. Why not? It's not a big, scary AI. It's just fun, approachable Apple Intelligence.
