- The AI boom in Silicon Valley shows no signs of slowing.
- Apple is finally ready to tackle AI “for us.”
- The iPhone maker unveiled its vision for AI at WWDC, showing that it's doing things its own way.
When Apple released the first Macintosh in 1984, the message was simple: “This is the computer for all of us.”
Early ads featuring this slogan contrasted the ungainly heft of IBM computers with Steve Jobs's sophisticated vision for personal computing, suggesting that Apple would always have its own way of doing things better than its competitors.
That message remains the same even in the age of AI.
On Monday, during the keynote address at its Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, Apple finally unveiled Apple Intelligence, the company's vision for generative AI across its devices, as “AI for all of us.”
There are a few reasons for this: First, generative AI has been around for a while, and Apple has no reason to pretend it didn't exist.
Apple's biggest rivals, including Microsoft, Meta and Google, are rushing to make AI a top priority, vying to get ahead with a technology that Bill Gates has described as “revolutionary” since the launch of ChatGPT.
Apple has remained largely silent during that time, raising concerns among its supporters that the company was caught off guard by its sudden shift toward generative AI.
After all, the company was already hell-bent on breaking new ground in virtual reality computing with Vision Pro.
But if you've followed history, you know that Apple likes to do things its own way, which is precisely why the company has dubbed Silicon Valley's most talked-about approach to technology “AI for the People.”
So what exactly is it? Well, there's not a fundamental difference between what Apple showed off on Monday and what its competitors have already announced.
When announcing “Apple Intelligence,” Apple CEO Tim Cook emphasized that Apple's AI will be powerful, intuitive, integrated, personalized and private. “All of this comes together to go beyond artificial intelligence — it becomes personal intelligence,” he said.
The problem is that Apple's AI isn't the most powerful on the market: As Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick pointed out at X, Apple's newly introduced on-device AI models are only as good as smaller models released by competitors.
Apple is also relying in part on other companies for integrations, announcing a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI that will see OpenAI's technology integrated into Apple's operating system, allowing users to opt-in to use ChatGPT on their iPhones, for example.
So, none of this is fundamentally new — Apple isn't showing off some powerful new AI model to blow away competitors in performance benchmarks — and companies like Google are already working on intuitive uses of AI with features like “Circle to Search.”
But with more than 2 billion active devices worldwide, Apple knows there's a huge installed base waiting to offer its own Apple-packaged AI to users.
Apple is doing AI for them.
