CEO Tim Cook said the new AI features are “the next big step for Apple.”
Apple has unveiled a series of new artificial intelligence features in partnership with OpenAI as it battles perceptions that it is lagging behind in the race to embrace technology.
Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, announced “Apple Intelligence” on Monday during a roughly two-hour presentation at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California.
“This is all about personal intelligence beyond artificial intelligence and the next big step for Apple,” CEO Tim Cook said.
The upgrade includes a complete overhaul of the virtual assistant Siri, which will enable you to perform hundreds of more tasks with the help of ChatGPT.
Apple users can also create their own emojis based on language prompts and generate summaries of emails in their mailboxes using the tech giant's in-house technology.
Apple has said it hopes to differentiate itself from rivals Microsoft and Google by putting privacy at the “core” of its AI, which is known for collecting vast amounts of data.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said “Apple Intelligence” will build AI models “at the core of every iPhone, iPad and Mac” and protect user privacy every step of the way.
The upgrade will be available for free with Apple's iOS 18 operating system, due for release later this year, but all features will only work on the latest models of iPhones, iPads and Macbooks.
In a social media post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company was “excited” to partner with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into its products.
But billionaire Elon Musk, founder of OpenAI rival xAI, slammed the partnership, claiming that Apple was “misleading users” by failing to account for the user data it shared with OpenAI.
“This is an unacceptable security breach,” Musk, who heads electric car maker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, said in a post on X.
“And visitors will have to leave their Apple devices at the entrance, which will be stored in a Faraday cage.”
Apple, which has long shunned the term “artificial intelligence,” is under increasing pressure to show it can keep up with rivals Microsoft and Google in the race to deploy AI.
But investors seemed less than impressed with Monday's announcement, with Apple shares falling nearly 2%.
