In 2024, the company gave the answer to “What is Apple going to do with AI?” The announcement included a variety of new features under the banner of Apple Intelligence, but its rollout was delayed.
“This year is naturally softened compared to previous years when there were more material announcements at WWDC,” wrote Amit Daryanani of Evercore Isi in a note to client last week.
Like many, Apple was surprised by the November 2022 release of Openai's ChatGpt, a match that sparked the current AI boom. Apple used AI throughout its products for certain features such as photo, video creation, and high quality audio, but it was unable to make Siri a useful conversation assistant, as the new generation of chatbots offer.
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced new AI features that are becoming common elsewhere, such as text, image generation, and notification summaries. But a big new advance is the redesigned Siri. This is a real assistant that works across the installed apps and the web, creating automated workflows from simple conversation commands.
However, the rollout was delayed last fall, omitting the new Siri, which Apple users still await when they arrive. The existing features are overwhelming and full of poor reviews.
“Apple has made this promise. This enormous thing is trying to change everything across the lineup,” said Marques Brownlee, a well-known technical reviewer, in November. “They've been talking about it for a while and I think that promise is beginning to fade.”
In a March statement to Apple Blogger's John Gruber, an Apple spokesperson admitted that the new Siri “expects it will take longer than we thought it would offer these features, and we expect them to roll out next year.”
On a revenue call in May, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a similar statement.
Ben Reitzes of Melius Research said management should not be happy as management is ready for the meeting. “But there's no doubt they're adjusting their strategy behind the scenes.”
“However, until September, it is unlikely that the company will outline the exact aspects of its future product plans,” Reitzes said.
Even if you race from behind, no one should still count Apple. Its greatest strength is that it is installed at the base of over 2 billion devices. Everything it put out is soon in front of a huge number of people. However, Apple needs to do better than ever before to engage these users, which has led to a reform of the leadership of this new version of Siri.
The majority of the problem is self-harmed by concerns from other apples. Privacy and security are at the heart of everything Apple does, and Apple would also prefer that no one else has access to conversations with Siri. The best way to do this is for everything to happen somewhere on the device, not on the cloud. This is how most of the work of Apple's legacy AI works.
The first layer of Apple Intelligence is on-device AI, which is hampered by the limited computing and memory capabilities of consumer devices, and the results are mixed. Apple also builds its own cloud called Private Cloud Compute, whose first business order is that no one can see the user chat. Apple wants to control its hardware and software to ensure private and secure chat, which is a disadvantage for the NVIDIA technology used by many competitors.
For now, at least, Apple is forced to resort to ChatGpt, the third tier of Apple Intelligence.
Security and privacy could turn out to be Apple's biggest hurdles in creating the SIRIs that users want, and Apple promised a year ago.
Apple was not the first to create a PC, smartphone, tablet or smartwatch, but ultimately created a product that defined all categories. It would be harder to make Apple Intelligence a leader than any of them.
Write to Adam Levine at Adam.levine@barrons.com
