Apple on Monday introduced Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that’s incredibly useful and relevant. Apple Intelligence is deeply integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. It harnesses the power of Apple silicon to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks. With Private Cloud Compute, Apple sets a new standard for privacy in AI, with the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers.
Apple is integrating ChatGPT access into experiences within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, allowing users to access its expertise — as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities — without needing to jump between tools.
Siri can tap into ChatGPT’s expertise when helpful. Users are asked before any questions are sent to ChatGPT, along with any documents or photos, and Siri then presents the answer directly.
Additionally, ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools, which help users generate content for anything they are writing about. With Compose, users can also access ChatGPT image tools to generate images in a wide variety of styles to complement what they are writing.
Privacy protections are built in for users who access ChatGPT — their IP addresses are obscured, and OpenAI won’t store requests. ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply for users who choose to connect their account.
ChatGPT will come to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, powered by GPT-4o. Users can access it for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT subscribers can connect their accounts and access paid features right from these experiences.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
At Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the company showed the results of its mad scramble to build a sophisticated new platform: Apple Intelligence.
The frenzied effort to create Apple Intelligence began in late 2022, when it became obvious that generative AI would take the world by storm. Until that point, Apple’s lack of progress in artificial intelligence technology hadn’t been an issue for investors or consumers. But it was suddenly clear that the brand would suffer if Apple didn’t have a more aggressive AI strategy soon.
After ChatGPT and other AI tools arrived, Apple had no choice but to rework iOS 18, its latest iPhone operating system, to include as much AI as possible.
So, in roughly a year and a half, Apple concocted an entirely new AI platform that today remains a work in progress. The features will launch as a public beta test later this year, and it may be a rocky stretch to get to that point. Apple Intelligence is still so finicky in internal testing that some features have been stripped out from the version headed to developers.
Apple also swallowed its pride and added OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, rather than waiting for its own technology to be ready years later… But the company may still be getting ahead of itself. Many of the features unveiled during the event won’t be available until next year.
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MacDailyNews Take: After the last 12-18 months of frenzied rowing to catch up to rivals after missing the boat, those Apple employees who are working on Apple Intelligence are set for a busy summer! This is the direct result of going for so long – too long! – without having a visionary in the CEO chair.
Of course and as usual, we were the first to tell you all of this was happening at Apple, months ago:
Apple was caught flat-footed, due to a lack of vision on the part of leadership. They were, uh, focused elsewhere. Apple’s traditional data center network is not fit for generative AI. It will take years and billions of dollars to catch up just to where GenAI leaders (OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, etc.) are today.
So, the only solution is to partner with a [Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc.] for the real GenAI stuff while pretending (marketing) really hard that some on-device AI Apple has whipped up in a few months is “insanely great Apple innovation” that’s at the heart of Apple’s 2024’s AI announcements when it’s really just an adjunct… Watch Apple make a big show of its on-device AI at WWDC and run many ads touting it from June onwards.
Apple hopes to buy time for the data center buildouts and investments that will be required for them to someday own their own AI technology and not have to license it from the likes of [OpenAI].
This is what happens after a decade plus with a caretaker CEO at the helm after he hits the last page of his iteration playbook, yet attempts to stay in the game for too long.
See also:
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
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The real loser here is Google. It should have been their chatbot integrated in Apple ecosystem. They lost a big battle.
For Apple, most people don’t care about who has developed the tool. They just want to use it. And Apple will give them the opportunity, closely tied with their ecosystem. And Apple will continue to make money by selling hardware.
That would have been too much for even Apple to swallow. OpenAI may turn out to be worse but they don’t have the same bad rep yet. Anyway Apple painted themselves into a corner because they can’t just allow some outside mega corp to access their walled garden and still lay claim to safeguarding user privacy.
They have to build the key AI stuff at the app level themselves to work within their ecosystem. All they’ve done is bought themselves 3-4 months of additional scrambling to make something presentable for fall release. Compatibility realities aside, they may not even have the capacity to handle more than tens of millions of users to start.
200 baby.
A $10+ gain after yesterday’s questionable/tepid media reports of Apple Intelligence!
Hype to fade, or response to something material in yesterday’s event?
Coincidental to Elon’s warning adds to; hmmm….
Took folks a while to understand the implications of the announcements.
Apple is now the only large tech company with an AI business model. These are real products and services that will drive enormous revenue through hardware sales and platform loyalty (expanding the number of Apple devices a user will want to own, and keeping them invested in the Apple ecosystem).
Apple has reduced the cost structure of AI (by doing lots on-device and running it on its own chips in the cloud).
Apple has shown what an AI-powered multi-modal, multi-platform, hardware/software/services ecosystem can look like for average consumers. It looks good, and it’s just the start.
Because of the gangly monster that AI could be (perception and reality), AAPL’s connection to the personal, calms the mental boogie-man and instills the possibility of concrete indi functionality.
With that said, the tech-market apparently knows more about the concrete plan ahead–as almost everything I read was heavy on marketing prose and much of the functionality augments the tech I despise…and that is the tech that sees the human as lame and trains the human to be lazy.
Yes, it’s just the start and, it seems, others see more in the beginning elements than me.
Who doesn’t give a nod to 205+!
Whoa. That didn’t take long to go from $205+ to $215+
Did the CEO really need to be the visionary?? How about the high priced VP from google running the show? Hard to believe had he actually developed something compelling that he couldn’t have sold the CEO on it.
This is the different between a visionary and non-visionary CEO. The former is proactive and desires to lead the market. He / she “goes to where the puck is going”
https://x.com/AiBreakfast/status/1800265994394554624
Look, Apple is a much much bigger company than when Steve Jobs ran it. Those VP’s are critical to moving Apple forward, and the resources at their disposal dwarf those available to Apple when Steve was calling the shots.
Yes, because of Steve Jobs innovations and product developments — NOT Tim Cook riding the iPhone gravy train. A visionary CEO is solely lacking at Apple. Stock bump a band-aid, see how long it sticks…
The start of a great company almost always starts with a visionary. These days, it’s
“best” to hand-off to those that maintain and grow via $$ management. Great businesses become more like insurance companies. Not a bad thing, but usually boring.
The vision in Apple is the development of a family of powerful enabling chips that create a multi-device platform which is the framework for their AI approach. Something that competitors lack. AI enabling or enhancing hardware doesn’t appear to be a bad place to be, just ask Nividia.
Our revisionist history, or for the younger crowd that doesn’t know all the Jobsian history at Apple – this isn’t the only time Apple’s been caught flat-footed. Jobs was so stubborn, brilliant but stubborn, he missed many opportutnites only to play catch up or forced to leap frog.
Jobs was focused on DVD’s into iMacs, vs burnable CD recorders. That was a huge deal at the time (no iPods, iPads, iPhones, just Mac), so yah, Apple scrambled and included burners into iMacs but not after a lot of sales damage had been done.
While Jobs and crew were scrambling to integrate the NEXT OS as OS X, a massive, massive, undertaking, portable music players were becoming the rage, and CREATIVE had a huge lead. Apple was able to find the Toshiba Type II Microdrive and birth a great music interface, boasting your “entire music library in your pocket” coupled with iTunes – it was a vertical solution. But make no mistake, Apple was playing catchup.
Jobs was hyper focused on “The Cube” and its ultra expensive LCD Cinema displays. It was a disaster. Too expensive for the consumer, no expansion for the Pro, so where did it play? Uh, nowhere… That’s a cool vision, but a vision to nowhere…
While the Palm Pilot and Trio and other such personal organizers and cell phones were out there, BlackBerry beat Apple to making a key feature accessible to all business users – email!
Apple fought back with iPhone of course, but my point is, that while Steve Jobs was indeed visionary, he blew it quite a bit and only because Apple’s HW and SW was under their roof could they catch up and pass folks relatively quickly.
Cook is no visionary at all. Not even close to Jobs. He is a great manager and caretaker of ideas and direction, but he doesn’t set it. And now it’s time for him to move on.
The biggest brick by time was a 10-year, multi-billion waste in the car. Project creep, no clear direction, what a mess.
What Apple should have done is learned from Tesla – Built your own mousetrap. In Tesla’s case, your own charging infrastructure.
But in Apple’s case, it should have been looking 5-7 years out, and what can leapfrog or Purple Cow the market? Hydrogen.
Whether a combustion hydrogen engine (which leaves no pollution behind), or hydrogen fuel cells, either way, could be used to power directly or power EV motors. The result is still zero pollution output.
Apple – still could – reboot and go this route, partnering with Costco’s to put in a hydrogen island, fill the gaps with Chevron or go it alone – Apple has the money, they can get this done.
It’s a complete leapfrog, and requires leadership to think big, huge, massive, and yet Elon seems to be one of the few that can think big, think 10 years from now, and get it done…
I disagree that the car project, and by extension Apple’s investment in spatial computing, was a waste. I think both categories have promise and potential for Apple. The problem is a case wrong-timing and Apple being flat-footed with respect to AI.
Apple should have invested heavily in their Apple Intelligence foundation first (ie: their on in-house LLM and cloud-based AI datacenter) and released it like 2 years ago. Once that foundation is set, then release Vision Pro and their take on a car.