Apple Intelligence - Slow Out The Block, But Gaining Ground

The tech world was waiting with baited breath for Apple to outline their vision for Artificial Intelligence, and its fair to say they did not disappoint. Many commentators had inexplicably mistaken this delay for innovative inertia or even imprudence, rather than their typical thoughtful and cautious deployment. What we saw at this years World Wide Developer’s Conference was exactly that; a detailed roadmap for the integration of AI into applications and services that only Apple could achieve.

Many other companies beat Apple out of the gate with regards to AI in the public domain, but like all the best athletes, the Cupertino champion understood their strengths perfectly. Rather than hastily assemble some kind of AI based product to compete (at least with one exception and more on that in a little bit) they have bided their time well and clearly observed the pitfalls that lay in wait for their more eager competitors. Broadly speaking, these traps in AI can be distilled into two distinct camps; applications and privacy. The former concerning itself with how these new technologies can be leveraged either by existing or new processes in a meaningful way, while the latter is all about how one can accomplish this by not surrendering all your users data to some dodgy third party. Both are important, both are tricky.

Apple’s WWDC Key Note presentation addressed these directly, and did so with their characteristic confidence and guile. First we got a glimpe on how Apple Intelligence (as they call it) will work across the different devices, leveraging the personal context inherit to their all-in-one hardware and software ecosystem. In line with Apple's entire operating model, users who are ‘all-in’ on the Apple ecosystem will stand to benefit the most from the integration of Apple Intelligence. So users with their contacts, messaging, emails, photos and bookings will see the most transformative change, as AI integrates seamlessly, they claim, across all Apple’s first-party apps.

Then there is privacy; orders of magnitude more important and more boring. Apple has long positioned privacy as an intrinsic part of its ecosystem, and broadly speaking, has an excellent reputation in that regard. To put it simply, the vast majority of the AI tasks outlined in the keynote will happen on your device, and if it requires additional power then a private cloud service will be available. Functionally I see no distinction between this and say Microsoft leveraging their Azure Cloud service, but it will still be reassuring for users to hear that it would use Apple’s own hardware to ensure consistency of privacy. AI does have the potential to complicate this, and we will deal with that in the next paragraph but Apple’s privacy-first approach will go along way to heading off the most common complaints levelled at AI.

That was Apple Intelligence, and it was mightily impressive if not particulary surprising. Where things did get a bit weird, as I mentioned earlier, was the planned integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT service as an option when Apple’s own AI models don’t want the responsibility of handling it the request. The user will be prompted to proceed with this service, but whether Apple want to own it or not, the responsibility for any AI shenanigans will still lie with them. It won’t go down well if something heinous happens and their refrain is ‘don’t blame us, blame that weirdo Sam Altman’. This is sticky, its new ground, and its a potential PR quagmire that I am surprised Apple didn’t swerve altogether.

There’s another caveat with integrating ChatGPT, which refers back to the point regarding privacy. If the request requires ChatGPT, then that data is officially off Apples servers. Again, that lack of control is very ‘un-Apple’ and their handling of that relationship will be fascinating to see play out.

It is too early to say whether they will deliver in either area, of course, but the strides that Apple will take this year to close the gap on (surpass?) their competition have been planned, and will release to the public in the coming months. What appears to be true at this early stage, is that the AI race will be run with Apple setting the pace.