Apple unveils its AI vision at long last

Hey Siri, how is Apple using generative AI?

As of this week, the company finally has an answer. After seeming to sit out much of the generative AI arms race over the past year or so, Apple announced a new flagship system called “Apple Intelligence” and a flood of new features that it powers. Those span everything from new emoji generated on the spot to writing assistance and agent-like task performance.

Apple also announced a partnership with OpenAI that will tap ChatGPT to answer certain questions posed to Siri and image generation, among other integrations.

Apple sought to play up some of its existing strengths in how it rolled out its big AI play—namely, that its walled-garden ecosystem is already embedded in people’s lives and that it generally doesn’t deal in data collection for advertisers. Personalization and privacy were thus major watchwords.

“It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the keynote. “It has to be deeply integrated into your product experiences. Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more. And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up.”

Apple seemed to be trying to make up for lost time with the pace at which its executives dropped new AI features during the event.

Some of the highlights:

• Apple Intelligence will be able to carry out tasks across different apps and coordinate between them, such as checking traffic conditions after rescheduling a meeting.
• A new feature called Genmoji will produce emoji-like reaction images instantaneously, and a system called Image Playground will create visuals in apps like Messages.
• A new set of writing tools that can draft, rewrite, proofread, and summarize text.
• Much of this functionality will be processed on-device with Apple’s own chips (Apple Intelligence will only be available on devices with an M1 chip or later). More complex requests can draw on the company’s new cloud-based solution called Private Cloud Compute, where data is never stored or accessible to the company, according to Craig Federighi, Apple SVP of software engineering.

Whether or not this new collection of AI-powered tools will be enough to vault Apple up into contention with its Big Tech rivals that have been dribbling out offerings like this for more than a year remains to be seen. Apple’s share price dropped around 2% in the hours after the keynote, as of market close on Monday.