What We Learned Yesterday About Apple's AI Strategy

Author

Nathaniel Whittemore
June 11, 2024

The AI Daily Brief First Five - Tuesday June 11, 202

A little something different today as we review yesterday’s “Apple Intelligence” announcement at WWDC.

Some observations about Apple Intelligence at WWDC in no particular order

  • This was AI for normies. Not only were they not focused on big blow-you-away state of the art AI moments, the examples of using AI they showed were almost banal day-to-day uses. It's clear they think that small useful interactions are the first wave of AI adoption.

  • It really is all about Siri. Siri remains at the very center of Apple's future bets -- even more so now. Interestingly, they seem to have the same thesis that OpenAI and Google do -- that a single app assistant taking actions across all the other apps, in large part mediated by voice -- is the future of human-computer interactions.

  • Apple is SO focused on simple user experiences that they're willing to reduce choice in order to reduce complexity. Case in point is their image generation tool, which just gives users three style options like Animation or Illustration. They also obliterate the entire concept of promoting with it.

  • If you're a person who thinks models will become commoditized, you just got a lot more evidence. Apple is clearly betting that all normies are going to care about is the AI doing useful things for them, and that naming and branding models would actually be more distracting.

  • Even more than that, by opting to integrate ChatGPT, it's clear that Apple is confident that the win with AI isn't about proprietary models, but about the right use cases finding their way to a massive base of installs.

  • For a company that doesn't have a massive base of installs to work with, OpenAI has certainly put themselves in as good a position as possible to borrow others, given that they're now partnered with the 1st and 3rd biggest public companies whose products touch a significant portion of consumer and enterprise users. +As expected, Apple is pushing privacy hard. In fact it seems to me like they might even be testing how much hay they can make about privacy in this AI context. As in, maybe the rise of GenAI will make people even more concerned about privacy and care enough to actually vote with their wallets.

  • Trying to bring device-style privacy to the cloud is a cool effort.

  • But man are they trying to thread a hard needle. All about privacy, but still need access to absolutely everything on your phone in all your applications for these tools to work. This isn't Apple's fault, per se -- it's sort of just an inevitable reality of going after "private AI" and "personal context" in AI at the same time.

  • The Calculator and Notes presentations right before the AI were honestly the most technically impressive showing for the entire event. Part of me wonders if they dropped that demo video just to show that -- even though they're betting AI is going to come to normies through simple day-to-day uses -- they still have some big crazy technical game that they can pull out as they want and need to.

  • Community reactions are mixed. The most common critiques are around privacy (on screen awareness being a priority problematic for some) and not having their own AI (Apple as ChatGPT wrapper). But lots of folks are also buying the Apple pitch about "AI for the rest of us" and are excited to see what happens next!

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