Nearly two years after OpenAI sparked a race to add genetic artificial intelligence to products, Apple entered the fray Monday as it unveiled plans to bring the technology to more than a billion iPhone users worldwide.
During a two-hour presentation from its futuristic Silicon Valley campus, Apple said it would use genetic artificial intelligence to power what it calls Apple Intelligence. The system will prioritize messages and notifications and offer writing tools capable of correcting and suggesting what users have written in emails, notes or text. It will also lead to a major upgrade for Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.
In unveiling its new AI, Apple highlighted how it planned to integrate the technology into its products with privacy in mind. The new AI features could help assuage concerns that Apple had slipped behind its biggest rivals in the tech industry embracing AI.
The company said the technology, which can answer questions, create images and write software code, will perform sensitive tasks. It showed how the system could automatically determine whether a rescheduled meeting time would complicate a child’s plans to attend a play.
He said computer processing would be done on iPhones rather than in data centers, where personal information is at greater risk of being compromised. For complex requests that require more computing power, he has built a cloud network with Apple semiconductors that he said is more private because it’s not stored or accessed, even by Apple.
Apple has struck a deal with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to support some of its AI capabilities. Requests that its system cannot place will be directed to ChatGPT. For example, a user might say they have salmon, lemon, and tomatoes and want help planning dinner with those ingredients. Users should choose to direct these requests to ChatGPT, making sure they know that the chatbot — not Apple — is responsible if the responses are unsatisfactory. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, attended Apple’s event.
Apple’s deal with OpenAI, which already works closely with Microsoft, is another indication that the young San Francisco company has clearly become the leading AI developer in the tech industry
“As we strive to develop these incredible new features, we want to be sure that the result reflects the principles at the core of our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive. “It has to be powerful enough to help the things that matter most to you. It should be intuitive and easy to do.”
Apple also said it will make improvements to its iPhone software system. This fall, Messaging will add the ability to schedule messages and reply to messages by tapping back with more emoji. Apple will also release a redesigned Photos app to make it easier to browse images by topics like pets and travel. And he said iPhone users will be able to send high-resolution images to Android smartphones.
Apple brings many strengths to the AI race. Its semiconductor development team is among the most talented in the industry and has been making chips that power complex AI functions for years. The company has also positioned itself as better at protecting people’s personal information than its rivals because it makes money by selling devices, not ads.
However, Apple has several weaknesses that could slow down the development of artificial intelligence. The secretive company has struggled to recruit and retain top AI researchers because it limits the amount of research it publishes. It also sought to license published material and objected to collecting it without a license, as other AI companies did to build and train their technology.
Although Siri has been around for more than a decade, Apple has let the voice assistant languish. The assistant has frustrated users with its inability to recognize various requests, and its ability to actually converse is limited because it’s programmed to follow every single command.
Generative AI could improve on Siri because it has been trained on spoken conversations derived from podcasts and videos. The result is a system that can mimic the way people speak.
Apple said Siri could remember context for something a user has touched with it. For example, if someone asks for the weather at Muir Woods National Monument and later asks to plan a hike there, Siri will now know that the hike they’re planning is in Muir Woods.
Siri will also understand more of the things people want to do in iPhone apps. For example, users can ask it to show a photo of a friend, and it will find and show those images for people in the Photos app. It will also be able to perform tasks for people such as finding an image of a user’s driver’s license and filling it into a form.
Other AI production capabilities Apple demonstrated included automatically summarizing audio recordings, allowing customers to create movies from photos by writing a description, and cleaning photos by removing distracting background images.
Apple’s push to build artificial intelligence was partly a response to Wall Street investors. The technology has boosted the values of Microsoft, a big player in genetic artificial intelligence, and Nvidia, which sells artificial intelligence chips. Earlier this year, Microsoft dethroned Apple as the world’s most valuable tech company.
“This is the biggest event for investors since the iPhone because they have to infuse artificial intelligence into their products to thrive,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, which invests in emerging technology companies. “Today was about showing that they will make AI a core competency and that they can deliver an AI experience that consumers want.”
The event was a major milestone in Apple’s relationship with developers, too. Tensions have flared between the company and app makers over the past year as Apple has resisted new rules in Europe designed to loosen its grip on the App Store. The rules require Apple to allow third-party payment alternatives that could bypass the 30 percent fee it collects on app sales. But developers say Apple has responded by introducing workarounds that would make such a switch prohibitively expensive.
Apple faces similar challenges in the United States. A federal judge in San Jose, California, is considering whether the company can proceed with a plan to collect 27 percent of sales on alternative payment systems. And the Justice Department also sued Apple over rules that prevent other companies from offering cloud-streaming gaming apps, digital wallets and other iPhone alternatives.
In this context, Apple tried to emphasize the benefits it offers to developers. During the event, he demonstrated how Apple Intelligence tools would be available to make apps more useful to customers.
Apple said that later this month it will expand sales of Vision Pro, its mixed reality headset, beyond the United States to China, Japan and Europe. The company also revealed new features for the headset, including the ability to view old photos in three dimensions and create a giant, virtual screen for your Mac.
