Apple's foray into AI highlights how the tech industry is betting its future on the technology. The iPhone maker has long positioned itself as forging its own path, focusing on a closed ecosystem around expensive phones and computers and touting that model as better for user privacy. But its embrace of generative AI shows that the tech trend is too powerful for Apple to ignore.
Apple showed off AI features it calls “Apple Intelligence,” including text generation for emails and texts, image generation tools that work across Apple apps, and a more powerful Siri voice assistant. The company touted that its AI tools are better than those of competitors because they're integrated into Apple's software. For example, a user can ask their iPhone to “play the podcast my mom sent me,” and the system will automatically know which podcast to play because it has access to the various Apple apps on the user's phone.
“There are some really great chat tools out there already,” Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said during the company's video presentation on Monday, “but these tools know very little about users or their needs.”
At the same time, the deal could bring new regulatory scrutiny to Apple. The Cupertino, California-based company is already facing an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department that accuses it of running an illegal smartphone monopoly. Antitrust enforcement agencies are wary of the way tech companies use their deep pockets to strike deals that scare away innovation. Apple's megadeal with Google — where the search giant pays to give its search engine preferential treatment in Apple's Safari web browser — is a key part of a government lawsuit that alleges Google is using the arrangement to crowd out competitors.
The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission recently struck a deal to step up oversight of big tech partnerships, and the FTC is already investigating whether Microsoft engineered its $650 million deal with AI company Inflexion to dodge government antitrust scrutiny.
“Whether innovation runs on steam, transistors, or reconfigures human thought through machine learning, our competition enforcement principles apply,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Cantor said in a speech last month.
When OpenAI announced ChatGPT in November 2022, the tech world was abuzz. Microsoft, which had already partnered with OpenAI, invested billions more in the small company and began incorporating the company's technology into its products, from its cybersecurity software to the Windows search bar. Google soon followed suit, announcing it would surface AI answers in search results and launch its own chatbot, first called Bard and then Gemini.
In interviews and company conferences last year, executives at Microsoft and Google proudly spoke about putting AI at the center of their business strategies. But Apple CEO Tim Cook was less enthusiastic. In a May 4, 2023, conference call, he told investors that generative AI still has “some problems to solve.” Apple will introduce chatbots and other generative AI technologies “very carefully,” Cook said at the time.
From chatbots churning out misinformation to image generators that repeat harmful biases against women, AI's problems remain unsolved, but Apple is forging ahead.
“The accelerating pace of generative AI product releases is raising significant concerns for both businesses and users around safety and reliability,” said Liran Hasson, CEO and co-founder of Aporia, which makes software to help developers track AI programs and put guardrails in place. “Innovation is exciting, but the rush to release these products often comes without necessary safeguards. As we've seen in the past, this 'arms race' dynamic can lead to unintended consequences.”
The company said in a statement Monday that most of its AI functions will run on-device, in line with the privacy-focused approach it has taken to differentiate itself from Google's Android smartphone operating system. AI functions that are too complex to run on individual phones or for consumers will run in special data centers equipped with Apple's own computer chips, the company said.
It is unclear whether OpenAI will have access to Apple user data as part of the partnership.
Apple has been using AI technology for years. Image recognition algorithms help classify images in an iPhone's photo library. AI helps the Apple Watch determine if the wearer has been in a car accident and send an alert to emergency personnel. The company's voice assistant, Siri, was built using AI natural language processing and came before Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
But recent breakthroughs in AI technology have come from other companies: Google researchers authored and published papers that provide the foundation for the “large-scale language models” that power ChatGPT and other modern chatbots, which are far better able to understand and respond to human conversation than traditional voice assistants.
