Nearly two years after OpenAI ignited the race to build generative artificial intelligence into products, Apple entered the fray on Monday, revealing plans to roll out the technology to its more than 1 billion iPhone users around the world.
During a two-hour presentation at its futuristic Silicon Valley campus, Apple announced that it plans to use generative AI to power a system it calls “Apple Intelligence,” which will prioritize messages and notifications, provide writing tools that can proofread and suggest what users write in emails, notes and texts, and lead to a major upgrade to Siri, Apple's virtual assistant.
Apple's plans to put AI in the iPhone are the next step in bringing artificial intelligence into the consumer mainstream, and as a Silicon Valley icon, the company stands to do more than anyone else to boost trust in a technology that many critics worry is prone to error and could add to the misinformation already rampant on the internet.
Apple's new AI capabilities could help ease concerns that the iPhone maker is lagging behind its biggest rivals in the tech industry's adoption of artificial intelligence. The value of other tech companies, including Microsoft and Nvidia, has soared due to their aggressive AI plans. Earlier this year, Microsoft overtook Apple to become the world's most valuable tech company.
In unveiling its new AI, Apple highlighted its plans to incorporate the technology into its products in a privacy-conscious way. The company said the technology can answer questions, create images and write software code to perform sensitive tasks. It also showed how the system can automatically determine whether changing the time of a meeting would complicate plans for a child's theater performance.
The company said that the computing power happens on the iPhone, not in a data center where personal information is at higher risk of being leaked, and that for more complex requests that require more computing power, it uses Apple's own semiconductors to create a cloud network that not even Apple itself can store or access, providing greater privacy.
Apple has signed a contract with OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to support some of the company's AI features. Requests that the company's system cannot fulfill will be sent to ChatGPT. For example, a user can say, “I have salmon, lemons, and tomatoes, and I want help planning a dinner with those ingredients.” Users must choose to send these requests to ChatGPT, and will ensure that they understand that the responsibility for any unsatisfactory answers lies with the chatbot, not Apple. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended the Apple event.
Apple's deal with OpenAI, which already has a close partnership with Microsoft, is another sign of how the young San Francisco company is becoming a leading AI technology developer in the tech industry.
“As we build these great new features, we want to ensure that the results reflect the core principles of our products,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “They should be powerful enough to help you do what matters most to you. They should be intuitive and easy to do.”
Apple said it will also make improvements to its iPhone software system. This fall, messaging will get the ability to schedule messages and tap to reply to messages with more emojis. It will also release a redesigned Photos app that makes it easier to browse images by topic, such as pets or travel. And iPhone users will be able to send high-resolution images to Android smartphones, the company said.
Apple brings some advantages to the AI race. Its semiconductor team is one of the best in the industry, and it has been making chips that power complex AI functions for years. The company also touts that it is better able to protect your personal information than rivals, because it makes money from device sales rather than advertising.
But Apple has some weaknesses that could slow AI development: The secretive company has struggled to recruit and retain top AI researchers because it limits how much research it publishes, and it has also sought to license published materials and opposed harvesting them without permission, as other generative AI companies have done to build and train their technology.
Siri has been around for over a decade, but Apple has neglected the voice assistant, frustrating users with its inability to recognize various requests and limited ability to actually converse with it, as it's programmed to follow individual commands.
Generative AI has the potential to improve Siri's capabilities because it is trained on conversations extracted from podcasts and videos, resulting in a system that can mimic the way humans speak.
Apple said Siri will be able to remember the context of what you ask — for example, if someone asks about the weather in Muir Woods National Monument and then asks to plan a hike there, Siri will know that the planned hike will take place in Muir Woods.
Siri will be able to better understand what you want to do in your iPhone apps: for example, if you ask Siri to show you photos of your friends, it will find and display them in the Photos app, or it will be able to find a picture of your driver's license to fill out forms and do other things.
Other generative AI features Apple demonstrated included the ability to automatically summarize audio recordings, allow customers to create movies from photos by writing descriptions, and clean up photos by removing distracting images in the background.
“This is the biggest event for investors since the iPhone, because to be successful they need to build AI into their products,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, which invests in emerging technology companies. “Today was about showing they can make AI a core competency and deliver the AI experience that consumers want.”
The event also marked a milestone in Apple's relationship with developers. Tensions have been building between the company and app makers over the past year as the company has resisted new rules enacted in Europe to weaken its grip on the App Store. The rules require Apple to allow alternative third-party payment methods that allow users to avoid the 30% commission it charges on app sales. But developers say Apple has responded by introducing alternatives that make the changes cost-prohibitive.
Apple faces similar challenges in the U.S., where a federal judge in San Jose, California, is considering whether the company can go ahead with a plan to collect a 27% cut of sales on alternative payment systems, and the Department of Justice has also sued Apple over rules that bar other companies from offering alternatives like cloud-streaming gaming apps and digital wallets on the iPhone.
Against this backdrop, Apple was keen to highlight the benefits it offers to developers, with the event showing how Apple Intelligence tools can help make apps more useful for customers.
Apple has announced that it will expand sales of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset to China, Japan and Europe beyond the US later this month. The company also unveiled new features for the headset, including the ability to view old photos in 3D and create a giant virtual display for your Mac.
