Apple WWDC: iOS18 and Apple’s intelligence announcements

At WWDC 2024 Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, a set of AI features coming to iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Apple’s goal with Apple Intelligence is to seamlessly integrate AI into the core of the iPhone, iPad and Mac experience.

Siri is getting a significant AI upgrade in iOS 18. Apple promises a more natural, conversational experience, allowing you to talk to Siri in a more relaxed and familiar way. In a bold move, Apple is integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Siri and Writing Tools. This means that Siri can use ChatGPT’s extensive knowledge base to answer complex questions or perform tasks that go beyond Siri’s current capabilities.

Apple Intelligence aims to revolutionize writing across the Apple ecosystem. With Writing Tools, users will be able to proofread, rewrite and summarize emails, messages and documents. These features will be available not only in Apple’s own apps like Mail, Notes and Pages, but also in third-party apps that adopt Apple’s API.

Apple Intelligence also opens new avenues for visual expression. Image Playground lets you create original, fun images in seconds. Choose from styles like animation, illustration or sketch and explore different concepts and themes.

Apple is also focusing on keeping users’ data on their devices. The company emphasizes “on-device processing” as a core principle of Apple Intelligence, meaning many of its AI models run directly on the iPhone, iPad or Mac. This is a marked departure from competing AI services that rely heavily on cloud processing, potentially exposing user data to third parties.

At X, Andrej Karpathy, formerly director of AI at Tesla and part of the founding team at OpenAI, shared his thoughts on the announcement:

I actually really liked the Apple Intelligence announcement. It should be a very exciting time at Apple as they put AI on top of the entire operating system. Some of the main topics.

Step 1 Multimodal I/O. Enable text/audio/image/video capability, both read and write. These are native human APIs, so to speak.
Step 2 Agent. Allow all parts of the OS and applications to interact through “function calls”; LLM kernel process that can schedule and coordinate work along them given user queries.
Step 3 No friction. Fully integrate these features in a highly frictionless, fast, “always on” and contextual manner. No information on copy paste, fast engineering, etc. Adjust the user interface accordingly.
Step 4 Initiative. Do not perform a task given a prompt, anticipate the request, suggest, initiate.
Step 5 Hierarchy of delegation. Move as much intelligence as you can into the device (Apple Silicon very useful and convenient), but allow optional sending of work to the cloud.
Step 6 Modularity. Allow the operating system to access and support an entire and growing ecosystem of LLMs (eg ChatGPT notification).
Step 7 Privacy. <3

Apple acknowledged that some AI tasks require more processing power than a single device can provide. This is where Private Cloud Compute comes in. The company promises that the data sent to Private Cloud Compute is encrypted, processed exclusively for your request and then deleted immediately. The company says this means that Apple itself does not have access to your personal information.

Apple Security shared that “Private Cloud Compute continues Apple’s deep commitment to user privacy. With sophisticated technologies to meet our stateless computing requirements, enforceable guarantees, no privileged access, non-targeting and verifiable transparency, we believe that Private Cloud Compute is nothing less than the world’s leading security architecture for cloud AI computing at scale.”

Some believe this could lead to more phone sales for Apple. According to an industry note written by Wedbush Securities, an LA-based wealth management, brokerage and advisory firm, “The AI ​​holy grail we see for Apple is two-fold going forward: 1) While the AI ​​strategy— of Apple is stretched, this will catalyze a long-awaited super cycle in Cupertino with 270 million iPhones out of 1.5 billion worldwide in the installed base gold that are not upgrading their smartphones in more than 4 years, based on our estimates, 2) Developers will now build hundreds of apps on top of Apple’s AI stack essentially creating a new AI app store over the next few years, which will be the primary way consumers interact with Generative AI”.

Apple Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPad and Mac with M1 and later, with Siri and the device language set to US English. Developers interested in learning more about Apple Intelligence can watch the keynote where it was introduced. Developers can also refer to the technical blogs on Apple Foundation Models or Private Cloud Compute.