Nearly two years after OpenAI launched a race to add generative artificial intelligence to its products, Apple jumped into the competition on Monday, revealing plans to bring the technology to more than one billion iPhone users around the world.
During a two-hour presentation from its futuristic Silicon Valley campus, Apple said it would use generative ai 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 texts. It will also result in a major update to Siri, Apple's virtual assistant.
Apple's plans to offer ai in its iPhones represent the next step in bringing artificial intelligence to mainstream consumers. Apple, Silicon Valley's iconic name, could do more than any other company to add credibility to a technology that has more than a few critics, who fear it is error-prone and could add to the flood of misinformation already on the Internet. . .
Apple's new ai features could also help ease concerns that the iPhone maker has fallen behind its biggest rivals in the tech industry's adoption of ai. The value of other tech companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, has skyrocketed due to their aggressive ai plans. Earlier this year, Microsoft dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable technology company.
When introducing its new ai, Apple emphasized how it planned to integrate the technology into its products with privacy in mind. The company said the technology, which can answer questions, create images and write software code, would perform sensitive tasks. He showed how the system could automatically determine whether a rescheduled meeting would complicate plans to attend a children's theater performance.
He said computer processing would be done on an iPhone rather than in data centers, where personal information is at higher risk of being compromised. For complex requests that require more computing power, he has created a cloud network with Apple semiconductors that, he said, is more private because it is not stored or accessible, not even by Apple.
Apple has reached an agreement with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to support some of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Requests that your system cannot process will be directed to ChatGPT. For example, a user might say that he has salmon, lemon, and tomatoes and wants help planning dinner with those ingredients. Users would have to choose to direct those requests to ChatGPT, making sure they know that the chatbot, not Apple, is responsible if responses are unsatisfactory. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attended the Apple event.
Apple's deal with OpenAI, which already has a close partnership with Microsoft, is another indication that the young San Francisco company has clearly become the tech industry's leading developer of ai technology.
“As we look to develop these incredible new capabilities, we want to be sure the result reflects the core principles of our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. “It has to be powerful enough to help with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to do.”
Apple also said it would make improvements to its iPhone software system. This fall, Messaging will add the ability to schedule messages and respond to them by tapping with more emojis. Apple will also launch a redesigned Photos app to make it easier to search for images by topics like pets and travel. And he said iPhone users could send high-resolution images to Android smartphones.
Apple brings several 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 touted itself as better at protecting people's personal information than its rivals because it makes money selling devices, not advertising.
But Apple has several weaknesses that could hold back its ai development. The secretive company has had difficulty recruiting and retaining top ai researchers because it limits the amount of research it publishes. It has also tried to license published material and opposed collecting it without permission, as other generative ai companies have done 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 by not recognizing various requests, and its ability to chat is limited because it is programmed to follow each individual command.
Generative ai could improve Siri because it has been trained on spoken conversations drawn from podcasts and videos. The result is a system that can mimic the way people speak.
Apple said Siri would be able to remember the context of something a user has asked it. For example, if someone asks about the weather at Muir Woods National Monument and then asks to schedule a hike there, Siri will now know that the hike you're scheduling 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 to people in the Photos app. You'll also be able to perform tasks for people like finding an image of a user's driver's license and filling it out in a form.
Other generative ai capabilities Apple demonstrated included automatically summarizing audio recordings, allowing customers to create movies from photos by writing a description, and cleaning up photos by removing distracting images from the background.
“This is the biggest event for investors since the iPhone because they have to infuse ai into their products to prosper,” 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 the ai experience that consumers want.”
The event was also an important milestone in Apple's relationship with developers. Tensions have risen 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 circumvent the 30 percent fee it charges on app sales. But developers say Apple responded by introducing alternatives that would make such a change prohibitively expensive.
Apple faces similar challenges in the United States. A federal judge in San Jose, California, is weighing whether the company can continue with a plan to collect 27 percent of sales through alternative payment systems. And the Justice Department also sued Apple over rules that prevent other companies from offering cloud gaming apps, digital wallets and other alternatives on iPhones.
In this context, Apple sought to emphasize the benefits it offers to developers. During the event, it showed how its Apple Intelligence tools would be available to make apps more useful to customers.
Apple said it would expand sales of Vision Pro, its mixed reality headset, beyond the United States to China, Japan and Europe later this month. The company also revealed new capabilities for the headset, including the ability to view old photos in three dimensions and create a giant virtual screen for a Mac.
