Apple's AI push is receiving mixed reviews — but it may be the 'human twist' the technology needed

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At long last, Apple has joined the AI race, unveiling what CEO Tim Cook called a "new personal intelligence system" at its annual developer conference this week.

The company introduced a suite of AI capabilities that it collectively dubbed “Apple Intelligence,” which will be embedded across its operating systems starting this fall, helping users do everything from creating illustrations to writing personalized texts and work memos.

At first glance, the company’s much-anticipated foray into AI may appear to be incremental and more "cautious" than some expected, accompanied by a tepid market reaction with its shares down nearly 2% after the big reveal on Monday (which have since rallied to a record).

After all, many of the new AI features it touted — such as text generation and upgrades to Siri — are already offered in products by rivals 微软 and 谷歌 . Add to that the fact that Apple is relying on a partnership with OpenAI ’s ChatGPT for tasks that “offer specialized domain expertise,” and it only feeds the narrative that the company is playing catch-up.

But it would be premature to write the tech giant off, according to experts. Here’s why.

Apple is the tech world’s Goliath?

Apple is not merely a device maker, but maintains a mammoth user ecosystem with its stronghold across both hardware and software. The company boasts over 2.2 billion active devices worldwide and has a fast-growing services business, as well as manufactures its own chips. That footprint gives it a built-in advantage when it comes to leading the consumer adoption of AI.

“ChatGPT had a big role to play in putting the power of AI directly in the hands of the masses, but Apple, with its significant global footprint, could now truly unleash the floodgates for consumer AI access and excitement,” said Janelle Teng , vice president at VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners. “Apple is in a unique position to capture value across the entirety of the AI stack for a user, since the company produces chips, owns the device layer and controls the operating system.”

Moreover, AI models are only as good as the data that they are trained on. Apple once again has a leg up there, thanks to the sheer amount of data that lives within its devices, from texts, images and emails to location, health and even sleep data.

“Data is the fuel for AI, and Apple has an edge here,” said Viral Tripathi , global CIO at Ascendion , a provider of AI software engineering services. “When you combine all this data together with an operating system, the network effect is significant.”

The one potential obstacle is that Apple’s AI offerings will only be available in its future software updates of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and its Sequoia operating system for computers — so those who want to use Apple Intelligence will have to upgrade their devices. There’s no guarantee that will end up happening, according to a note from Wedbush Securities quoted by Business Insider.

‘AI for the rest of us’

While generative AI until now has primarily been adopted at the enterprise level and harnessed to execute on specific tasks, Apple’s pitch is that it’s the company poised to deliver on AI that understands each of us on a personal level.

This positioning is not a stretch of the imagination, given the personal data the company has access to. At the event, Apple drove that message in a demo by its SVP of software engineering, Craig Federighi.

In his example, Federighi showed how Apple Intelligence could seamlessly retrieve and analyze relevant data from his email, calendar and Apple Maps to determine whether a last-minute rescheduled meeting would make him late for his daughter’s play on a particular evening, triumphantly declaring: “This is AI for the rest of us.”

Such data sources give Apple a valuable competitive advantage, said Bessemer’s Teng, as they can unlock an unprecedented level of tailored intelligence. It’s also a game-changer when it comes to productivity and efficiency, since AI can now accomplish in seconds something that would take a person minutes. But most importantly, said Teng, it displays “agentic AI potential,” familiarizing people with a future where AI software can asynchronously take over and execute tasks on our behalf.

Doubling down on privacy

A common thread across Apple’s product launches in recent years has been an emphasis on user privacy and safety, with the company poking fun at how public we all are about the minutiae of our lives, as investor Tomasz Tunguz pointed out on LinkedIn. Apple Intelligence is no different.?

The company doubled down on privacy as its differentiator once again, making the case that its AI features were focused on protecting the user, since the models would run locally on its devices and on cloud servers, and would be powered by its own chips. Cook described this method of training on a user’s personal data without it leaving the device as “AI as only Apple can deliver it.”

This approach should allay the kind of privacy concerns that are shrouding its competitors, said Benjamin Lee , a computer and information science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.??

“Apple has built up a large foundation of trust for its users with regard to privacy, so this notion of doing stateless computation is a really compelling selling point,” said Lee. “You know that your data is going to be used only for the computation that you've requested and it’s not going to be mixed in with any other user data to provide you an answer.”

Sure, Apple’s moves may not have been a step function in advancing AGI or have received the euphoric fanfare that its product launches typically do, but it gives AI “a friendly, human twist,” in the words of MoveoApps founder Hiral Atha . In a world where many fear disruption or even destruction at the hands of technology, a friendly twist may just be the push that was needed.

Here’s where we bring you up to speed with the latest advancements from the world of AI.

• French AI startup Mistral AI has raised 600 million euros ($643.7 million) in a funding round led by existing investor General Catalyst , the company told Reuters on Tuesday. The Series-B round has upped its valuation close to 6 billion euros, up from its prior valuation of 2 billion euros. See General Capitalist Hemant Taneja ’s LinkedIn post here.
• Buzzy AI startup Perplexity launched its first ad during last week’s high-profile National Basketball Association Finals. The company, which is developing an AI-powered search engine rivaling Google, took an unconventional idea for its ad, dropping a movie-style trailer for an action thriller that doesn’t exist. See CEO Aravind Srinivas ’s LinkedIn post here.

Here’s keeping tabs on key executives on the move and other big pivots in the tech industry. Please send me personnel moves within emerging tech.

• OpenAI is expanding its executive team as the maker of ChatGPT scales up its AI offerings. The company hired Sarah Friar , the former CEO of Nextdoor , as chief financial officer, and recruited Kevin Weil , a product development alum of Instagram and Twitter , as chief product officer.
• 摩根大通 has hired former PayPal tech executive Sri Shivananda as its CTO, the bank said in a memo Monday, according to Reuters. It also added 亚马逊 ’s Manoj Sindhwani as CIO for the chief data and analytics office and Darrin Alves as CIO for infrastructure platforms to its Global Technology Leadership Team.

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