Apple Intelligence is Not a ChatGPT Wrapper

As expected, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 was all about AI, shifting focus from last year's emphasis on machine learning. This year, the buzzword was ‘Apple Intelligence’ – a fancy term for ‘privacy-focused AI’.

The most exciting announcement though was the Apple-OpenAI partnership. Yes, the wait is finally over. Apple has announced integrating ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4o, directly into iOS, which can be connected with Siri.

The integration will allow the users of Siri to leverage ChatGPT’s intelligence, when beneficial. They will be prompted before sending any queries, documents, or photos to ChatGPT.

After the hour-long previews of features on different Apple OSs, and even a Calculator, the conversation veered towards ‘Apple Intelligence’. Creating DALL-E like images, correcting emails with ChatGPT, GenEmoji, and many more such announcements were met with a huge applause by the audience.

Apple has its own intelligence

Something that went under the radar for many because of the OpenAI announcement was that all the features running on-device and on Private Compute Cloud run on models developed by Apple, not OpenAI.?

Apple explains in its blog that it has built its ~3 billion parameter on-device language model and a larger server-based language model for Private Cloud Compute.

“Our foundation models are trained on Apple's AXLearn framework, an open-source project we released in 2023. It builds on top of JAX and XLA, and allows us to train the models with high efficiency and scalability on various training hardware and cloud platforms, including TPUs and both cloud and on-premise GPUs,” reads Apple’s blog.

The Cupertino giant has once again proved that the future of AI is on-device specialised LLMs, not generalised models such as GPT.

Meanwhile, at Google I/O 2024 last month, there were rumours that the company would announce a partnership with Apple. But, the search giant just introduced tons of AI features such as Gemini-nano running on edge devices, powering Pixel 8 Pro, and Project Astra by Google DeepMind.

Siri is Not that “Chatty”

The new Siri looks and feels amazing with full integration with iOS, better natural language understanding, and Siri interacting with each app the user wants with AppIntent. Siri can even take actions on users' demand. It felt like Apple might not even announce its OpenAI partnership, as its own LLMs looked good enough.

But with the announcement rolling in towards the end, Apple was all hands off when it came to privacy.

OpenAI’s blog made it clear that if someone uses their ChatGPT account through Siri, “their data preferences will apply under ChatGPT’s policies”.?

This is just to emphasise on Apple’s well-founded obsession with privacy, while also focusing on innovation. It would use on-device LLMs, connecting it to ChatGPT if needed, leaving the privacy part for OpenAI to figure out.

“Are you like…really…REALLY sure that you want ChatGPT to help you with that?”

Not everyone is happy though. “If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation,” posted Elon Musk on X.

To put Musk’s privacy concern in context, if a user queries ChatGPT through Siri on iPhone, according to the company’s existing policy, the data can be collected by OpenAI, even though the company claims that it does not collect user data.

There is no word on whether Apple will use the data through OpenAI, though the latter using it to train its AI models is not completely undeniable.?

Steve Wozniak, too, seemed unimpressed with the announcements. “I have an AI myself: Actual Intelligence,” he mocked Apple Intelligence, calling it just another type of AI. He believes that people should try it and not just rely on the demo.?

Regardless, Apple Intelligence was quite impressive to say the least. Now iOS, macOS, and tvOS, have LLMs running on-device and also on its Private Cloud Compute, which is Apple’s new privacy-focused cloud, separate for each user.?

Apple’s dedication to privacy is unquestionable, even with the OpenAI partnership.

OpenAI is the Word

For Sam Altman, this is another huge partnership after Microsoft. It is almost as if ChatGPT is powering both the Copilot at Microsoft and the intelligence within Apple products. There is no escaping OpenAI – it is the word.?

Amid all this, the company announced the addition of two new leaders to its executive team, Sarah Friar as the chief financial officer and Kevin Weil as its chief product officer.?

For Microsoft, this might seem like OpenAI is slowly moving away from the company, which has been coming for a very long time. Moreover, the ChatGPT on Apple is kind of being funded by Microsoft, as the tech giant paid billions of dollars to OpenAI to build it.?

Pretty interesting that Apple is indirectly buying intelligence from Microsoft!

For Apple, this was just a part of what's to come. Tim Cook concluded the keynote by saying, “We also intend to add support for other AI models in the future.” Maybe, the likely Google and Apple deal could come through in the future.?

Regardless, OpenAI is on its way to becoming a trillion dollar company, thanks to Apple and Microsoft.