Apple Intelligence, a thousand AI apples (are a little green🍏)

How AI-native will iOS 18 be really? What OpenAI partnership?

Hello Everyone,

I know you hate getting Emails on Sunday, so I’ll be brief.

Got to admit, I’m looking forward to WWDC this year on June 10th-13th. That is, tomorrow.

Still though some baffling things will be taking place. Apple is gearing up and set to reveal a new AI system on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac next week at WWDC 2024 — and it will be called “Apple Intelligence”, according to a report from Bloomberg. You know I try hard daily to admire Generative AI, but lately to be honest I have found it all a bit disappointing and anti-climatic as is the usual for hype cycles from this version of Silicon Valley.

If Twitter founder Jack Dorsey warns social media algorithms are draining people of their free will, I have noticed they are trying to make AGI and BigTech PR seem believable, really hard! No now wonder real people have left Twitter/X and find LinkedIn cringe, even as Facebook tries to lure back GenZ, which never really used the platform in the first place.

According to Exponential View, Apple has more than 7 times the revenues and about 4 times the profits of Nvidia. Apple of course is not growing. Investors are betting heavily that Nvidia’s revenues will continue to grow.

This quote sort of sums up my mood about Apple. 🍎Apple has been moving sideways for some time. AAPL 0.00%↑ Apple’s stock is only up nearly 9% the last year.

It’s not Apple’s job to keep up in AI, which they historically have called machine learning. At least, not in any first-mover sense. However on device and edge computing with Generative AI will be able to do some neat things, and hopefully iOS 18 reflects that. The pressure on Apple as a company is immense and their OpenAI partnership might hopefully make us laugh at Siri a bit less.

Their Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) takes place on Monday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. And I’ll be covering it. Now I’m not sure how excited I will be if ChatGPT is baked into iOS nor if AI-powered summarizations, reply suggestions, and an AI overhaul of Siri is even that high on the list of what Apple users actually want or need?

🍏 Apple is Late to the Party of Generative AI

Apple long avoided using the acronym AI when talking about its products. What high-quality utility can Apple even find in the Gen AI parlor tricks of predicting the next token, for its billions of users? It’s almost a head-fake of a situation where Apple has to pretend everything is fine.

Apple will use its “own technology and tools from OpenAI” to power its new AI features, according to Bloomberg. Some of Apple’s small language model research papers have been fairly interesting the last year, and on-device language models will soon be able to do some pretty neat things.

In an era of so much betrayal from the likes of Microsoft Recall, Apple needs to show privacy still matters in an age of ubiquitous AI, that pretends to be smarter than it is. Apple won’t build profiles based on user data and will also create reports to show their information isn’t getting sold or read. Not the easiest thing to show considering Apple is also getting more into Advertising.

The ideal of AI devices and even AI PCs has been a bit of a head-fake, we aren’t quite there yet. Everything from Dell to Humane to Microsoft, has been a bit underwhelming. Even GPT-4o and its demo fell flat for me. 18 months later I barely use ChatGPT. The chatbot or the search bot just aren’t compelling products or apps. Even the aesthetic of AI in devices natively doesn’t seem quite right yet in 2024.

For Apple, Generative AI might just be a method to try to force consumers into upgrading their iPhones and devices, though I’m not sure we’re ready. Does iOS 18 with some bells and whistles even count? Apple music could get auto-generated playlists, the Reminders app is expected to integrate with the Calendar app, and the Photos app is expected to feature AI-powered photo retouching. It’s going to be hard to impress us.

Meanwhile Apple’s stock has been going nowhere, fast. Even as the AI bull market has lifted some failure names to dizzying heights. As Nvidia overtakes them in market cap, “the AI strategy is the missing piece in the growth puzzle for Apple,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush. Outside of huge buybacks and with Apple cash on hand for the quarter ending March 31, 2024 that was a still impressive $67.150B, what has Apple even does for us lately?

A Parade of AI Hype for Apple