By Jason Snell

June 13, 2024 4:29 PM PT

Last updated October 24, 2024

OK, fine, here’s Apple Intelligence

It was clear that Apple didn’t want to be a part of this.

For years now, the company has resisted using the phrase Artificial Intelligence to describe what it does. It’s facile and misleading and not what Apple is really about at all. So it’s been working on advanced computing techniques and the hardware to drive them, all using phrases like machine learning and Neural Engine.

Then, a couple of years ago, the AI buzzword exploded into the consciousness of… if not the general public, then the tech industry and press. The image creation and chatbot demonstrations were, yes, facile and misleading, but also quite a party trick. The narrative shifted: Was this the future of computing?

And there was Apple, churning away on its ML photo tagging in Photos and eye tracking in visionOS and image segmentation for silly video effects, suddenly caught flatfooted. The area it had looked on with some disdain—and not without reason—was suddenly the next big thing in tech.

And, of course, the scary part was: What if it was the next big thing? What if—after investing billions in visionOS and a car project that never even saw the light of day after a decade, all as a hedge against anything that might eclipse the iPhone—the technology that it had pooh-pooed was the real existential threat?

According to multiple reports, there was a moment in late 2022 or early 2023 when Apple realized that it needed to aggressively embrace AI or risk being seen as old and out of touch—not just by its industry but by the general public. The result was a prioritization of AI features all around the company, and the first fruits of that prioritization were on display at Monday’s WWDC keynote.

Three kinds of AI

It seems to me that on Monday, we saw three different kinds of AI features. Apple won’t ever say which was which, but the rest of us can guess at it. The three categories are:

• Features Apple would’ve done anyway. The company has been rolling machine-learning stuff into its software for ages now. Would smarter photo tagging and better Inbox organization in Mail have been announced regardless of Apple’s new, big AI focus? Almost certainly. Apple has always been about leveraging advanced technology in the service of customer needs.

• Features Apple would’ve done… eventually. It sure seems like Apple’s shift of priorities led to some features being announced that seem very much like the sort of thing Apple would’ve done, but at a slower pace and more conservatively. There seem to be more WWDC announcements than usual that ask for our patience because they won’t be ready until later this year or even sometime next year. But if it was an AI-related feature and was on the drawing board, it probably got pulled forward for introduction at WWDC 2024. Ready or not, here they come.

• Features Apple would never have done. There are some areas where Apple shows the strain of fearing they’ll be seen as burying their heads in the sand and resisting the trends. ChatGPT support and Image Playgrounds both feel like areas where Apple is stepping far out of its comfort zone in order to make it seem more tuned in to the zeitgeist.

We’ll see how these different features end up faring over the course of time.

The difficult choice

Last week, I wrote that Apple should see itself as the grown-up in the tech industry’s rush toward AI at any cost. For all of AI’s potential, it can be unreliable, the training data sources can be questionable, and it all just feels overhyped. (To me, AI manages to be simultaneously overhyped and potentially world-changing. Great potential… lots of snake oil. All at once.)

Apple’s WWDC announcements show that the company wrestles with this idea too. In its most thoughtful moments, it has expressed the desire to approach AI features with clear, important guidelines. The tools are meant to be intuitive, personalized, deeply integrated into Apple’s product experiences—they’re features, not tech demos—and build with privacy in mind.

In most cases I think Apple’s announcements showed those principles in action. This is a company that realized it was not going to be able to perform all the AI actions it wants to from a user’s device, so it built its own server hardware and operating system and is hosting them in its own data centers, all so that it can ensure that private user data isn’t ever misused. Nobody else does that, but Apple knew it had to.

Most of what Apple announced is really about solving problems for users. Rather than creating a model that has eaten the entire Internet but has a troubling tendency to hallucinate, Apple has focused on serving a user’s personal contexts. It seems to have avoided buying into the broader tech industry fallacy that the future of computers is asking questions to AI chatbots that respond with clichés and dissembling and hallucinatory answers.

Well. Avoided for the most part.

Apple has always been good at building features that play to its strengths, both technical and market wise. It owns your phone, it’s got your data in its ecosystem, it’s invested in building neural processing into its chips, and now it can put that all together to build a whole new Siri that knows your personal context and can put it into action.

But at the same time… all the cool kids are making weird AI art in Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, I guess? And even if Apple doesn’t have a chatbot that’s been trained on “world knowledge” (the official buzzphrase of WWDC 2024), I suppose you’re not in with the in crowd unless you’ve got a chatbot?

This is where Apple has compromised, a little, at a distance: Its Image Playgrounds feature makes weird AI-looking art, built around a nicer interface than any fill-in-the-text prompt, but still kind of weird and off-putting. And Apple has wired in ChatGPT, because if Siri can’t help you, maybe a chatbot can.

Warning labels and defaults

Which brings me to Apple’s ChatGPT integration, which seems utterly necessary from the standpoint of making the iPhone not feel hopelessly behind Google, which is rolling its Gemini chatbot into Android. People who despise AI hype in general and chatbots in particular will probably be disgusted by Apple’s choice, but if you look closer, Apple’s clearly not comfortable with any aspect of the partnership.

Think about it. Apple made a much-ballyhooed introduction of its partnership with ChatGPT by showing off that every single time Siri offers to use it; it throws up a (scary?) alert dialog that asks if you’re sure you want to use the chatbot. When the ChatGPT results return, they’re appended with a warning label advising that you check all the information if it’s important!

That was just in the keynote. Before the day was done on Monday, Apple execs had also made it clear that the feature was turned off by default and that ChatGPT was just the first partnership of many. Google Gemini was mentioned by name as if it was only a matter of time before ChatGPT’s archrival would be integrated. They likened it to offering users different, interchangeable search engines in Safari. They also suggested repeatedly that the ultimate goal of the “external chatbot” feature wasn’t really general knowledge at all but chatbots trained on specific areas of knowledge, like medicine.

Now Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple’s not even paying OpenAI for ChatGPT. I get why OpenAI would do this deal—its biggest competitor has the home-field advantage on the world’s only other notable mobile operating system—but it really looks like they’re the one over the barrel here, not Apple.

I think that might say it all. The conventional wisdom going into WWDC was that Apple was the company that was flailing and desperate, trying to catch up to the giants of artificial intelligence and retain some level of relevance. What we saw this week, however, was a company that seems surprisingly confident in its own AI prowess, and one that continues to largely follow its own playbook rather than compromising its ideals.

The hottest company in tech, OpenAI, just gave its crown jewels to Apple for free, and Apple responded by introducing its integration as optional and tagged with numerous warning labels. So, who’s behind and flailing, exactly?

The truth is that Apple right now is like a duck: serene on the surface but paddling furiously underneath. It was clearly complacent about the pace of AI innovation and allowed itself to get a bit too comfortable, and now it’s hurrying to keep up. It will undoubtedly make a few mistakes along the way. We also don’t know how good Apple’s stuff is—note that most of the Siri section in the WWDC keynote was aggressively in the future tense—and have to take the company’s word for how private its cloud services really are.

There’s a lot to interrogate here, and if Apple can’t fulfill its promises, it will be in real trouble. That’s a story that will be written over the next year, but right now, I wouldn’t bet against them.

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