Does Apple Intelligence Actually Matter?
No, it doesn't. It's not a pivotal moment for Apple, for GenAI or anyone else. It's a mostly forgettable entrance into a market already struggling to prove its value.
When Apple Intelligence was announced, I posted some snark on LinkedIn that it was entirely expected and entirely unneeded. Both in the fact that they announced it all and the fact that launched it more because they felt like they had to instead of solving any customer problems. Typing that out, I thought I should dig more into it, and the deeper I went the more meh I became. The features that I was excited about had very little to do with Apple Intelligence, and core Apple Intelligence use cases are kitschy (and I'm being charitable there).
Will Apple Intelligence change anything?
I'm going to begin at the end and answer the question: Will Apple Intelligence bring GenAI to the masses, making it indispensable in our day-to-day lives? No, and it's not even a question. Apple doesn't know what to do with GenAI anymore than anyone else does. It doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before. The greatest innovations from Apple Intelligence are the privacy tech and the improvements to Siri. Everything else is just noise and marketing hype.
Apple Intelligence is the first real attempt by big tech to put an LLM in everyday people's hands. (Technically Google did it first with Gemini, but no one is taking Google's AI efforts seriously.) Apple Intelligence is launching with the standard fare for an LLM - text and image generation.
And yes, it's every bit as kitschy as every other LLM.
Apple Intelligence Fails to Solve Any Meaningful Problems
Despite taking their time to get an AI product to market, Apple made the same mistakes as everyone else peddling AI solutions - the Apple Intelligence features are a solution looking for a problem. Text generation sounds interesting, but who pays attention to tone and grammar when texting or emailing friends and family? In a professional setting privacy and infosec concerns aside, the people who care the most about what they are writing aren't going to trust Apple Intelligence to write it for them. The people who it most benefits are the ones who shouldn't be using it in the first place -- they aren't going to review the output, they are just going to hit send.
Circling words on a page and generating an image based on those words makes for a good marketing story, but when is that useful? I think about the number of times I've been taking notes and said, "You know what would make this better? If I could doodle it out..." and that number is nigh nonexistent. This isn't a problem I, or anyone I know, has ever encountered.
The integration with ChatGPT is a nightmare. You should never use it. Full stop.
The features Apple is marketing sound cool and slick. But they aren't going to have an impact on your day-to-day because they aren't solving any problems you have.
The Impactful Pieces of Apple Intelligence
Contrary to the rest of this nonsense, the Apple Intelligence upgrades to Siri could be really useful. There's a real problem to be solved here in that Siri, for all her advances, can't handle natural language conversation. Apple Intelligence claims to move the needle, allowing Siri to have greater contextual awareness and understand the natural flow of conversations better. If Apple is bringing me closer to being able to yell at my house and issue a complex series of commands like I'm on Janeway's Enterprise, I'm here for it.
The other exciting part of Apple's announcement is one that most people aren't going to notice - the on-device processing and "Private Cloud Compute." Of all the major tech companies peddling half-baked AI solutions, Apple is the only one that's made end-user privacy part of their story. This is on-brand for them, as they made the confidentiality of women's health tracking in Apple Health a major talking point in the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
On-device processing is exciting because it's a win for privacy--instead of shipping your data off to some cloud system somewhere and hoping that everyone in that chain has good data handling (spoiler: they don't), your phone can handle the bulk of the work. We aren’t sure exactly what’s going to be handled on device, but we know it won’t be everything. Apple is still sending your data off their servers, but claims it's protecting your privacy using its "Private Cloud Compute."
Privacy continues to be a huge problem in AI. If Apple can deliver on its privacy-protecting practices, this could be a huge win for privacy-conscious users and businesses. While OpenAI, Google, and others are relying on hoovering up all your personal information to train the models, Apple's approach is refreshing. If they can pull it off.
I Have Concerns
That's not to say that I don't have concerns. First, no one has validated Apple's privacy claims. Apple Intelligence hasn't been audited to see if holds up its privacy claims, so we are left with Apple promising us it's doing what it's said it's doing. Historically, self-governing like this has not yielded good results for citizens, or companies.
Second, we are talking about a lot of data stored on device for all this processing, and I wonder how secure that data is. Our phones already capture and process unfathomable amounts of data, adding AI processing and storage on the device means even more data. I worry about how secure that is - if someone can hack into your iPhone, can they crack the AI data? I hope that Apple has put in the due diligence, but the Apple Intelligence launch feels rushed and I worry about the corners they cut to make this happen.
Finally, while Apple is making a lot of noise about Private Cloud Compute, we haven't seen it in action yet. As a newer tech, it will attract more adversarial attention and if it doesn't hold up to muster, Apple could end up with egg on its face, and users could end up holding the short end of the stick.
Wrap-Up
At the end of the day, Apple Intelligence is a Me-too move by Apple. They felt like they had to have something GenAI, and they slapped in the standard solutions of text and image generations without clear problems to solve. The most interesting parts of the announcement are about the under-the-hood changes to their infrastructure and Siri.
No, this isn’t a pivotal moment for AI, and Apple Intelligence won’t change anything. It’s another mostly forgettable entrance into a market that’s struggling to show it’s value.