Apple: “Artificial Intelligence for the rest of us”: Tim Cook’s apology to Tim and the Apple Anomaly

Uncharacteristically, for such an event, the news was less about products than Apple’s declaration that when it comes to gen AI, we’re on it. In an interview after the keynote, CEO Tim Cook explained the anomaly. “It became clear that people wanted to know our views of generative AI in particular,” he said. But just as in 2016, there was a cautionary note: While the company would now embrace generative AI, it would do it in a very Apple way. The company refused to even label its technology as artificial intelligence. Instead, it coined the phrase Apple Intelligence, a made-up technical name whose purpose seems to distance Apple from the scary aspects of this powerful tech wave. Apple doesn’t want to make the movie Her come to life. It’s using this new tool to enhance productivity and creativity, and just as with past intimidating technologies, Apple-izing AI will make it go down easy.

The approach is on time. The age of generative AI was found in November-December of the same year. A lot of people are now experiencing a rejection impulse after years of trying to absorb what it meant. They’re repelled by AI’s hallucinations and angry at the prospect of lost jobs. And most people still haven’t figured out what AI can actually do for them. Smart companies have been focused on how this technology can be put to use. Apple said, “Artificial Intelligence for the rest of us.” The keynote had the letters “AI” in it. It was a conscious nod to the original Macintosh slogan. Presumably, Apple will spread AI to the masses in the same way it promulgated the graphical user interface with the Mac.

You may have heard plenty about how it makes Siri smarter, rewrites your emails and essays, creates never-before-seen emoji, and turns rough sketches into bland AI art.

It truly is a vision of the future. It may be one of the most friendly, intuitive and useful implementation of generative Ai seen to date thanks to the usual Applegloss.

How much do you need to use Apple intelligence for your daily life? The cynical view on exclusion timescales in generative artificial intelligence

You need two of the following to use Apple intelligence: the iPhone 15 Pro oriPhone 15 Pro Max. A regular iPhone 15 won’t do, meaning a mobile well under a year old is, at least in this specific sense, obsolete. Mac users just need an Apple Silicon computer, meaning one released in 2020 or newer.

A more cynical take on this is that these exclusion timescales are tied to the average upgrade cycle of phones and laptops. The person might be considered normal if they upgrade their phone every year. Buying a new laptop every year could mean stupidity, a theft-magnet or just plain clumsy.

The reality is a lot more complicated. The computation required for at least some parts of Apple Intelligence is quite different to that of the average iPhone or Mac task.

And this has all been obscured to the average generative AI or chatbot dabbler so far because of the way all of us have been introduced to the form. When you use ChatGPT, Midjourney, or even Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill feature, your own computer is doing almost none of the real work.

That is done on remote cloud servers, which perform the necessary calculations then simply beam the final result over to your phone or laptop. Since it’s like a digital assistant, generative artificial intelligence has been like this. At times, it can perform great things. It is not happening on the device that it is used on.

Why? Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering stated during the announcement of the new features that “you should not have to hand over all the details of Your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s artificial intelligence cloud.”