For Apple, AI now stands for “Apple Intelligence,” launched at WWDC 2024

Apple debuts new catchall AI branding, generative features during WWDC 2024 keynote.

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[msawzall]

I can't wait until AI goes the way of blockchain.

 

[purecarrot]

I can't wait until AI goes the way of blockchain.

Are you talking about Apple Intelligence?

 

[Podginator]

I was impressed and horrified in equal measure.

I saw a recent author mention that Generative AI will be used to create things like Apple showed off today. Indications of importance in messages, summarisation, extraction of key details. All of that.

Those things feel like a slam dunk when implemented by a company that have UX at the forefront of their mind.

I see a lot of power from being able to take inconsistently formatted text and extract certain features from it.

But on the other hand...

I do not like the idea of having instant text generation at my finger tips. I do not like the idea that I can suddenly rephrase my plans as Poetry. Those things do not excite me as much. I feel like something is lost when we outsource our tone and content to a generative model.

I do not want a single person to send me an AI Generated Image. I will accept GenMojis.

Funnily enough though - the things I found most interesting about the presentation - The UX pieces... I don't think you need massive models for. On Device seems sufficient. I wonder where the bigger companies moats are.

 

[maxintosh]

It looks pretty well thought out overall with the APIs/SKDs for developers, though you could tell that the chatgpt integration for more complicated tasks was definitely a last-minute deal. I'm just excited for a better Siri. Also the Genmojis look like fun.

 

[Kesh]

I'm hoping we can disable the third-party system integration (aka ChatGPT). They showed it asking before using those systems, but I'd rather just disable it globally.

 

[DrewW]

I wish I knew which Arsian said it first, but Apple has been using AI for a long, long time. Computational photography is AI. Siri is (bad) AI. OSX has had an AI text summarizer for a long time. Apple has just resisted making AI a prominent buzzword longer than everyone else.

 

[brdv]

It feels Apple is approachin AI the same way Google does: stuffing ai gizmos everywhere. Let s see if there is some level of coherence into all that

Actually, I thought that Apple was very targeted in how they are using AI - with the catch-all escape of explicitly using ChatGPT as an escape hatch if you want to do more…

 

[Kesh]

I wish I knew which Arsian said it first, but Apple has been using AI for a long, long time. Computational photography is AI. Siri is (bad) AI. OSX has had an AI text summarizer for a long time. Apple has just resisted making AI a prominent buzzword longer than everyone else.

Right, that's why they kept saying "Machine Learning" during the first half, that's what they've always called it. They had to pivot to saying "AI" to make investors happy, because those investors just want to hear buzzwords they think will earn more money.

 

[dtich]

I do not want a single person to send me an AI Generated Image. I will accept GenMojis.

LOL. I feel ya.

 

[Podginator]

Until this point I have not seen a Generative AI application that made me think the technology was necessarily worth it. Chatbots did nothing for me.

Seeing a tightly integrated semantic search for photos, seeing summarisation of messages, seeing all that packaged up and available via the UI I already use. That might have sold me a bit.

I wonder if in this new Siri I can ask it to play my playlist on Spotify. Or do we have Apple Intelligence meeting it's natural enemy Monopolistic Practices.

 

[bdrram03]

My only question is if Siri will now realize there is a timer in the kitchen

 

[apoclypse]

I can't wait until AI goes the way of blockchain.

Personally I think what Apple is doing here is a bit more useful than say what Microsoft is doing in the space. Like the keynote showed they are focusing on making it more useful to people as a product. Genmoji's are not my thing but I can see kids loving that. Some of the Siri features shown were actually useful imo.

They could take it even further in certain areas for sure. Like my phone knows when I get home and it also knows whether it's dark outside or hot outside. It would be nice for it to automatically create home automations to turn on my lights and my air conditioner when I'm getting close to home. I know I can create that stuff myself (and I have) but I know a lot of people who don't even know Shortcuts exists or how powerful it is. Having that stuff be done intelligently for you by the phone would be great.

 

[mariupolo]

iPhone 15 Pro (Max) only (and M1 and above on the iPad and Mac). Ouch. I may start to feel like my 12 is a bit long in the tooth, maybe, depending on how well this works in practice. The contextual surfacing and transcribing of information does seem useful. I’m less keen on the generative aspects.

 

[moley]

The more these companies bake in these features, the less I want to touch them.

 

[Dano40]

Actually, I thought that Apple was very targeted in how they are using AI - with the catch-all escape of explicitly using ChatGPT as an escape hatch if you want to do more…

Apple also left room for Microsoft, Google, or any other company to offer their own large model ChatGPT solution like Perplexity.AI (Important for when the EU comes knocking).

Obviously Apple can at some time do their own large model ChatGPT solution in house at anytime like Apple Maps replacing Google Maps in the past for a even more secure solution.

 

[Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer]

This year, Apple figured out a new way to largely avoid the abbreviation "AI" by coining "Apple Intelligence," a catchall branding term that refers to a broad group of machine learning, LLM, and image generation technologies. By our count, the term "AI" only appeared once in the keynote: Near the end of the presentation, Apple executive Craig Federighi said, "It's AI for the rest of us."

I love a spot of good trolling and goddamn this is some good trolling. Also, shout-out to the Arsian who anticipated that Apple would start using AI for "Apple Intelligence"...I'm a little surprised they did it, so good on you.

It definitely is a bit of cognitive dissonance that I firmly feel that Alphabet AI, Meta AI and Microsoft AI are all probably irredeemably awful, and yet, when Apple talks about AI, I think, "Well, let's see what they manage to do with it." Then again, it is, I think, fair to extend a certain amount of credit to companies who have a habit of doing more than just giving lip service to their individual users' privacy. Anyway, all that is to say that I'm curious to see where Apple takes all of this.

 

[MagMan1979]

Once again, Apple has turned around to the industry and given them a big'ol Steve Jobs to all these asshats scrambling to put AI anything into their products with integration, UI and UX being a distant afterthought!

I'm still extremely apprehensive about the generative text and image generation components, but at least the images don't seem to strive for 100% realism and instead more like paintings... Text generation I don't think is something Apple should've integrated for many ethical, moral, and intellectual reasons, and is a clear example of including this in order to "not get left behind", oh well.

First WWDC I've been genuinely blown away and excited by in close to a decade!

 

[MikeC80]

I've yet to see an AI gimmick that makes me think "Yeah, I want that, and its totally worth the GPU market going to S***, millions of tons of extra CO2 released due to massive energy consumption, companies blowing the budget of a small African nation trying to build huge data centres and hire staff and hoover up personal data and be the first to make a new half baked, zero value AI toy that I will watch a scathing Youtube video review on and never use."

AI does have a future, but as someone up above said, its going to go the way of blockchain first. Many many players are going to lose a lot of money in this gold rush with not much gold - or product - to show for it.

 

[vought1221]

I wish I knew which Arsian said it first, but Apple has been using AI for a long, long time. Computational photography is AI. Siri is (bad) AI. OSX has had an AI text summarizer for a long time. Apple has just resisted making AI a prominent buzzword longer than everyone else.

I remember a tool called simply “101” at one point that was a killer text summarizer at Apple. I think it was based on some of the indexing stuff that later went into the OS, but was originally destined for Copland.

It was 1997.

 

[Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer]

iPhone 15 Pro (Max) only (and M1 and above on the iPad and Mac). Ouch. I may start to feel like my 12 is a bit long in the tooth, maybe, depending on how well this works in practice. The contextual surfacing and transcribing of information does seem useful. I’m less keen on the generative aspects.

Oof...so it'll work on my new iPad but not my 13PM. At least it'll work on my M1 MBA. I guess once I get my iPad paid off I might have to start thinking about a 17PM or 17 "slim" or whatever.

 

[Snark218]

I can't wait until AI goes the way of blockchain.

AI - if we so call LLMs and machine learning - won't go anywhere. Blockchains are still in use too. But it'll cease to be an overhyped stock pump and it'll start to find its natural uses in products and workflows for which it is actually a value added. Again, like blockchain and its predecessors in the great circle of tech hype.

 

[thismarty]

I wish I knew which Arsian said it first, but Apple has been using AI for a long, long time. Computational photography is AI. Siri is (bad) AI. OSX has had an AI text summarizer for a long time. Apple has just resisted making AI a prominent buzzword longer than everyone else.

Indeed. "AI" and machine learning have been around forever, but it looks like the MBAs have decided for us that "AI" now exclusively means "post-Transformer AI".

 

[Podginator]

AI - if we so call LLMs and machine learning - won't go anywhere. Blockchains are still in use too. But it'll cease to be an overhyped stock pump and it'll start to find its natural uses in products and workflows for which it is actually a value added. Again, like blockchain and its predecessors in the great circle of tech hype.

Are Blockchains still in use? Honestly? I sort of mean that seriously. I have never come across a use case for blockchains. I’ve heard of theoretical use cases that solve problems that people don’t face - the trust issue for instance.

Whereas there are clear use cases today for LLMs - and when the gimmick wears off and we come down to solid use cases I don’t expect LLMs to have that same level of incredulity when someone tells me they’re still in use.

 

[jock2nerd]

Building your own emojis?

So instead of sending someone an eggplant emoji, you could create an emoji peni$

 

[Dano40]

And then they doubled down on AI buzzword. They should have gotten really scared about their ML miscalculation.

That's "Apple Intelligence".

 

[thehardcard]

I can't wait until AI goes the way of blockchain.

I think it is going to outlast you by many orders of magnitude. In terms of capabilities and usefulness, generative AI is just barely hitting 1910 airplane levels of usefulness. The scope, capability, reliability, and accuracy are all going to rise qualitatively in each of the next 5 year periods.

I guess this is going to be unpopular, surprising how much to me on tech sites, but I think it’s as much of a mistake dismissing AI because of what it can do in 2024 as it would have been to dismiss aircraft because of how limited pre World War I biplanes were.

We are witnessing the birth of generative AI. Not the fully formed version.

 

[nickf]

It's electric monks all the way down.

 

[tubeless]

By our count, the term "AI" only appeared once in the keynote: Near the end of the presentation, Apple executive Craig Federighi said, "It's AI for the rest of us."

This isn't correct. According to the YouTube subtitles, it was actually used 4 times (5 if you count "OpenAI" being mentioned).

01:14:22

You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone's AI cloud.

01:18:08

This sets a brand-new standard for privacy in AI, and unlocks intelligence you can trust.

01:39:20

And we're starting out with the best of these, the pioneer and market leader ChatGPT from OpenAI, powered by GPT-4o.

01:41:18

We also intend to add support for other AI models in the future.

01:43:18

This is AI for the rest of us, personal intelligence you can rely on at work, home, and everywhere in between.

 

[Snark218]

Are Blockchains still in use? Honestly? I sort of mean that seriously. I have never come across a use case for blockchains. I’ve heard of theoretical use cases that solve problems that people don’t face - the trust issue for instance.

Whereas there are clear use cases today for LLMs - and when the gimmick wears off and we come down to solid use cases I don’t expect LLMs to have that same level of incredulity when someone tells me they’re still in use.

Crypyo is still a thing. Everytime you buy or sell or send crypto, that gets added to the ledger. Now, that technology is (and should have been) obviously more limited in its usefulness and scope than an LLM, but wildly overhyping something to pump a stock and hopefully leave someone else holding the bag is a tech industry tradition.

 

[ColdWetDog]

Until this point I have not seen a Generative AI application that made me think the technology was necessarily worth it. Chatbots did nothing for me.

Seeing a tightly integrated semantic search for photos, seeing summarisation of messages, seeing all that packaged up and available via the UI I already use. That might have sold me a bit.

I wonder if in this new Siri I can ask it to play my playlist on Spotify. Or do we have Apple Intelligence meeting it's natural enemy Monopolistic Practices.

I'd be happy if Siri on a home pod could use a playlist from the iPhone in my pocket instead of whining about Apple Music..

 

[dbussani]

I love a spot of good trolling and goddamn this is some good trolling. Also, shout-out to the Arsian who anticipated that Apple would start using AI for "Apple Intelligence"...I'm a little surprised they did it, so good on you.

It definitely is a bit of cognitive dissonance that I firmly feel that Alphabet AI, Meta AI and Microsoft AI are all probably irredeemably awful, and yet, when Apple talks about AI, I think, "Well, let's see what they manage to do with it." Then again, it is, I think, fair to extend a certain amount of credit to companies who have a habit of doing more than just giving lip service to their individual users' privacy. Anyway, all that is to say that I'm curious to see where Apple takes all of this.

I think this is because Apple has generally earned trust in user facing features, where Microsoft’s user facing features tend to feel like catch-up or used solely for marketing. I’m not making a judgement on whether Windows or macOS is better, but new Windows features tend to be meh.

Here though, boy, if someone sends me an ai generated boardwalk caricature artist-esque image of me on a skateboard, I will not like it.

 

[Woochifer]

The more stuff that can be done on-device, the better. My main issue with off-loading so many basic functions to the cloud is simple latency. I don't always have a fast or reliable network connection, so the functions that have to be processed remotely will often lag.

As someone with a hearing impairment, I rely a lot on live captioning. And in iOS, that's all done on a remote server. Most of the speech-to-text apps I use will piggyback on the iOS live transcription that gets sent back from Apple's servers. In practice, it can be very unreliable and lag big time, with large swaths of speech not getting transcribed at all.

If the new AI suite means more of the basic input done on-device, I hope that it also means more reliable speech recognition that works no matter the quality of the network connection.

For all of Microsoft's faults, they got the live captioning right on Windows 11. It's all done on-device. It's fast and reliable, and does not require a network connection. Only issue is that I have to lug my laptop around to use it.

 

[gnesterenko]

Less AI gimmicks, more fundamental control of device by voice please.

 

[Longmile149]

@benjedwards I work in a Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and something I’ve been playing with recently are the explosion of assistive apps that’ve integrated LLMs…they’re the first application I’ve found that are just flat-out net benefit to people, even if they aren’t perfect.

Did they mention integrating any of this into the iOS accessibility suite? Is that something you guys will be covering or could look into?

Edited to poke @ronamadeo too!

 

[sqrt(-1)]

I'm guessing it's an "as yet unknown AI model"