Apple rebrands AI
Apple Intelligence and the surprising OpenAI partnership
Apple just rebranded AI.
In classic Apple fashion, they’ve created a new word for it: “Apple Intelligence”. Throughout the keynote, Apple only said “AI” twice. They never used "Gen AI". Clearly, they're trying to separate themselves from the competition by using other terms like “personal intelligence”, "personal intelligence system", and "generative models". It's exactly how they separated the Apple Vision Pro from the AR/VR/Metaverse branding, and created the spatial computing term instead.
It’s a clever move, because it avoids the negative connotations of the word “artificial”. It also separates Apple from the negative press and sentiment that “artificial” intelligence gets around ethics and privacy.
Now, any AI that isn’t “Apple Intelligence” is just “artificial”.
This angle perfectly fits Apple’s narrative: they want to create the most private and personal AI experiences you’ll ever use, unlike the generic and underwhelming experiences we face with other AI tools that know nothing about us and require heavy prompting and rich context-setting.
If you missed the announcements, here’s a summary of what Apple Intelligence is all about.
Notable announcements
The most interesting things I found were:
#1: Writing Tools integrated directly into the OS
You’ll soon be able to access AI-powered writing tools no matter what app or space you’re in on any of your Apple devices. This omnipresence eliminates the friction of having to use other tools (ChatGPT, Grammarly, etc.) to rewrite emails, notes, and messages since you can do it in the context of the application you’re using.
It’ll be interesting to see the impact on other writing tools and how they differentiate to offer more benefits to users. You can’t be a simple AI writing tool anymore.
#2: Answer questions based on your messages or other data
Apple wants to make this a personal AI that knows everything about you (because they already know everything about you). Everything on your devices, including messages, emails, calendar events, and photos, will become the knowledge base of your unique AI.
For example, you could ask Siri to pull up all the book recommendations that people texted you in the past, specific images from your past trips, or even help you remember what the group chat agreed on for weekend plans.
#3: Agent Siri
Siri has been consistently bashed for the past 13 years because everyone’s been begging for Jarvis-level intelligence.
We’re not there yet, but Siri is getting lots of upgrades. The biggest transformation is taking Siri from a simple assistant to an AI agent that can act across apps. It’ll have “on-screen awareness” of what you’re looking at and use that as context for any requests.
For example, you could be writing a note and tell Siri to email it to someone. Or ask Siri to play the podcast that a friend sent you last week, and even ask it to edit a photo for you.
#4: ChatGPT integration
The most unexpected thing was Apple casually announcing ChatGPT’s integration into Siri at the end of their keynote. It was surprising after they leaned into the privacy aspect so much for the entire Apple Intelligence segment.
This integration won’t be forced or enabled by default. Instead, Siri will ask you if you want to use ChatGPT in those instances where you’re asking for a more complex request like analyzing a document or photo you’re looking at.
This partnership might be similar to Apple’s deal with Google to use them as the default search engine on all Apple devices. Google pays Apple a hefty $20 billion per year for that privilege. Neither Apple or OpenAI are paying each other for now, but some financial benefit will likely be established if this becomes a long-term partnership. Rumours about a revenue-sharing deal between both companies were reported by Bloomberg.
📖 News and weekend reads
Some Apple Intelligence-related articles worth reading:
Marques Brownlee interviews Tim Cook at WWDC 2024 (YouTube)
Side note: Marques holding in his laugh/shock at the Magic Mouse part is hilariousApple Intelligence in 5 minutes (YouTube) - in case you need a quick and visual rundown of all the Apple Intelligence use cases that were shown on Monday
🔮 The future is too exciting to keep to yourself
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