Apple is about to go all in on AI, kind of.
This power of Apple Intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before.
This is a big lift, and we feel like we want to get it right. This is a many year, honestly, even decades-long arc of this technology playing out, and so we're gonna do it responsibly.
Yes, Apple Software Chief, Craig Federighi, is leading our iPhones into the future of generative AI, cautiously, that is. In late October, when iOS 18.1 hits, the company will begin releasing the first of many promised Apple Intelligence tools that work only on the iPhone 15 Pros and iPhone 16 models. They're coming to Macs and iPads, too. But while other companies are rushing AI to market, Apple's behind, or at least taking its time, focusing on privacy and doing it all responsibly. I sat down with Federighi to get a better look inside Apple's AI strategy. Apple's late to generative AI. It's almost two years since ChatGPT launched, but Apple's never really been first to a new tech product category. What is new with Apple Intelligence?
We looked at this as not how do we build another chat bot and bolt it on the side of our existing experience, but how do we create something that's deeply integrated? Most importantly, we view it as personal. The bulk of the focus in chat bots historically have been around products that don't know you at all. They're powerful and interesting and they have some fantastic uses, but I think the real power of intelligence, as it pertains to how our customers would use our products, are intelligence that understands you. And with that comes a great deal of responsibility because to do that, that intelligence has to traffic in information that you've stored on your device. And that means privacy is a tremendously important consideration.
ChatGPT and other large language models sends every prompt to their powerful cloud servers. Apple, however, is prioritizing privacy by running AI models directly on the device only when more processing power is needed. Does it tap its encrypted cloud-based models? Apple calls it Private Cloud Compute. Explain to me how you're deciding what should be done locally and what should be going to Private Cloud Compute.
Right, right. There are some cases, let's take a long-form summarization. An on-device model could try to do that, but would probably not provide the best result. If we run that instead in the cloud, it can both be faster in that case and also provide a higher quality result. But the important part is that message that you asked to be summarized was encrypted to a trusted device in the cloud, that then performed artificial intelligence processing on it to return you the result and never recorded anything about that data, that email. Apple had no access to that email, no one else did. It's gone.
Why doesn't all cloud computing work this way?
It's hard to build, for one. I think it also runs counter to many companies' entire philosophy about how they see data. For many companies, I think their answer is, 'Send us all your data, store all your data with us in a way that we can read and process.' And so when you ask our cloud a question, we already have your data, and we're going to use whatever processing we've done on it to answer your question. But as a user, you're not quite sure. Is that all they're gonna do? And maybe they aren't doing anything with it right now, but they have my data. What are they gonna do with it in the future? I don't know.
But when it comes to AI plus Apple, there's long been one promise. Siri was introduced 13 years ago.
Which is kind of hard to believe.
Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.
Is Siri gonna finally live up to that promise?
The journey never ends. Siri processes today, I think it's something like 1.5 billion requests every day. And Siri gets things done for me. With Siri, I'm opening my garage, I'm closing my garage, I'm turning on my lights, all kinds of things. I'm sending messages, I'm setting timers. There are all kinds of things that I and hundreds of millions of other customers are doing every day. So, Siri does a lot of that. But as humans, our expectations for what it means to use our voice to communicate and ask for things is almost unbounded. The great news is Siri's useful today, has been useful in many ways for many people for years, but it's getting more and more useful because this power of Apple Intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before and is gonna have access to more tools on your device to do more for you than ever before. But is there gonna be one moment where we say, 'Siri is now my sentient pal,' that... No, it's gonna continue to get better and better.
Apple's promised that Siri will be able to answer deeper questions based on your Calendar, Messages, and more. Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?
You met Zac Wingate at Cafe Grenel.
It'll also incorporate ChatGPT to answer certain questions, but none of that is out yet. Where is this smarter Siri?
Coming. It's coming in waves. So with Apple Intelligence, we've created this foundation that understands personal context and the ability to take action. Siri is adopting that in stages and will benefit in stages over the coming year.
Recently, OpenAI released Advanced Voice Mode. How does Craig Federighi do his hair?
Craig Federighi's hair is a full silver mane with a naturally voluminous look, typically brushed back professionally...
Is that kind of large language model integration on the horizon for Siri?
Well, I'm not announcing anything here today, but I'll say that I think those things are great. It's just showing how quickly this field is moving and what has all of us so excited about the potential for this kind of technology. The properties of something like that OpenAI Advanced Voice Mode and Siri are quite different. That OpenAI mode is great. If you want to go ask a question about quantum mechanics, and have it write a poem for you about it, and then answer another question and so forth. It's not gonna open your garage. It's not gonna help you send a text message. There are many, many useful things Siri does for you every day, does them quickly, does them locally on your device. There's a spectrum here. There's a trade off across capabilities. Will these worlds converge? Of course, that's where the direction is going.
