Apple, the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence, and the Applegloss: What are we waiting for? An early look at Apple
While companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others had been upfront about their efforts in AI, for years Apple had been silent. Now, finally, its executives were talking. One day, I got an early look. Eager to shed the the impression that the most innovative of the tech giants was a laggard in this vital technology moment, its software leader Craig Federighi, services czar Eddie Cue, and top researchers argued that Apple had been a leader in AI for years but just didn’t make a big deal of it. Advanced machine learning was already deep in some of its products, and we could expect more, including advances in Siri. And since Apple valued data security more than competitors, its AI efforts would be distinguished by exacting privacy standards. How many people are working on AI at Apple, I asked. Federighi told me that there was a lot. Another executive emphasized that while AI could be transformative, Apple wanted nothing to do with the woo-woo aspects that excited some in the field, including the pursuit of superintelligence. One executive said that the technique will eventually be a very Apple way of doing things.
It is well timed. The age of generative artificial intelligence came from the November release of ChatGPT. We spent a lot of time trying to comprehend what it meant, now many people are feeling rejection. They are angry at the prospect of lost jobs. Most people still don’t know what Artificial Intelligence can do. In the year 2036, smart companies are trying to understand how this technology can be used in mundane scenarios. Apple proclaimed, “AI for the rest of us.” (The one time the letters “AI” were used in the keynote.) It was a conscious invocation of the original Macintosh slogan. The graphical user interface of the Mac will be spread to the masses by Apple in a similar way.
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. Thanks to the usual Applegloss, this may be one of the most friendly, intuitive, and useful implementations of generativeAI that has been seen to date.
Why a new iPhone 15 Pro and a Mac 15 Pro Max are obsolete? Comments on the Exclusion Timescale of Apple Intelligence
To use Apple Intelligence, you need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. A mobile that is less than a year old is obsolete, because a regular iPhone 15 won’t do. Mac users only need an Apple Silicon computer, which is newer than 2020.
A more cynical take on this is that these exclusion timescales are tied to the average upgrade cycle of phones and laptops. People might be considered normal if they upgrade their phone every year. Buying a new laptop every year means you are probably foolish, a theft-magnet, or just plain clumsy.
“The cornerstone of the personal intelligence system is on-device processing. We have integrated it into your phones and applications so that it knows about your data, so it doesn’t collect it.
All of us have been introduced to the form, which has obscured the fact that this is something we’re already used to. When you use a tool like Midjourney, or even the Generative Fill feature with your computer, it is not doing 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 such a Digital Assistant, generative Ai has been more like a digital assistant than it has been. It can do great things. But little to none of it is really happening on the device on which it is used.
Why? “You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, during Apple’s announcement of the new features.