Is Apple late to embrace AI or right on time?
Apple kicked off its big developer conference on Monday where it announces its latest software innovations. It’s usually not as heralded an event as the annual iPhone or new hardware release, but this year it’s been highly anticipated because it marks Apple’s big entry into artificial intelligence.
While Big Tech competitors like Microsoft, Google and Meta won’t shut up about all the new generative AI features they’ve been adding to their products, Apple has largely been silent.
But on Monday, the company announced new AI integrations for text, email, photos and Siri. It’s also partnering with OpenAI to add the capabilities of ChatGPT into operating systems.
In true Apple style, the company has a branded name for the new AI features: Apple Intelligence.
CEO Tim Cook said Apple’s offerings would be unique in the AI landscape because it also has your calendar, your emails and your texts.
“It has to understand you and your personal context — like your routine, your relationships, your communications and more,” Cook said.
Which are all contained on your device. And it’s those devices — more than 2 billion of them in use globally — that provide Apple with the biggest advantage, said analyst Angelo Zino at CFRA.
“Those are very loyal consumers out there and will start to kind of utilize AI, probably more so than any other consumer across any other ecosystem,” he said.
They won’t need to download a new app or navigate to a particular browser or build trust in a new brand, said marketing professor Anjali Bal at Babson College.
“There’s so much nervousness in the market related to AI. But one of the things I always notice about Apple users is we have faith in Apple, right?” she said.
Apple isn’t always the first-mover on new technology, she said.
“They typically wait and see what the market is going to do,” Bal said. “And then after they see what the market is going to do, then they pounce and they do it better than the other companies.”
And by partnering with ChatGPT rather than launching its own large language model, Apple can offload some of the risks now inherent to the technology, like hallucinations and bias, said Eric Seufert, an analyst at Mobile Dev Memo.
“You’ve seen companies rush out some of their AI products to disastrous results,” he said. “And just from a strategic standpoint and optics standpoint, that’s probably something you’d prefer to avoid.”
He said Apple is ultimately aiming to differentiate itself with its focus on user privacy. The company has touted that many AI features can run on internal processors, avoiding the need to send so much user data to the cloud.
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