APPLE'S INGENIOUS LEAP INTO THE FUTURE: UNWRAPPING APPLE INTELLIGENCE AT WWDC 2024

At the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024, Apple once again stepped out in front of the crowd with a bold initiative to take the next step in human/computer interaction: Apple Intelligence. A new, deeper layer of artificial intelligence (AI) has been integrated into the fabric of our lives.

APPLE INTELLIGENCE: A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE

It was a show-stopping announcement when Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence to the world. Yet, for a relatively small announcement, Apple has over-hyped it, promising that Apple Intelligence would ‘change the way you interact with a device’. That’s quite the big promise to deliver. Then again, Apple always wants us to think that it’s ahead of the tech ‘competition’ so perhaps that’s the hype we should expect from Apple. But what is Apple Intelligence exactly? Apple promises that its generative AI model can run in real time on your device. Apple’s version is known as Apple NeuralEngine and it’s running on the latest Apple A17 Pro chip. Apple also makes the point that Apple Intelligence can also scale out to the cloud when necessary.

THE PERFECT HARMONY OF DEVICE AND CLOUD

Thanks in no small part to the A17 Pro chip, Apple understands that some processes must and do spill beyond the hardware confines of the device. Enter the Private Compute Cloud, a place ‘where privacy by default is a feature, not a marketing promise’. Because the Apple architecture anonymises and encrypts your data, these clouds won’t raise any of the concerns they do with other cloud-based AI systems.

THE PRIVACY PARADIGM: APPLE'S TWO-PART SOLUTION

Apple’s devotion to privacy hasn’t come out of nowhere. Apple Intelligence was built on top of this foundation The other side of Apple’s privacy philosophy, Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software engineering, explained at WWDC was ‘to do as little of the most sensitive kind of processing as possible on your device.’ This is the second half of Apple’s Secure Enclave answer to data privacy concerns. It’s one thing to go through lists of contacts to pick out potential events, but it’s another matter entirely to analyse those contacts, and perhaps extract their email addresses, before sending the results off to the cloud. Both iPhones and Android devices can be triggered to silently listen for nearby advertisements.

BEYOND THE SURFACE: THE POWER OF KNOWING YOU

The secret sauce of Apple Intelligence is that it ‘knows’ you so well, because the data it has on you – thanks to your iPhone – is complete. For as long as we have been able to ask questions of computers, we have always been trying to ask a smarter, more useful version of the same question. For as long as we have wanted more automation and efficiency, we have wanted it on our terms, for our benefit, so that we can do more and achieve more. Apple’s promise with Apple Intelligence is that the more your iPhone knows about you, the more it can anticipate your desires and the better it can deliver on them, whether via a souped-up Siri or a network of locally generated generative AI models.

SIRI, REIMAGINED AND SUPERCHARGED

Siri is poised to lead this charge, in the form of ‘Apple Intelligence’, a ‘new semantic index’, paired to ‘powerful AI models’, backed by all the data that Apple knows about the user. According to Apple’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy – John Giannandrea – that dynamic will change as Siri’s understanding of user commands is brought into its next incarnation.

THE EXCLUSIVITY OF APPLE-BUILT MODELS

And, in a world of third-party generative AI models, Apple is assuring us that a core piece of Apple Intelligence is, and will remain, proprietary models, in the interest of privacy as well as user experience. It will be the onboard AI models running on the A17 Pro chip that will produce real-time responses and real-time suggestions, and this will form a key component of the seamless user experience for all Apple products.

UNDERSTANDING APPLE

In the end, because Apple’s march to AI is as much a philosophy as it is a technology, it’s really less about a device becoming more capable, and more about a user interface that’s more personalised, more intuitive, and more seamless. Apple Intelligence is the next evolution of how we interact with our machines; one where every action, every question, and every interaction is made for you. And guided by privacy and inspired by innovation, Apple doesn’t just get to eat its AI cake and have it too — it gets to share it.