Apple Intelligence: iPhone maker set to overhaul the AI experience

It's the "hottest and most widely telegraphed partnership in Silicon Valley", said the Financial Times, after Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday announced a venture with artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI.

The tie-up, announced at Apple's annual developer conference, will see AI integrated into iPhones by embedding a suite of models into the operating system, under the "catch-all term" of Apple Intelligence, said the newspaper. 

The new features, arriving this autumn, will include text and image generation and an "improved" Siri virtual assistant, said Sky News. They will be supported by integrating the "already popular" ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, into the phones.

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 The plans have been criticised by Tesla and X boss Elon Musk – who has a "fractious relationship" with OpenAI – as an "unacceptable security violation". The billionaire warned that if the move goes ahead, "Apple devices will be banned at my companies".

'Faster, better, higher quality'

Apple announced its new AI features "not with a bang but with subtle, realistic improvements to the apps and services we use every day", said Katelyn Chedraoui on CNet. 

The tech giant "showed off" new features that can read your calendar, check traffic on your route, reschedule a meeting, draft a message to contacts, summarise articles, rewrite emails or sort texts according to priority. Other updates include "a more useful" Siri and an improvement to its text-messaging system that would allow iPhone users to send messages to Android devices, after a decade of difficulty. 

None of this is "groundbreaking", said Chedraoui. Other big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft have been doing something similar for a while. Google's latest AI features are already available on Pixel phones, and the company last month announced that they would become available on other Androids later this year. 

But think of Apple's announcement as "a top-to-bottom makeover of the iPhone", said NBC News. AI will be integrated "wherever the company's software engineers could think to do it". The idea, said tech reporter David Ingram, is that using AI on the iPhone will seem "so normal that sometimes you might not even notice it's there".

Cook told The Washington Post that "I get excited about helping people do things faster, better, higher quality" and by "anything that improves the human existence". And "I think AI can do that again, subject to keeping the rails on it appropriately", he said.

'Rooted in privacy'

Musk was an original founder of OpenAI but has "since turned against it", accusing it of "failing to follow its founding principles", said Sky News. Musk has now accused Apple – without evidence – of "turning over user data" to OpenAI.

Apple said the new system would be "rooted in privacy" and that many of the features would happen entirely on the iPhone, without users' data ever leaving it – making it more private than others such as Google's Gemini, the company claimed. Users will have to give permission before any request or personal data is shared with OpenAI. 

The idea that it's private is "a very big idea in today's world", Cook told The Washington Post. "People want to know in some kind of way that [AI] is personal to them, but also private. And these two things generally haven't gone together very well. We found a way to thread the needle."

But the row "reflects the diverging views surrounding AI, and how quickly the technology is being developed and implemented", said Sky News.

Apple 'will win consumer AI game'

Some of the biggest companies in the world, such as Microsoft (OpenAI's partner) and Google, have "surged ahead of Apple" in the AI arms race, said Sky News. 

Meanwhile, Apple was recently overtaken as the world's second most valuable company by Nvidia, an AI microchip maker. But with this announcement, Apple has "thrust itself into the race". Like other tech companies, it is "betting that AI is the future of their industry".

But for Apple, AI is "not a separate service to sell but a way to make its core product, the iPhone, more attractive", said NBC News. By naming the system Apple Intelligence, the company is seemingly "trying to redefine 'AI' from an initialism for artificial intelligence" to one that refers to Apple itself.

And that puts Apple in a powerful position, according to Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, because those popular devices have "invaluable data". 

Apple "will win the consumer AI game", he predicted.