The long awaited Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2024 took place last week, featuring many exciting announcements. Let’s explore what these announcements reveal about the future of AI on Apple devices.
Setting the stage: Core apps vs. the rest
Before we dive into Apple's AI strategy, let's consider how apps and services can be divided into two categories:
Core apps/services: Essential for the phone’s functionality and user experience, such as calling, messaging, camera, photo organization, and browser. Usually, there are native apps in each operating system for such core services.
The rest: Includes everything else, like games, social media, and productivity tools. These apps can be installed using the app store available on the operating system.
This distinction is important because it helps us understand Apple's deliberate approach to integrating AI.
Apple believes in AI’s long-term value as a core capability
Apple could have relied on OpenAI for all their AI needs but instead they chose to build their own foundational models, integrated deeply into their operating systems across all platforms such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS etc. Building a native capability i.e. treating AI as a core service signals Apple’s strong belief in the technology’s long-term value. Apple announced native AI integration for just a few user tasks:
Writing tools: Including messaging, email, and various text editing apps.
Image generation: Featuring emoji creation (Genmoji), a dedicated image generation app (Image Playground), and tools for transforming rough sketches into polished images (Image Wand).
Prioritizing and summarizing notifications: Highlighting important notifications ahead of others by “understanding” what the notification is about
In-app actions across apps: Understanding the current app context and taking action across multiple apps.
At least for now, Apple thinks these are the only mainstream AI use-cases, and for anything more, users should go to dedicated tools such as ChatGPT. And they make it easy to do this via their partnership with OpenAI. This feels similar to their approach to another core feature - Photo Editing. They allow users to do basic edits (fixing colours etc.) in the native app, while users can install and use third-party apps such as Adobe Photoshop for advanced needs.
Apple will likely track the number of queries going to ChatGPT, and likely expand on their core offering based on data and user feedback.
Apple’s platform play: Siri
Siri received upgrades for language understanding, personal context awareness, and integration with ChatGPT. The most interesting part of this announcement was when Craig mentioned,
“We also intend to add support for other AI models in future”.
Apple clearly wants to be a platform here, trying to eliminate the need for a user to install multiple apps. The demo showed a rudimentary experience while using ChatGPT, missing basic features such as chat history. I can see Siri evolving into a dedicated app, with features such as chat history, multi-modal interactions etc., while allowing users to choose their preferred AI model — similar to how Safari lets you switch between search engines. Also, similar to Safari, I expect Apple making a lot of money from whoever wants to be the default model on Siri.
Apple is cautious about getting it wrong
Recently, it’s become a trend that a particularly bad response from an AI model goes viral — remember Google suggesting glue for your Pizza! For more complex queries, Apple is cleverly turning to ChatGPT, clearly attributing responses to the model. This approach mitigates the risk of hallucinations or errors, ensuring that any mistakes are associated with ChatGPT, not Apple’s own AI, thereby protecting Apple’s reputation. However, it's unclear whether Apple's on-device experiences (text and image generation) will entirely prevent inappropriate responses.
Conclusion
Apple’s WWDC 2024 announcements signify a major shift towards integrating AI as a core component of its ecosystem. By integrating on-device AI for fundamental tasks and partnering with OpenAI for more complex queries, Apple is ensuring that users benefit from the best of both worlds—speed, privacy, and advanced AI capabilities. Siri’s evolution into a platform supporting multiple AI models further enhances user flexibility and choice.
It will be fascinating to watch how Apple's AI ecosystem evolves in the years to come.