Apple Intelligence

I’ve been wondering why everyone seems so interested in what Apple is going to do with regards to AI, or why there’s so much reporting about how Apple needs to “catch up” to others in the industry. Are Apple users unable to do AI things on their iPhones? No, because the majority of AI right now is a cloud service, accessed through apps or websites just as usable on an iPhone as on Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows. So why all pressure for Apple to “catch up”?

Honestly I find the AI systems available right now don’t do much for people’s day-to-day and so I think what everyone is hoping for is for Apple to productize AI. They’re hoping Apple will release something that will show how AI can be useful and used in the day-to-day. They’re not wanting Apple to come out with a chat bot that you can converse with in iMessage like you do OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They want a product.

If Apple releases a generative AI that’s as capable as any other out there but doesn’t do anything different, it’ll be considered a failure. The reports will say Apple didn’t innovate and they’re still behind and they need to do more to catch up. And that’s because the expectation isn’t for Apple to match the competition, it’s for Apple to define the AI category. To come up with the reason we should all be excited by generative AI or AI in general.

I think generative AI is interesting, but right now that’s all it is, interesting.