Ricky Bobby from the 2006 film Talladega Nights would consider Apple’s late rollout of Apple Intelligence a clear sign of failure. “If you’re not first, you’re last,” he told Apple CEO Tim Cook. In the meantime, Cook is aware that his company won’t have AI first, but the longer the CEO says it takes to cook up – ahem – Apple Intelligence, the tastier the treat will ultimately be..
Compared to the competition on Android, the initial rollout, expected on October 28, will be barebones. Google’s Gemini already has AI-generated text and summary capabilities, and AI image generation via Apple’s Image Playground and – importantly – the Siri integration that can work between apps on behalf of users do not yet have an official launch date. Tips from Bloomberg’s Apple guru Mark Gurman mention that we could see these features within a few months, although a better Siri likely won’t arrive until 2025.
“We weren’t the first to do intelligence,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in an interview Monday. “But we did it in a way that we think is best for the customer.”
We have yet to test Apple Intelligence in all its true glory. ChatGPT and Gemini are already productive, and we’ve seen some of their ups along with their many downs. However, as Apple integrates its AI, there are already worrying signs. Gurman wrote in his latest Power On newsletter that Apple internally believes its AI is “more than two years behind industry leaders.” An internal study found that Siri was 25% less accurate than ChatGPT. According to the Bloomberg writer, OpenAI’s chatbot could answer 30% more questions.
Apple plans to integrate ChatGPT on users’ iPhones (or at least on all iPhone 16s, the iPhone 15 Pro, and the latest iPads, including the 2024 Air, Pro, and the upcoming iPad mini). It will be limited to Apple’s security device, and users will have to grant permission before using any of the touted generative features.
Apple may not have to be the first. Bringing the rear forward has its advantages. You can see how other companies fail and then tweak your software for the better. Even then, the initial rollout will seem like déjà vu. You can already access the first version of Apple Intelligence through the iOS 18.1 beta. In short, AI features like Writing Tools allow you to highlight text to proofread, rewrite, or summarize with an AI. Other initial features of Apple Intelligence include the ability for priority notifications to place your most urgent notifications, such as important meetings or text messages, closest to the top. The AI can also summarize the transcripts in Notes or from phone conversations.
How useful are text summaries? Cook says he’s been using them for his emails lately, saving time “here and there.” If it saves you a few minutes every day, then it might save you a few hours or days a month. I might ask why I would write a long, detailed email if I know my boss won’t read it. Yet he claims for Apple’s CEO: “It changed my life.”
As someone who has used AI in various capacities over the past two years, I have a very different view. Text summaries can sometimes be useful, but as a journalist I find that the most important pieces are in the details. I can’t ask AI to review product overviews for the next iPad I’m reviewing, in case something is missed. I could ask an AI to figure out the specs of an old iPhone for a feature I’m working on, but I still have to check its work because AI might get it wrong, and you’re never quite sure where it goes to the data of.
The less I have to say about AI-generated text, the better. Still, Apple’s CEO told WSJ that AI would make users’ time on the phone “very different.” He believes this will change the way users operate their phones.
Apple has had big misses. Remember the butterfly keyboards? It’s just like any other big company that’s been around for 50 years. Sometimes things go wrong, but Apple is unique in that it never acknowledges these mistakes. The interview suggests that Cook has a positive outlook. He said the company is not “out to get anything out there first… If you talk to 100 people, 100 of them will tell you, it’s about being the best.”
Not the interview to critically examine the CEO’s reasoning. Cook is a salesperson first and foremost. Despite the CEO’s speech, Apple was late to AI. It wasn’t until December that it made its first AI models public 2023. An anonymous employee at Apple told Gurman last year that the late work on AI was seen as “a pretty big miss internally.”
On the other hand, we may not need Apple Intelligence as capable as ChatGPT. The ideal is to have an ‘agentic’ AI working on the device. It should be able to pass information between apps, such as setting a calendar reminder based on a text (something Gemini is already close to doing). The first company to reach that goal will have struck gold; AI summaries be damned.
