The wait to find out Apple’s plans to get on the artificial intelligence (AI) train is over. More than a year and a half after the emergence of ChatGPT, which caused a shake-up in the technology industry quickly followed by giants such as Google, Microsoft or Samsung, the American multinational apple company is prepared to announce its strategy to face the new technological trend , according to both the rumors of recent months and the statements to investors by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Even a leak published by Bloomberg Over the weekend, details of how the company is going to add smart functions to speed up everyday tasks carried out by users of their phones, computers, tablets, watches, glasses and sound systems are being announced.
One of Apple’s hallmarks is that it never comments on the new products and features it is working on. It only does so when they are practically ready to go on the market, and it communicates it at one of its big events, like the one that starts this Monday, and which is held every year at the beginning of June: its World Developers Conference (WWDC, for its part). acronym in English).
In a tradition that is broken in some years, such as in 2023 with the announcement of the Vision Pro mixed reality glasses, Tim Cook’s inaugural speech at WWDC – which begins this Monday at 7:00 p.m. Spanish peninsular time and that EL PAÍS will continue live—it is usually aimed primarily at professional software developers and die-hard Apple fans. The company’s executives use this annual event to preview the new functions that will arrive at the end of the summer to the operating systems of the iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Vision Pro or Apple TV. This time, the expectation is once again at its highest outside that most intimate circle of followers: the entire technology industry is looking towards Apple’s movement, which is expected to make a strong entry into the generative AI race. The apple company seeks to break with the idea that it has been left behind in this area.
All analysts foresee a profound renewal of Siri, the voice assistant that Apple launched in 2011 and which, without major improvements to date, was first surpassed in many capacities by competing products from Amazon and Google; and then, the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 has made Siri seem like an obsolete technology, both due to its lack of reliability when interpreting and following orders, and its inability to maintain the thread of the conversation with users.
The most anticipated: a new Siri
According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the analyst who in recent years has obtained the most leaks of the news that Apple is going to announce – the most recent, the premiere of the M4 processors in the latest iPad Pro -, the biggest renewal in the history of Siri will be based on great language models like those that drive the chatbots that lead generative AI—OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. In addition to the ability to better understand users and converse with them, which everyone expects, Gurman claims to have managed to get sources involved in the project to leak specific details to him, which has been published in a comprehensive report two days before Tim Cook’s presentation. “For the first time, users will be able to ask Siri to control a multitude of specific functions and actions within the apps: for example, ask Siri to delete an email, edit a photo or summarize a news story,” says Gurman, who also assures that this capability is initially limited to Apple’s own programs — such as Safari and Mail — and “is unlikely to reach third-party apps until next year.”
Regardless of whether Siri is asked out loud, or the iPhone, Mac or iPad is ordered by clicking on buttons, this and other recent leaks indicate that Apple is going to focus on providing generative AI functions that facilitate everyday relationships. that users already have with their devices, instead of incorporating spectacular new features such as creating texts and images from scratch; or to offer your users the illusion that they are having an intelligent conversation with a chatbot that has a seductive and emotional voice.
These practical functions will reach the new operating systems – such as iOS 18, macOS 15 or visionOS 2 -, with the aim of integrating into as many Apple apps as possible, to speed up current day-to-day tasks: summarizing emails, text, meeting notes and web page content; transcribe audios, sort emails and suggest response texts; or improve images and eliminate people or photos from them, just by saying it, without having to have knowledge of photo retouching. Most of these functions are already offered by the most modern smartphones from Google or Samsung, and also, for years, many of them have been included in third-party apps.
The doubts: the pact with OpenAI and other details
Analysts assume that Tim Cook is going to announce an alliance with OpenAI today and that the CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, Sam Altman, will intervene at the event to comment on details of that alliance that would give OpenAI an advantage in its rivalry with Google for leading generative AI. According to Gurman, “this alliance with OpenAI will give life to a ChatGPT-type chatbot.”
For other experts, such as John Gruber of Daring Fireball, This raises many doubts about how this chatbot is going to work without competing with Siri., if it is going to be integrated into the voice assistant itself or within the Spotlight search bar on Macs, iPhones and iPads; or if this intelligent bot will be integrated even more transversally into the operating systems and apps of all Apple devices, with an intention more to offer help on how to use them than to ask them anything, as users do with ChatGPT or Gemini. Gurman wonders “what’s the point of an Apple chatbot, powered by OpenAI if ChatGPT already has excellent applications for iOS and MacOS?” From his point of view, it would be strange if the fruit of that alliance were a app that competes with them and with Siri.
The most surprising thing about the leak obtained by Gurman is that it gives details such as that the new AI system that Tim Cook will announce today will be called Apple Intelligence. Or also that the new functions that will be grouped under that umbrella will be of optional access, only for users who request them, that they will initially be labeled as beta functions – that is, testing – and that some of them will only be available for devices more modern —on phones, starting with the iPhone 15 Pro—. Lists of specific models are already circulating of phones, tablets and computers that will support Apple Intelligence functions, based on the fact that the company will choose to perform as much intelligent processing as possible on the devices themselves – instead of doing it on servers in the cloud – and that this will require the most powerful Apple processors, only included in the latest models.
Privacy and ethics in the age of AI
However, several specialists also point out that the Apple Intelligence system will decide in each case whether to carry out the processing on the device itself or on servers in the cloud. The latter would be necessary for the most powerful generative AI functions and would have a lot to do with the planned alliance between Apple and OpenAI: the creators of ChatGPT could rent their servers and their large language models to power the most complex Apple Intelligence functions.
That is, Apple would pay OpenAI a significant sum to use its base technology and thus be able to catch up in the generative AI race. But what is certain, taking into account Tim Cook’s statements in recent months and Apple’s trajectory since he assumed leadership of the company, is that Cook is going to place great emphasis on how they plan to embrace artificial intelligence while maintaining privacy and ethical and copyright commitments. In the words of analyst Jason Snell, from his column in the veteran magazine macworld, Apple has the opportunity to position itself as “the adult in the room: a company dedicated to using AI for functions that improve people’s lives, instead of competing to perform the best magic trick on stage that is then impossible to reproduce.” With this, Snell refers to the spectacular announcements, followed by striking missteps, that have more recently featured Google, OpenAI or humane in the last weeks. Demonstrations that promise advances typical of science fiction, compared to the realities of the hallucinations of chatbots and the racist biases of generative AI systems, have become a constant since the technological fever of artificial intelligence was unleashed.
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