At Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and apparent windswept silicone savant, stepped on stage with the usual Apple grandeur and the slightly less usual mission of unveiling what may be the most polite artificial intelligence ever conceived: Apple Intelligence. Not to be confused with general intelligence or godlike consciousness, Apple Intelligence is Apple’s tidy, privacy preoccupied answer to generative AI, here to proof your emails, tidy your calendar and doodle you into a watercolor fantasy if asked nicely.
Playing catch-up with Silicon Valley’s existing obsession with AI chatbots and assistants that are simultaneously helpful and terrifying, Apple has opted for the classic Cupertino approach of arriving fashionably late, wearing better shoes and insisting on talking about privacy until everyone else at the party either leaves or listens. According to Federighi, this AI isn’t just smart, it is “personal intelligence” which sounds rather like calling a butler your emotional support human. This version of AI lives inside your device, where it can understand what you need and whisper sweet autocomplete suggestions without leaking your secrets to distant data centers.
To help sell everything from AI-powered emoji generation to Safari’s ability to summarize websites you didn’t want to read anyway, Apple presented enhancements to Siri, the digital assistant previously best known for misunderstanding song requests and telling jokes with the emotional range of a Roomba. Now, Siri will be able to do things like find the document your boss emailed you last week, schedule a meeting you forgot you agreed to and all this in a gentler, chattier tone of voice. Yes, Siri is getting a personality upgrade and will soon respond with more context awareness and less existential confusion.
And because no AI launch is complete without a celebrity endorsement, Apple has brought OpenAI into the loop, stashing ChatGPT into Siri’s holster like a helpful if occasionally unpredictable sidekick. Federighi took pains to stress that Apple Intelligence will know when to call in ChatGPT’s help and when to keep things on device, possibly implying that even machines have limits on how much exposure to ChatGPT is healthy. Users will be asked for permission before anything is shared with OpenAI, because nothing says cutting-edge technology like needing human consent to function.
Apple promises that Apple Intelligence will arrive this fall on select devices, notably iPhones and iPads with at least an A17 chip and Macs with Apple Silicon, which may leave users of older devices wondering if their perfectly good machine is suddenly considered too dim-witted for modern life. Still, for those eligible, this software update might make your devices talk to you like a fondly sarcastic research assistant with a minor in calendar optimization.
In true Apple fashion, the company reinvented a wheel that was already spinning but now insists it is not just round, it is secure, integrated and has phenomenal typography.
After all, why rule the AI race with brute force when you can do it with chamfered edges and soft-spoken confidence?