WWDC 2024 – All About Apple Intelligence
WWDC 2024
With the annual gathering of Apple Developers (and the rest of us) in the summer, Apple announced its latest developments to their operating systems.
As always, the intro was over-the-top fun. The Apple team jumped out of a plane to music coming from an iPod.
For the rest of the morning, they systematically went through the different operating systems, giving relatively small updates across the board.
Don’t get me wrong—there were some welcome changes. However, I found the math integration throughout the iOS and iPad systems to be probably the most interesting.
There were also some fun additions to the app layout and the Control Center, but these aren’t headline features for WWDC. This has been confirmed as I have downloaded the MacOS Sequoia and iPadOS 18, and both are quite stable—for initial developer betas, that indicates to me that they aimed low this year since they had a bigger focus.
Building up to Apple Intelligence
From my perspective, the key takeaway is that Apple Intelligence is the big deal this year. After a very conservative (some would argue boring) update, Apple introduced Apple Intelligence, their personal AI assistant.
Though Apple has been incorporating machine learning and other AI into its systems for years, this is the first AI update in which AI is the headline feature.
AI for personal use
Apple Intelligence isn’t a ChatGPT competitor, as it will integrate models including ChatGPT as part of the options. Instead, Apple is leaning into a personal AI that will work within the context of your own data while remaining private—something arguably ChatGPT or any other current large model wouldn’t do.
Taking information from your calendar, mail, notes, and messages will help Siri, who still seems to be the main way of interacting with the model, answer questions, perceive potential issues with your schedule, and offer greater context around your life.
AI for fun
The rest of the options Apple highlighted, specifically around generative AI, are about fun. Generative emojis and generative images didn’t seem to have many business functions. Arguably, you may see more usage in the iWork suite, but overall, Apple sees the generative models as a way to express your personality – not build a business off of.
Conservative to start
It also appeared that Apple remains relatively conservative as every company is trying to blow the user’s mind with new AI features. This is a welcomed approach from my perspective.
As companies are trying to move fast and break things, it seems that Apple’s cautious approach could make it a far more reliable and helpful system in the long term.
If I could read between the lines, one of Apple’s core principles is ensuring it retains the user’s trust. This will mean it will seem like it does less, but perhaps it will do better. For someone who has been utilizing a lot of tools during this AI boom, after the novelty wears off, what I am really looking for is a system that can consistently work.
Future of AI at Apple
Will Apple Intelligence perform at a level that makes it a truly meaningful part of my everyday needs, or will it turn into another Siri—something that I use sometimes and can perform some tasks pretty consistently but doesn’t change the way I interact with a computer overall?
Steve Jobs famously compared a computer to a bicycle—an enhancement to human abilities. The question is whether AI will take away from the human experience, like creativity, or whether it will act like a bicycle, allowing us to go beyond our natural abilities while retaining our humanity.
