Apple Intelligence Initial Thoughts

I’ve been busy and haven’t watched any of the WWDC 2024 sessions yet, but I’ve definitely been observing news and people’s impressions. Having one foot deeply in the Apple world, and the other just as deeply sunk into AI, provides an interesting vantage point.

Over on Hacker News, the top of the Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac comment thread was interesting:

To me, the key insights are:

It’s the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft … I hadn’t considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn’t … Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. – they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text … I’m not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.

And:

‘AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn’t’

Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can’t see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.

It’s early days yet, but if Apple manages the jiu-jitsu move of leveraging their platform strengths to overcome a huge lead by other players, that will be quite an achievement at the product and company level.

Elsewhere, Simon Willison has a good early take generally and specifically on Apple’s Private Compute Cloud.