Apple’s ambition: It wants AI to stand for Apple Intelligence

livemint.com:

You have to hand it to Apple Inc. After a tone-deaf ad last month that made the company look oblivious to AI’s impact on the world, its marketing department has now rebranded AI as ‘Apple Intelligence.’ It’s a feat only the company could pull off. Customers of Macs and the latest iPhones will use it to rewrite emails, transcribe and summarize calls, generate images and cross-reference information from Apple apps.

“Will I get to my daughter’s play performance on time?" Apple Software Chief Craig Federighi asked in a demo at its developers conference on Monday. Apple Intelligence would consult his iPhone’s proprietary Calendar, Maps, Mail and iMessage apps to answer. After a string of mundane updates to its operating systems, these are the most exciting features in years, but will Apple Intelligence really work as seamlessly as it did in pre-recorded demos when it rolls out this fall? I’m inclined to believe we’ll see glitches and latency issues that will make it a tough sell to consumers, at least initially.

The most sophisticated AI tools today process your queries on cloud servers that need an internet link. Apple’s iPhone has a fraction of the power of those servers, but to make its AI service private and quick, it will run some AI queries via Siri ‘on device,’ on a small language model Apple built for iPhones. No net connection needed.

Apple Intelligence will also decide, on the fly, if a query like “Will I get to my daughter’s play performance on time?" requires extra computing power. If it does, it’ll access a bigger AI model that Apple made, via its ‘Private Cloud Compute’ (its own servers). Anything more complex will request a query to ChatGPT, via a partnership with OpenAI.