What is AI best at now? Improving products you already own
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. AI’s boosters have billed it as a technology so revolutionary that it could become the dominant intelligence on Earth. In reality it is shaping up as more a product feature than a new product category.
As recent announcements from Apple and Google show, it is proving most useful as a technology to soup up the gadgets and software we already use, rather than reset the world order. That disconnect has big implications for how we are using artificial intelligence at work and in our personal lives. It’s also going to shape the landscape of winners and losers among startups and tech giants currently investing a deluge of cash in building this technology.
The chatbots that started the generative AI wave, with their impressive ability to mimic human expression, seemed to portend an era of all-knowing, oracular automatons that we’d interact with like the AIs in science fiction. These stand-alone bots—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude—have been the focus of hopes and fears, not to mention massive investment. They may also someday be viewed as a transitory state on the way to generative AI becoming part of everything we do—like the way word processors used to be physical devices you’d buy, rather than just another piece of software on your computer.
Look at Apple’s announcement on Monday of new AI features to be woven throughout the operating system in its forthcoming iPhones. These ran from the entertaining—AI-generated custom emojis—to the practical—summaries of incoming texts and emails and enhanced intelligence for the Siri voice assistant. Apple also is partnering with OpenAI to embed ChatGPT in aspects of its new AI offerings.
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