There is a saying in tech amongst who follow Apple which goes “Apple is not the first to the party, but the best dressed”, It is very early to say if that is true when it comes to Apple’s take on Artificial Intelligence, but in theory Apples take seems to be the most useful for a lot of people.
I’d argue that there are two unique selling points of Apple Intelligence when compared with the “Artificial Intelligence” that people know of:
Your Apple devices know you best
Say you have a query that AI can help you with, you go into ChatGPT and put your prompt in, and it gives you an answer based on what it knows from the model it’s trained on.
With Apple intelligence when you ask a question the AI processing knows a lot about you, it knows you because it has access to all your private and personal data thanks to the device you are asking the query from. It will help you based on what the device knows about you, there is context to the query put forward. When you just go into ChatGPT or Gemini there is no personal context, Apple Intelligence does and that alone will make a huge difference in this era of AI.
Artificial Intelligence with personal context sounds great, but it also sounds like a privacy and security nightmare. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the three major software players today. And these three companies make personal software and devices. Of these companies (who are all on board with AI), who would you trust with your most personal data? (Rhetorical question!).
Privacy and Security
What makes Apple stand out amongst tech companies is their take on privacy, they are not in the business of needing your data to sell to advertisers, they sell hardware. I don’t necessarily think Apple cares of privacy because that it feels like the moral position to take, but because they are not in the business of selling your data – it is one of their values – to “care” about the privacy of their users.
As I argued above, the thing about AI is that it has to know a lot about you to be really useful, and the device that knows you the most is what you always have with you – your smartphone. The iPhone (and other Apple devices with the M series chips) is powerful enough to do most AI processing on the device itself and with Apple Intelligence most of the processing does happen on your device, but if your phone thinks that it needs a bit more processing power it sends off relevant data to Private Cloud Compute (PCC). The PCC is a cloud intelligence system designed for AI processing where the security of your phone is extended to the cloud. When (and if any) private data is sent to the PCC for processing no part of the users data is stored nor is it accessible for anyone else, not even Apple has access to your data. And if Apple Intelligence ever thinks that you’d be better served by ChatGPT or any other third party AI model it would explicitly ask you if you are OK with sending your data to the third party model. This is not turned on by default and it is opt-in. Even when sending your data off to a third party Apple does not send any data where it can be traced back to you – like hiding your IP address, etc.
I hope when these AI features are rolled out during the course of the next year, Apple Intelligence is good as they claim it to be. Apple cannot afford to fail when they are the only company that people trust, and possibly the only company out there that can bring personal AI to the masses. To quote Apple from WWDC “Apple Intelligence is AI for the rest of us”. And I hope it is.
