Apple to open up underlying AI technology to developers
CUPERTINO, California :Apple said on Monday it will open up the underlying technology it uses for Apple Intelligence and announced an overhaul of its operating systems.
Apple software chief Craig Federighi said the company is opening up the foundational AI model that it uses for some of its own features to third-party developers.
"This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar," Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said of the delays of some features such as improvements to the Siri virtual assistant.
Apple is facing an unprecedented set of technical and regulatory challenges as some of its key executives kicked off the company's annual software developer conference on Monday.
Shares of Apple, which were flat before the conference, slipped 1.5 per cent after executives took the stage.
Federighi also said Apple plans a design overhaul of all of its operating systems.
Apple's redesign of its operating systems centered on a design it calls "liquid glass" where icons and menus are partially transparent, a step Apple executives said was possible because of the more powerful custom chips in Apple devices versus a decade ago.
Federighi said the new design will span operating systems for iPhones, Macs and other Apple products. He also said Apple's operating systems will be given year names instead of sequential numbers for each version. That will unify naming conventions that have become confusing because Apple's core operating systems for phones, watches and other devices kicked off at different times, resulting in a smattering of differently numbered operating systems for different products.
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A YEAR ago, when Apple used a jamboree at its home in Silicon Valley to unveil its artificial-intelligence (AI) strategy, grandly known as Apple Intelligence, it was a banner occasion. The following day the firm's value soared by more than US$200 billion – one of the biggest single-day leaps of any company in American history. The excitement was fuelled by hopes that generative AI would enable Apple to transform the iPhone into a digital assistant – in effect, Siri with a brain – helping to resuscitate flagging phone sales. Twelve months later, that excitement has turned into almost existential dread. It is not just that many of last year's promises have turned out to be vapourware. Siri's overhaul has been indefinitely postponed, and Apple Intelligence is no match for other voice-activated AI assistants, such as Google's Gemini. Meanwhile, Apple's vulnerabilities in China have been exposed by US President Donald Trump's trade war. 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If so, the company will avoid 'doing a Nokia', he says. Likewise, Apple might make use of this moment of soul-searching to rethink other shibboleths of Cook's tenure, such as the obsession with privacy and the high walls it puts around its family of products. As Ben Thompson of Stratechery, a newsletter, points out, sanctifying the privacy of its users' data has been an easy virtue for Apple to uphold because until recently it did not have much of an advertising business. Yet in the AI era, it has drawbacks. First, Apple's reluctance to scrape customers' individual information makes it harder to train personalised AI models. Apple uses what it calls 'differential privacy' based on aggregate insights, rather than the rich, granular data hoovered up by firms such as Google. Second, privacy has encouraged it to prioritise AI that runs on its own devices, rather than investing in cloud infrastructure. Chatbots have advanced more rapidly in the cloud because the models can be bigger (awkwardly, this led Apple to offer some users of Apple Intelligence an opt-in to ChatGPT). In order to overcome its AI deficiencies, it could splash out on buying a builder of cloud-based large language models (LLMs). But it has left it quite late. OpenAI's deal with Ive makes it less likely to ally with Apple. Anthropic is close to Amazon, which has a big stake in the maker of the Claude family of LLMs. Other options are either Chinese or too small for a company of Apple's heft. Alternatively, it could relax its 'walled garden' ethos of seamless integration, and partner with a variety of third-party LLMs, as Motorola, owned by the Chinese firm Lenovo, has done. Third-party voice-activated chatbots could quickly solve its Siri problem, giving renewed reason for people to upgrade their phones. The likelihood is that Cook will do nothing radical. As Moffett puts it, his tenure has been marked by the steady ascendancy of 'process over product'. Instead of flashy innovations, his hallmark has been metronomic reliability, especially with regard to financial performance. Nor has he any hope of swiftly extricating Apple from China. As McGee points out, even if Apple's final assembly moves to India and elsewhere, the supply chain's roots remain deeply embedded in the Middle Kingdom. Yet this is no time for complacency. Whatever the ups and downs of AI – as Google has recently shown, yesterday's losers can quickly become today's winners – nothing turns investors off quicker than a profits shock. That is what makes the threats to Apple's services business so serious. The most striking risk is that the judge who declared Google a monopolist may order it to suspend payments to Apple that make Google's search engine the default on the iPhone. 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