Apple and OpenAI Join Forces

Hello readers,

Welcome to another edition of This Week in the Future! Apple has revealed its AI strategy at WWDC24, and it’s refreshingly restrained and … revealing. We’re getting Apple Intelligence and an OS-level integration with ChatGPT.

Let’s get into it!

Apple Intelligence

In characteristic Apple fashion, artificial intelligence itself was rebranded to Apple Intelligence. Apple’s focus was on personalized and useful AI features across their operating systems while emphasizing privacy. Here’s what was announced:

Writing Tools: Apple will allow users to rewrite, proofread, and summarize text using generative AI in Mail, Notes, Pages, and even third-party apps.

Priority Messages and Smart Reply: In Mail, AI will surface the most urgent messages to the top of your inbox and suggest quick replies to emails.

Notifications: Deep language understanding will extend to notifications, prioritizing and summarizing them for you. Reduce Interruptions surfaces only urgent notifications.

Audio: In the Notes and Phone app, users can record, transcribe, and summarize audio. When a call is recorded, all participants are notified, and a text summary is generated.

Image Playground: Apple is giving users a dedicated app to generate images on device in various styles. Image generation is also available in Messages and other apps.

Genmoji: Users can generate their own emojis. ✨

Photos: Users can search their photos and videos based on what’s in them and even find specific moments in a video. With Clean Up, unwanted objects can be removed from photos. With Memories, users can generate a “memory movie” using natural language.

Calculator: The unequivocal highlight of WWDC24 was the new Calculator app for iPad, where Apple showed off the ability to write an expression and then the answer be automatically appended in your handwriting.

Siri

In a long overdue upgrade, Siri will now be more like GPT-4o. You can now converse with Siri using text. Thanks to onscreen awareness, Siri will also be able to take actions on your behalf across native and third-party apps.

Powering Siri and all of Apple’s other AI features is Apple’s on-device and server foundation models running on Apple silicon (no NVIDIA dependence for Apple). Additionally, Apple is guaranteeing privacy with its Private Cloud Compute.

ChatGPT

GPT-4o will be freely accessible within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia thanks to a new partnership with OpenAI. Apple will outsource complex prompts and tasks to ChatGPT, and users will always be asked for permission before doing so.

Our Take

Apple’s AI strategy is refreshingly practical, and the emphasis on privacy is welcome. Slow and steady may win the AI race if you’re Apple and control over a billion user devices. Elon Musk had his own take on the ChatGPT integration, prompting OpenAI to explain its consumer privacy policy given Musk’s vast influence.

🔥 Rapid Fire Inferno

• OpenAI hires a new CFO and CPO and U.S. Army General

• OpenAI selects Oracle to extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform

• Databricks unveils new AI features and gen AI data visualization

• Stability AI announces open release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium

• Sora competitors emerge with Dream Machine and China’s Kling

• Samsung showcases its AI vision and latest foundry technologies

• AWS announces $230 million commitment for AI startups

• South Korean chip makers merge to challenge NVIDIA

• Google shares how its software engineers are using AI

• Google unveils AI-powered copy/paste for developers

• Air Force launches experimental chatbot named NIPRGPT

• Brazilian government hires OpenAI to cut costs of court battles

• Opinion: California AI law will destroy the AI industry

• Meta explains how its building AI products for the EU

• Anthropic explains how they construct Claude’s personality

• Anthropic shares how its mitigating election risks posed by AI

• Gemini Nano expands to the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8a

• Google’s AI Overviews are still giving incorrect answers

• Microsoft retires GPT Builder a mere 3 months after launch

• Adobe tries to repair reputation after AI-related ToS policy

• LinkedIn introduces new AI tools for job hunting

• University of Tokyo reveals progress on robots driving cars

• Google shares research on health and wellness insights with AI

• DeepMind paper says superintelligence needs open-endedness

• Research paper demonstrates LLMs without matrix multiplication

• Researchers demonstrate unreliability of medical LLMs

• China’s open source Qwen2 surpasses Llama 3

📖 What We’re Reading

Challenges in red teaming AI systems

💻️ AI Tools and Platforms

• Lamini → LLM inference and tuning for enterprises

• Danti → Search Earth data like never before

• Galileo → Evaluate, observe, and protect AI applications

• Monterey AI → AI copilot for product insights

• Roe AI → AI-powered SQL data warehouse for multimedia