Understanding Apple Intelligence

What Apple announced and what it means; other developments in AI; three limericks; recommended blogs.

Jun 17, 2024

The Week

This week I get clearer in my own mind about what news topics I especially want to follow. Spoiler: artificial intelligence. And I share my thoughts on Apple’s revelations about its AI strategy. Also, there are limericks.

The picture, as usual, has nothing to do with anything else in the post. It was taken yesterday from our front porch and is a still from nine minutes of video of a deer family hanging out on our front lawn.

Gen AI

Forget Boomers and Zoomers. We’re all Generation AI. Generative Artificial Intelligence is changing the world, and I’m doing my humble best to keep up with the technology, its applications, and its societal impact.

But What If It’s Watching Fox News?
We’re getting used to the idea that artificial intelligence models can learn to converse amazingly well (though they sometimes hallucinate) merely by consuming mass quantities of linguistic data. But a new system developed at MIT is able to parse and understand language just by watching videos of people talking. Sort of like Daryl Hannah in Splash. I think this is important because I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a system exhibiting intelligence until it has some way of observing the real world rather than just text pulled off the internet. This looks like a step in that direction. Hat tip to Larry Yaeger for pointing me to this story.

When Will You Be Replaced?
If you’re wondering when AI will make your particular skills obsolete, the answer is, sooner than you think. According to the CEO of the workplace training platform Workera, the half-life of skills used to be over ten years. It’s now under five. He identifies four worker categories in an AI-ready workforce.

There Is a Vacuum in AI Policy and Teaching in Schools
AI is everywhere in our schools. Students, teachers, and parents are increasingly savvy about AI, but its use in schools is largely unauthorized and undirected. Most respondents in a recent survey of teachers, students, and parents said that “their school has no policy on it, is doing nothing to offer desired teacher training, and isn’t meeting the demand of students who’d like a career in a job that will need AI.” But teachers who have used AI generally report that it helps students learn faster and more.

Apple Intel

Apple famously follows its own path and the company is doing its own thing with artificial intelligence, branded as Apple Intelligence. I’ve been an Apple user since 1984 wasn’t like 1984, and I’m following their moves, intelligent and otherwise, both as a reporter and as a user.

The Reviews Are In
A week ago today, Apple lifted the lid and gave us a sniff of what artificially intelligent goodness it’s been cooking. Apple’s market valuation went up by 7% Tuesday on the strength of the announcement. How much is 7% of Apple, you ask? About $200 billion. Not bad. Oh, and then it went up 4% on Wednesday to surpass Microsoft as most valued company. I share my thoughts about what it all means below.

The New Features Are All AI
Maybe not all. But most of the new features Apple previewed for its existing products are implementations of Apple’s AI. As reported by Conrad Gray in the Humanity Redefined blog, “ In the first half of the keynote, the words ‘AI’ or ‘artificial intelligence’ were not said even once. However, AI and machine learning were featured over and over, if you knew what to look for.” More from his post:

“Math Notes, the feature where you can handwrite equations in the new Calculator app and the app will solve them — that’s machine learning. New features that make handwriting a little bit tidier — that’s machine learning. Removing objects from photos, page summaries in Safari, and voice isolation in AirPods — that’s machine learning, too.”

Quote of the Week

“Near as I can tell, ‘self-documenting code’ was invented as yet another excuse for programmers not to have to talk to other people.”
— Kent Beck.

How Smart Is Apple Intelligence?

Maybe Smarter Than You Think

On Monday, June 10, Apple kicked off its annual developers’ conference with a keynote address that laid out Apple’s plan for integrating artificial intelligence across its product line, branded as Apple Intelligence. The keynote also offered previews of Apple’s latest operating system updates: iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, and visionOS 2.

The best place for a summary of what was announced is Apple’s own site, and if you want more and have two hours to spare, you can watch the keynote. Tripp Mickle, covering the event for The New York Times, suggests that Apple could do more than any other company to add credibility to generative AI, and that its implementation of AI could calm concerns that Apple had fallen behind its competitors in the race to AI-ify everything.

If Apple Intelligence does add credibility to Generative AI, it will be because of Apple’s approach to incorporating AI and how well it executes on that approach. More interesting, maybe, than the clever things Apple Intelligence will let your apps do are its moves regarding privacy and partnerships.

Apple is claiming to be introducing “a brand new standard for privacy and AI.” Understanding that people are afraid that AI is going to steal, make that has already stolen, their words, their art, their identities — their data — Apple promises its AI software will never store your data or make it available to Apple. It will do most of its AI processing on-device and when it needs to go outside, it will get your permission and still secure your data. This is remarkable in that Apple is denying its AI tools the ability to learn from the data that it is securing. Here’s what Apple says about AI security.

Apple has partnered with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available on Apple devices, but Apple is on record as leaving the door open to other partnerships. Its AI, in fact, was trained in Google data centers. Also, the partnership with OpenAI has some interesting wrinkles, including the fact that Apple is paying OpenAI nothing.

The Generative AI industry players are in a race with one another that is not driven by some identified market need but by FOMO. The money spent developing and training the models, building the processors, and hosting the data will be limited by how much investors are willing to risk. But the income from the efforts will be market-driven, and Apple, by virtue of being a very big customer and by being able to choose among vendors, is positioning itself to control its costs. And in the case of the OpenAI deal, apparently the cost is zero.

Anyway, Apple is not in competition with these AI companies: it is their customer.

I think Scott Galloway gets it right: “‘Apple Intelligence’ is more than a great brand move; it encapsulates the company’s strategy. Take something invented elsewhere; make it more consumer friendly, easier to use, and more reliable; mix in world-class industrial design; and print billions. Artificial intelligence is for tech bros and data scientists. Apple Intelligence is AI for the rest of us.”

Verse

If you’ve been following this blog for over a year, you may recognize some of these. I just feel a need to put some verse in each post. I’ll try to include a new one from time to time. For a while it’s just going to be limericks, but eventually I’ll get to the sonnets and villanelles and whatnot.

Three Limericks

The way you spend money is prodigal
And dare I say highly illogical
I don’t mean to diss you
But maybe your issue
Is neuropharmacological.

This software is like a garage, it’s all
Cluttered, dust-covered, illogical
The effort is noble
But debugging COBOL
Is paleoentomological.

A Badger linebacker named Bradley
Said sacking folks made him so sad he
Ultimately quit and
Went out for badminton
Which he played with great brio though badly

Of Interest

When I was editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, we had a section in the back of the magazine titled “Of Interest.” Here are some things that I think you might find Of Interest.

My Day Job

I edit books on technology for The Pragmatic Bookshelf. One recently released in beta is The Stress Equation by Marcus Lagré. Marcus explains: “The Stress Equation is a model and a tool to help talk about stress as a systemic issue. By exploring how pressure, complexity, and security interact in software teams, we move focus away from the individual, so that we can talk about stress from a team and organizational perspective. By exploring external factors, we discuss how to solve problems rather than cope with the consequences.”

ICYMI
Thanks for reading. You can read all the back issues of Swaine’s World at my blog home.

Coming Attractions

In the coming weeks, more Swaine’s Flames flashbacks, Dirt Road Diaries, bulletins from the AI revolution, tech history, books, and random verse.