Apple’s AI Revolution: Insights from WWDC

After this year’s WWDC, I’m feeling a lot more positive about Apple’s efforts to weave artificial intelligence into its ecosystem. While a contextual Siri may not arrive until next year, the focus right now is on developing the inherent technologies rather than mass market AI interactions.

At Apple’s big developer event, developers were served a feast of AI-related updates, including APIs that will let them use Apple Intelligence in their apps and ChatGPT-augmentation from within Xcode. What this means is that as a development environment, Apple has secured its future, with Macs forming the most computationally performant systems you can affordably purchase for this work.

Apple’s role in AI innovation

The power of Apple Silicon has already made the MacBook Pro a favored device for AI development, and the announcements at WWDC consolidate that status. If you want a machine that can build AI, makes use of AI, and can even run its own on-device AI to support the work you’re doing, get a Mac.

Ensuring the Mac remains a chosen development tool makes it more likely the products of that labor will work on the platform in the future. Apple is smart to continue to invest in its platforms to ensure they continue to be the best system for AI development, especially because the future of artificial intelligence isn’t yet written and far from certain.

When smart isn’t so smart

In a widely-discussed, statistics-driven report published just before WWDC began, Apple clarified some of the shortcomings of generative AI (genAI) in the current innovation cycle, showing the intelligent machines are still not as smart as they are so often portrayed. What this means is that even the most sophisticated genAI systems you might use are not yet as smart as they’re made out to be. 

What do you do with a technology that has so many unwritten futures to it? I guess you enter the story line, which Apple achieved at WWDC. Being part of the development narrative may not be the same as being the company that owns a ChatGPT, Anthropic, or Gemini, but it does mean you sit in the same room. Being in the same room matters to AI developers, as professionals in the field really like to speak together, which goes with the territory when working at the cutting-edge of human endeavor. To an extent, it implies that developers at WWDC might all be hoping for more from Apple Intelligence but could well be working on its competitors. On a Mac.

To climb a mountain

I’m not saying Apple has no mountain to climb. It will clearly continue to struggle on the ascent. It’s just that I’ve become more certain the company will reach the summit — because that summit is not defined by consumer-facing AI chatbots. It is defined by powerful, intelligent tools to help humans achieve things they’ve been unable to do before. There’s a huge difference between applied AI and a glorified search engine, and while Apple’s report hints that machines might never match human cognition at the highest levels, that’s not to say Apple’s self-developed large language models (LLMs) can’t amplify what we can do. 

Perhaps the focus around AI is misplaced — the aim should not be on creating smart machines to replace human beings, but on building tech to augment them. Why replace the most sophisticated organic machine that has evolved with a computer when humans already have their own minds? Why not just build an AI to extend and enable what those amazing minds can achieve?

Can AI be a path to freedom?

If we follow that direction of travel, we end up in a place that seems to align with Apple’s moves at WWDC. Focused AI solutions to help people get things done will always be both more useful and less societally challenging than smart machines that seek to replace us. So, it’s with this in mind that I think through a confluence of historical internal decisions and unfortunate failure, Apple has managed to arrive in a pretty good place. 

The company that perhaps wants to develop an artificial intelligence for humanity now offers developers a great platform on which to build it. Perhaps one day, when humans once again make it to the mountain top, we will look with fresh eyes at tech’s promised land, a world in which computing devices augment and liberate humanity, rather than being exploited to keep us all in line.

We’ve just got to fight for it.

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