Apple heaps on the AI at its big conference, while promising to protect users’ privacy

Huge news… The calculator app’s coming to iPad and genAI is coming to iOS. Apple gave its own spin on artificial intelligence during its annual developers’ conference yesterday, calling “personal intelligence” its “next big step.” It introduced Apple Intelligence, which infuses gen-AI functions across apps. It can be tapped to rewrite, proofread, and summarize text (think: change the tone of an email, edit a breakup text, sum up an article). And to liven up the group chat, it can turn written ideas into images or create custom emojis (“Genmojis”). 

• Siri’s makeover: Apple said Siri is better at understanding (its one job, really) and will now let you type requests. Siri can pull info from different apps to better answer your q’s — like finding your partner’s flight info in your texts and cross-referencing it with flight-tracking data and Maps to tell you when you should head to the airport.

• OpenAI partnership: Apple confirmed it’s teaming up with OpenAI, allowing users to ask ChatGPT questions and generate images and text within Apple’s tools. Say you ask Siri how to make a five-course meal using lemon-lime Gatorade and Pop-Tarts. Siri will probably ask you if it’s OK to offload that advanced query to CGPT.

Privacy push… As device demand slows, tech companies are looking to AI-infused phones and PCs to juice hardware sales. Apple said its system “sets a new standard for privacy in AI.” It’ll process data on-device for many AI tasks, and when the request is too complicated to complete locally, it’ll send it through its new Private Cloud Compute service. Plus, Siri will ask users for their consent before it offloads their questions to ChatGPT (still, Elon Musk threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies). As AI scrutiny intensifies, Apple appears to be drawing boundaries between its offerings and OpenAI’s — which have been the subject of some regulatory messiness.