Apple employee explaining Siri AI features at WWDC 2024

(Apple / YouTube)

Apple may have just explained how Siri is actually going to become useful

Using on-screen awareness and context from your personal life and app usage, Apple may finally be able to prove AI is more than just a sideshow.

Rebecca Moretti

6/10/24 4:42PM

If you missed Apple's annual developer conference, rest easy knowing that you didn't miss much.

To illustrate this point: one of the most surprising things Apple announced was that it's finally bringing the calculator app to iPad.

And then there are the AI integrations (though Apple impressively managed to avoid saying "AI" for most of the conference).

Apple's bringing "Apple Intelligence" features to iOS 18. Basically, these will allow you to use genAI across apps. Picture: generative rewrites of your emails, text-to-image generation, and summaries of group chats. Perhaps less useful: the ability to create custom AI emojis ("Genmojis").

Siri's getting an AI makeover: The OG voice assistant will supposedly be smarter (oddly, Apple chose to demonstrate this by asking it to pull up the weather). Notably, Siri will be able to pull info from different apps (messages, mail, maps, search, etc.) to better answer questions and cross-reference. For example, you could ask: "Will I make it in time to pick up mom from the airport?" and it would find the message with your mother's flight details and check the flight status + commute time to inform its answer. Partially this will work because Apple is focusing on “personal context awareness” and “on-screen awareness,” which is able to access contacts and apps on your phone that are already filled with your personalized content. Apple says it will also let third-party app-makers tap into this functionality.

Oh, and you'll also be able to type your requests to Siri (so you don't have to embarrass yourself in public).

OpenAI partnership, confirmed: As expected, Apple said it's partnering with OpenAI to infuse ChatGPT into its AI features (both Siri and other apps). If you ask Siri a question and it thinks CGPT is better suited to answer, it'll ask you if it's okay to share your query with CGPT (seems like this could happen a lot?).

Our take: Outsourcing AI is a smart move. Companies have been sinking billions into AI with no way of knowing when (or if) it’ll pay off. Apple also left the door open to integrating other AI services beyond OpenAI at a later date, keeping the company from getting locked into a single provider. By outsourcing some of its AI to ChatGPT, Apple can stay focused on the thing that’s kept it one of the world’s most valuable companies (hardware) without sinking billions into Nvidia chips.

Jon Keegan17h

Anthropic launches “Claude Design,” sending shares of Figma and Adobe down

Anthropic has been slowly and steadily gaining a leading share in the enterprise AI market by focusing on coding, spreadsheets, and other common productivity and workplace apps.

Now it’s going after design apps.

Today Anthropic launched Claude Design, a dedicated app powered by its latest model, Claude Opus 4.7, that lets users use text prompts to build website designs, user interface prototypes, presentations, and marketing materials.

Shares of Figma and Adobe sank on the news.

While Claude has previously had the ability to create designs and user interfaces, breaking it out into a dedicated app signals a major new piece of its enterprise strategy alongside its popular Claude Code product.

Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs

Shares of Figma and Adobe sank on the news.

Rani Molla22h

Apple’s China iPhone shipments surged 20% in Q1 even as overall smartphone shipments fell

Apple’s iPhone shipments in China jumped 20% last quarter, even as the country’s overall smartphone market fell 4%, according to new data from Counterpoint Research. Rising memory costs have pushed prices higher across the industry, weighing on demand.

Apple appears poised to ride out the broader smartphone slump. Its strength at the less price-sensitive high end of the market and its unusual leverage over suppliers, which helps keep costs in check, give it an edge over rivals.

Greater China remains a critical region for Apple, making up about 18% of its total revenue in the fourth quarter. The company accounted for 19% of China’s smartphone market in the first quarter, up from 15% a year earlier, per Counterpoint.

Rani Molla4/16/26

Anthropic has surged past OpenAI in capturing business spending on generative-AI software

Last quarter, Anthropic attracted the lion’s share of trackable business spending on generative-AI software, according to new data from Ramp, a fintech company that provides corporate cards and expense management software for small firms and Fortune 500 companies alike.

The data showed that in the first quarter, Anthropic saw 37% of spending, its biggest share yet, versus 33% for OpenAI. Notably, the dataset doesn’t capture spending by Google or Microsoft.

OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, still leads in overall adoption at 81% of AI buyers, but Anthropic is catching up, at nearly 63% in March. Overall, more than half of Ramp’s customers currently pay for AI, up from just 18% two years ago.

Anthropic’s enterprise tools, including Claude Code and Cowork, have been making waves among the business class, sending its revenue soaring.

Anthropic’s revenue share is even higher among companies spending on AI for the first time.

“Anthropic has definitely been on a tear,” Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s economist, told Sherwood News. “Its increase in adoption rates has been driven by its ability to sell to less technical users and smaller contracts than it typically has.”

It’s notable that midway through the first quarter, Anthropic had a falling-out with one of its biggest customers, the US government, which near the end of February decided to shun Anthropic’s products and lean into working with OpenAI.

Jon Keegan

4/16/26

Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, with better coding, better vision, and occasional doom loops

The incremental update of Anthropic’s most capable public model includes steady improvements to coding and new ways to blow past your token budget.

Tunnel. Optical illusion. Abstract striped background. Vector illustration.

Jon Keegan4/16/26

Report: Google ditches its objection to defense work, pitches Gemini to Pentagon

In 2018, Google employees protested against the company’s tech being used for the US military’s Project Maven — a drone targeting program — reminding the company of its “don’t be evil” motto.

After the controversy, the company declined to renew the contract with the Pentagon, drawing a bright line between Big Tech and the national security establishment.

What a difference a few years makes.

Google is now actively working to get its Gemini AI model to be used in classified national security settings, according to a new report from The Information. Seeking a similar deal to the one OpenAI hashed out with the Pentagon, Google reportedly wants a contract that allows use of Gemini in classified work, but with a prohibition on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.

But Google is playing catch-up in a major way. Amazon and Microsoft both have been widely used for classified defense work, and contractors are already experienced in working with their cloud systems, while Google’s services have never been used in classified work.

Google and Pentagon Discuss Classified AI Deal as Company Rebuilds Military Ties