Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own initiative in June. Conventional wisdom suggested that this entry was old-fashioned and late.
Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is just in time and has been stealthily preparing for this moment for years.
That's part of the message I received this fall while speaking with key Apple executives about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior Vice President for Software Engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as Key Product Launches. Less well known to the public is John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who previously led machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke with Greg “Joz” JoswiakApple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing. (These conversations helped me prepare for my meeting with Tim Cookwhich I did the next day.) All executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite AI's extremely disruptive potential, Apple was going to handle this revolutionary technology with the same clarity and thoroughness for which the company is known. To paraphrase a song by certain musicians who created a company called Apple, the Cupertino team was still waiting for this moment to present itself.
“In 2015, we were doing intelligence, for example predicting which apps you would use next and helping predict routes on maps,” says Joswiak. “We didn’t always talk about it publicly, but we were there and ahead of it.”
In 2018, Apple poached Giannandrea from Google, a move that Cook said shows Apple was anticipating the coming AI transformation. The company created a new senior vice president position for him, an unusual move for Apple that broke with its traditional hiring norms. When he arrived, Giannandrea was struck by how Apple was already leveraging cutting-edge AI in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature that you use every day, multiple times a day, to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it actually works,” he says. “A lot of deep learning is done privately on your phone just to make this feature work. But for the user it disappears.
Federighi says experimenting with OpenAI's GPT-3 model, released in 2020, sparked his imagination. “Things that seemed on the verge of becoming possible suddenly seemed eminently possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to take advantage of the technology the Apple way.”
Apple quickly had several teams working on transformer based AI models. So when ChatGPT captivated the world in November 2022, Apple didn't need to assemble an internal working group to develop AI products: work was already underway to create features that, similarly, “would simply disappear”. “We have ways to bring functional expertise together within the organization to achieve larger product transformations,” says Federighi. “When it came to taking a bigger step in a public way, we pulled many of these threads together, in a way that is very familiar to us at Apple.”
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