Apple debuts its AI plans

The Future. In the run-up to its Worldwide Developer Conference next week, Apple is letting some details about its AI plans slip to the public. While the AI hype train has reached a fever pitch, Apple’s scale and focus on optimizing everyday tasks could mainstream its use.

Hello, my name is SiriAI
The new generation of iPhones, iPads, and Macs are getting an AI facelift.

• Apple’s AI system, called “Apple Intelligence,” will focus on productivity and automation tasks like news and article summaries, reply suggestions, and other applications that have “broad appeal.”
• It’ll also supercharge Siri, using a new deal with OpenAI to provide more chatbot-like abilities.
• The company doesn’t plan to roll out image or video generators like most of its competitors, but it will have a feature to generate custom emojis that represent phrases as they’re being typed in real time.

Apple, which has always touted privacy as a major benefit to iOS, said that the AI features will not be default — instead, users have to opt in. Additionally, Apple promised that it wouldn’t build profiles on users based on their data and would create reports that information isn’t being shared.

But, the tech giant is making some concessions that previously were a red line for the company — it has no choice but to use cloud servers to compute some AI tasks because of how much processing power they take. An algorithm will determine if a task can be done on-device, or if it has to go to the cloud to be executed.