The chatbot might replace all software with a prompt - ‘software is dead’. I’m skeptical about this, as I’ve written here, but Apple is proposing the opposite: that generative AI is a technology, not a product.
Apple is, I think, signalling a view that generative AI, and ChatGPT itself, is a commodity technology that is most useful when it is:
Embedded in a system that gives it broader context about the user (which might be search, social, a device OS, or a vertical application) and
Unbundled into individual features (ditto), which are inherently easier to run as small power-efficient models on small power-efficient devices on the edge (paid for by users, not your capex budget) - which is just as well, because…
This stuff will never work for the mass-market if we have marginal cost every time the user presses ‘OK’ and we need a fleet of new nuclear power-stations to run it all.
Apple has built its own foundation models, which (on the benchmarks it published) are comparable to anything else on the market, but there’s nowhere that you can plug a raw prompt directly into the model and get a raw output back - there are always sets of buttons and options shaping what you ask, and that’s presented to the user in different ways for different features. In most of these features, there’s no visible bot at all. You don’t ask a question and get a response: instead, your emails are prioritised, or you press ‘summarise’ and a summary appears. You can type a request into Siri (and Siri itself is only one of the many features using Apple’s models), but even then you don’t get raw model output back: you get GUI. The LLM is abstracted away as an API call.
Apple is treating this as a technology to enable new classes of features and capabilities, where there is design and product management shaping what the technology does and what the user sees, not as an oracle that you ask for things.
Apple is drawing a split between a ‘context model’ and a ‘world model’. Apple’s models have access to all the context that your phone has about you, powering those features, and this is all private, both on device and in Apple’s ‘Private Cloud’. But if you ask for ideas for what to make with a photo of your grocery shopping, then this is no longer about your context, and Apple will offer to send that to a third-party world model - today, ChatGPT.
that’s clearly separated into a different experience where you should have different expectations, and it’s also, of course, OpenAI’s brand risk, not Apple’s. Meanwhile, that world model gets none of your context, only your one-off prompt.
Neither OpenAI nor any of the other cloud models from new companies (Anthropic, Mistral etc) have your emails, messages, locations, photos, files and so on.
Apple is letting OpenAI take the brand risk of creating pizza glue recipes, and making error rates and abuse someone else’s problem, while Apple watches from a safe distance.
The next step, probably, is to take bids from Bing and Google for the default slot, but meanwhile, more and more use-cases will be quietly shifted from the third party to Apple’s own models. It’s Apple’s own software that decides where the queries go, after all, and which ones need the third party at all.
A lot of the compute to run Apple Intelligence is in end-user devices paid for by the users, not Apple’s capex budget, and Apple Intelligence is free.
Commoditisation is often also integration. There was a time when ‘spell check’ was a separate product that you had to buy, for hundreds of dollars, and there were dozens of competing products on the market, but over time it was integrated first into the word processor and then the OS. The same thing happened with the last wave of machine learning - style transfer or image recognition were products for five minutes and then became features. Today ‘summarise this document’ is AI, and you need a cloud LLM that costs $20/month, but tomorrow the OS will do that for free. ‘AI is whatever doesn’t work yet.’
Apple is big enough to take its own path, just as it did moving the Mac to its own silicon: it controls the software and APIs on top of the silicon that are the basis of those developer network effects, and it has a world class chip team and privileged access to TSMC.
Apple is doing something slightly different - it’s proposing a single context model for everything you do on your phone, and powering features from that, rather than adding disconnected LLM-powered features at disconnected points across the company.