Apple is set to board the runaway locomotive that is generative AI at next week’s World Wide Developer Conference. Reports thus far have pointed to a partnership with OpenAI that will, among other things, help supercharge Siri.
A fresh round of rumors reported by Bloomberg shed more light on the news expected to be unveiled at Monday’s 10 a.m. PT keynote. First there’s the name: Apple Intelligence. The company was clearly invested in maintaining the AI initials for its own whack at the large language model (LLM) piñata.
The name appears to apply to a broader push into the category that could include that OpenAI partnership and a resulting chatbot. Apple Intelligence will arrive as an opt-in beta, similar to developer-focused operating system updates the company releases after WWDC. The system should ship on upcoming versions of the iPhone, iPad and Macs.
According to the report, a limited number of older devices will also be able to run the system, including iPads and Macs running an M1 chip or higher and the iPhone 15 Pro. That means the standard iPhone 15 may be left out in the cold on this one.
Apple Intelligence will initially be focused on bolstering existing applications. This includes things like summarizations of pages in Safari and notification summaries. As reported earlier, Siri is getting a 2024 glow-up, with the ability to access more things like photo editing with voice. it sounds like Apple’s big push into AI is less about flash and more about making its operating system more intuitive and user friendly.
In spite of the reported hardware limitations, the system won’t run entirely on-device, instead mixing local and cloud-based processes, depending on the complexity of the task at hand.
