Apple launches its own artificial intelligence system

Apple Intelligence, the new system implemented by the Silicon Valley giant, will offer writing tools capable of making corrections and suggestions to users.

Apple CEO Tim Cook at the company's developer conference at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters

On Monday, nearly two years after OpenAI launched a race to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its products, Apple jumped into the competition and revealed its plans to bring the technology to more than 1 billion iPhone users around the world.

During a two-hour presentation from its futuristic Silicon Valley campus, Apple said it will use generative artificial intelligence to power what it calls Apple Intelligence. The system will prioritize messages and notifications and offer writing tools capable of correcting and suggesting what users have written in emails, notes or texts. It will also imply a significant improvement for Siri, Apple's virtual assistant.

Apple's plans to offer AI systems on its iPhones represent another step in introducing that technology into the mainstream for consumers. Apple, one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable companies, could do more than any other company to lend credibility to a technology that has many detractors, who worry that it is prone to errors and could add to the avalanche of misinformation that already exists. circulates on the internet.

Apple's new artificial intelligence features could also help ease concerns that the iPhone maker has lagged behind its biggest rivals in adopting that technology. The value of other technology companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, has skyrocketed thanks to their aggressive artificial intelligence development plans. Earlier this year, Microsoft dethroned Apple as the world's most valuable technology company.

When presenting its new artificial intelligence system, Apple emphasized how it planned to integrate the technology into its products with privacy in mind. The company said the technology, capable of answering questions, creating images and writing software code, would perform sensitive tasks. He showed how the system could automatically determine whether rescheduling a meeting would complicate plans to attend a child's play performance.

Computer processing would be done on an iPhone and not in data centers, where personal information is at greater risk of being compromised. For complex requests that require more computing power, it has created a cloud network with Apple semiconductors that, the presentation said, is more private because it is not stored or accessible, not even by Apple.

Apple reached an agreement with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to support some of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Requests that your system cannot handle will be directed to ChatGPT. For example, a user might say that he has salmon, lemon, and tomatoes and that he wants help planning dinner with those ingredients. Users would have to make those requests to ChatGPT, making sure they know that the chatbot—and not Apple—is responsible if the answers are unsatisfactory. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attended the Apple event.

Apple's agreement with OpenAI, which already has a close collaboration with Microsoft, is another indication that the young San Francisco company has clearly become the leading developer of artificial intelligence technology in the technology sector.

“As we develop these incredible new capabilities, we want to make sure the result reflects the core principles of our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. “It has to be powerful enough to help you with the things that matter most to you. It has to be intuitive and easy to use.”

Apple also said it would make improvements to its software system for the iPhone. This fall, Messaging will add the ability to schedule messages and reply to messages by tapping back with more emojis. Apple will also redesign the Photos app to make it easier to search for images by topics, such as pets and travel. Additionally, iPhone users will be able to send high-resolution images to Android cell phones.

Apple brings several strengths to the artificial intelligence race. Its semiconductor development team is one of the most talented in the industry and has been manufacturing chips that power complex artificial intelligence functions for years. The company has also promoted itself as a better protector of personal information than its rivals because it makes money by selling devices, not advertising.

But Apple has several weaknesses that could slow down the development of its AI. The secretive company has had trouble hiring and retaining top artificial intelligence researchers because it limits the amount of research it publishes. It has also sought to license published material and opposed collecting it without permission, as other generative AI companies have done in order to build and train their technology.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attended Apple's annual developer conference.Credit...Carlos Barria/Reuters

Although Siri has been around for more than a decade, Apple has let that voice assistant languish. The assistant has frustrated users with its failures to recognize various requests, and its ability to converse is limited because it is programmed to follow each individual order.

Source： June 11, 2024  New YorkTimes