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Is AI a bad word? 

Might be if you’re Apple. 

At its much-hyped WWDC conference, the tech giant announced their anticipated partnership with ChatGPT and a bunch of AI everywhere. 

But Apple barely said the word AI. 

(3 times in nearly two hours, not counting “OpenAI”)

What they did talk about, though? 

A lot of Apple Intelligence (60 times!) Machine Learning and ambiguous dates about upcoming features. 

Shrug. 🤷

Apple thought that maybe if they said “Apple Intelligence” 60 times and avoided the word “AI” that we’d forget they’ve been sleeping on the sidelines since ChatGPT came out. 

Naahhhh shorties. We’ve been calling y’all out for more than a year. 

We didn’t forget. And that wasn’t even the worst thing about their announcements at WWDC. 

But, it obviously wasn’t all fumbling the AI bag from Apple. 

There were some highlight features, some epic fails and a bunch of under-the-radar points that LEGIT no one else talked about. 

If you just want the details, here’s our hand-picked recap of noteworthy updates and features around AI: 

1. New AI model capabilities 

2. AI image model and generation 

3. Actions 

4. Improved Siri 

5. Personal Context 

6. ChatGPT integration 

7. Semantic media 

8. AI functions in main Apps

We covered all of those in our recap podcast episode today, so make sure to give it a listen if you care about the future of AI. 

Because whether you love em or hate em, Apple pushes the buttons on how AI will be used in the future. 

So, let’s cut through the marketing fluff and kick it to ya straight. 

Here’s the tl;dr version: Apple released nothing new, but might make old AI stuff a bit more useful. 

But probably not for your biz. 

Let’s break down what you need to know. 👇

A lot to like here, as long as you weren’t hoping Apple announcements would help you much in your business. 

Some things that caught our eyes: 

UI/UX
In true Apple fashion, everything looks and feels intuitive. That’s probably why Apple ultimately tucks itself in at night while wearing solid gold bricks as slippers. 

Actions
In Siri and throughout the ‘Apple Intelligence’ suite (whatever that means), it looks like Apple’s got simple actions down.

Think — telling Siri while you’re reading a text message ‘add that to my calendar’ and it… actually happens. 

AI summarizations and writing
We said a naughty word — AI! But Apple baked in AI summaries, writing tools and more across the entire operating system.

Wherever you’re working with text, you can get ChatGPT-esque help making your text better, shorter, or more informal. 

• The summarizations might be the (small, but big!) area where this shines. From summarizing notifications to deriving key insights from emails to display in the preview pane, this one feature alone might save you enough time in a week to justify the costs. (More on that later.) 

A real personal assistant
Apple is making a hard play here on its future hardware being an amazing personal assistant for you, if you let it use all of your data. (We don’t care. We’ll take the efficiency.)

Privacy
Speaking of, you gotta tip your hat to Apple. They take privacy very seriously. Even though understanding it all is a bit above our pay grade, Apple’s new on-device privacy tech (and how they accomplish it) is super impressive. 

ChatGPT integration
This was a no-brainer and a no-choice for Apple to partner with OpenAI. We talked about this months ago. OpenAI is lightyears ahead of everyone else, and it’s not even a close race.

Failing to partner with OpenAI in the short term would have been a devastating misstep for Apple. 

How much space do we have in this newsletter? Sheeeesh. 

There’s a lot of bad. Like, a lot.

We’ll highlight some of our favorite fails. 

Siri is not that smart — Sorry not sorry. It seems like Apple’s Siri may only be getting a small update in the brains department for now, and most of that is because Siri now just uses ChatGPT.

Apple alluded to the fact that Siri would be getting more improvements within the year, but that’s not saying much.  

(Side note, as I type this, I have no clue if it’s 55 or 85 degrees out right now in Chicago. But I’m not going to ask the new and improved Siri, who apparently will just talk about the sky and not say the actual temperature.) 

Cheesy features — Cmon. You knew we had to bring this up. There’s two main parts of Apple’s new internal model — text and image.

The text part of Apple’s new model looks super useful. The diffusion/image portion?

Yikes.

We get that Apple may have decided to play it safe and not follow in Google’s disastrous Images footsteps, but CMOOOOOON!

The fact that Apple spent so much friggin time talking about AI-powered emojis and AI art that looks like it was actually drawn by children should be called out. 

The quality here is reminiscent of AI Will Smith eating spaghetti. 

It’s pretty bad. This mighta been a ‘feature’ better left never released. 

Model confusion — Ready for this? 

A. So Apple has its Small Language Model running the majority of the simple tasks regarding your data so it can keep it fast, secure and local. 

Cool. Makes sense. 

B. But then they have another Private Cloud Compute layer, for when that model needs more juice. 

OK. Sure. Tracking.

C. Oh! But when your query really needs off-device juice, then Apple taps into that ChatGPT integration, but asks you first. 

(So it’s just a wrapper then for most queries?) 

D. But wait, there’s more! Apple announced in addition to this totally not seamless ChatGPT integration, that it will also enable paid ChatGPT Plus features in the future right in Apple’s operating system. 

(We give up.) 🤦

You know we gotta talk about some of the big elephants in the room here, y’all. 

“AI for the rest of us.” — OK Apple.

What intern came up with this? Lolz.

Is this really your slogan? You all do know that the majority of the real world has been using  GenAI for years, right?

Is the ‘Rest of us’ just the Silicon Valley Billionaires? (Serious question, we’re confused.) 

Not mentioning its model
Imagine being one of the countless brilliant engineers who made Apple’s small language model that powers this whole ‘Apple Intelligence’ thing and they don’t even mention the model. 

Yeah. 

Apple legit glazed over the details of its model that makes this whole thing possible and just tried to sprinkle some marketing magic everywhere. 

We noticed, Apple. Huge foul.

Maybe Apple wanted everyone to think that OpenAI was powering their whole on-device model?

Nope.

Powering the secure AI experience is Apple’s brand new 3 billion parameter JAX/XLA Small Language Model. 

Not saying AI
You can’t rewrite history here Cupertino crew.

Here’s the reality — in the past year, Apple has underperformed against the market. 

And its AI-happy competitors like Google, Microsoft and Meta have run laps around Apple. 

It seems that by literally trying to erase the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘AI’ from its keynote that Apple hoped we’d all forget that it’s been sitting on its fat stack of cash like Scrooge McDuck not releasing a gersh darn thing in the AI space. 

Nope.

We remembered.