Everyone on stage used the more neutral phrase “machine learning” instead of “artificial intelligence”. For comparison, when Google did its I/O, journalists bet on how many times “artificial intelligence” would be mentioned on stage from the very first minutes. They lost numbers very quickly due to the number of cases passed for a few tens.

Why is Apple wary of artificial intelligence?

First of all, it’s worth noting that the company didn’t mention AI as a technology. We are talking about the word itself. Admittedly, “machine learning” is artificial intelligence, but this phrase carries a slightly different emotional color, which makes the company distance itself from itself and remove some expectations and responsibilities towards the audience.

As many in the field will tell you, “artificial intelligence” is a term they hate: both vague and over-defined, it’s more reminiscent of science fiction mythologies than real, concrete technology. Writer Ted Chung put this very well in a recent interview: What is artificial intelligence? “Bad word choice in 1954”,
– Writes James Vincent of The Verge.

Apple’s warning is not new. The company has long been wary of “artificial intelligence” as a particular force with technological influence. It prefers to highlight the functionality of machine learning by highlighting the benefits it offers to users. Tim Cook said in an interview: “We’re integrating this into our products, [але] People don’t necessarily think of it as artificial intelligence.”

Literally all the machine learning-based features mentioned at this year’s WWDC look pretty cheesy – improved auto-correction, a personalized volume feature for AirPods, a new iPad lock screen, note prompts in the new Journal app, and more. Features are welcome, but far from changing the world. This cautious strategy may seem strange against the background of all the disclosures by rival companies – Google, Microsoft and Meta. So the question is: is Apple missing an opportunity?

Of the three mentioned, Meta is by far the most discreet. He’s definitely working on AI tools, but he’s in no rush to make big announcements. Google and Microsoft have in turn implemented artificial intelligence in each of their products, functions, and devices (search engines, office programs, voice assistants, and more). These companies have caught the moment AI appears on the market and are hoping to make a lot of money.

Should Apple do the same? Can it? Apple is a company built largely on hardware, specifically the iPhone and its ecosystem. No one is pressing him to invent search like Google or develop productivity software like Microsoft. All it needs is to keep selling phones, and it does that by making iOS as intuitive and user-friendly as possible.

One of the few areas Apple has lost without using AI is the Siri voice assistant. It has been the subject of countless jokes over the years for being weak compared to its competitors. Even the company itself admitted that Siri is very difficult to manage and poorly designed. Making changes to the program is difficult, so over time it ceased to be a priority and became in disrepair. The biggest news about Siri at this year’s WWDC was the shortening of the call phrase from “Hey Siri” to just “Siri”. And that’s all. In a world where artificial intelligence language models have greatly improved computers’ ability to understand speech and opened up new opportunities in fields like education and health, Apple’s biggest announcement was a three-letter abbreviation of a trigger word for a product most of us ignored. .

The most important thing

However, aside from the fact that the company doesn’t have as many software products as Microsoft or Google, there’s another reason to be wary. As a company, Apple is mostly not a market innovator. If you follow its activities, you know that every presentation of the iPhone produces jokes about the so-called innovations that the company claims every time, but in fact, similar technologies have already existed in Android smartphones for five years. This is because Apple is in no hurry to be the first. He prefers to first observe the development of this or that technology, see the mistakes of competitors, user requests for a particular development, and then take it and package it with a good interface or design and release it to the market with maximum polish.

Against this background, artificial intelligence is no different. Artificial intelligence technology has given rise to many problems and controversies, as can be seen since the launch of ChatGPT: prejudice, systematic disinformation, constant scandals… An image-obsessed company like Apple can’t afford to launch raw AI., rushed to hop on this bullet train, as Google did, and failed to deliver, lowering the price of its own shares. He can’t let his clients scold him for racism or other discrimination in a neural network that doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Therefore, it continues to offer small features based on “machine learning”, such as animating the desktop wallpaper, and continues not to give false hope to users, as they perceive artificial intelligence as a kind of panacea, omnipotent and all-knowing machine.

But certainly the company is working on this technology, and sooner or later we will hear the traditional phrase “Apple has reinvented” artificial intelligence.