Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI when Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggests that this entry was unnecessarily late.
Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving at just the right time — and it's been quietly preparing for this moment for years.
This is part of the message I got from talking with key Apple executives this autumn about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi An ongoing web series in the tech world features a familiar character known as a major product launch. John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who was previously head of machine learning at Google, is less publicly recognizable. In a separate interview, I talked to him Greg “Joz” JoswiakApple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing. (These conversations helped me prepare for my meeting with tim cookWhich I did the next day.) All of the executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite AI's massively disruptive potential, Apple is going to handle this game-changing technology with the same clarity and care for which the company is known. Also to interpret a song of some composers formed a company The team from Cupertino, called Apple, was always waiting for this moment to come.
“We were introducing intelligence in 2015, like predicting which apps you'll use next and helping predict routes in Maps,” says Joswiak. “We didn't always talk about it publicly, but we were there and at the forefront.”
In 2018, Apple took over Giannandrea from Google, a move Cook told me showed Apple anticipated the coming AI transformation. The company created a new senior VP position for him, an unusual move for Apple that deviated from its traditional hiring norms. Upon arrival, Giannandrea was amazed at how much cutting-edge AI Apple was already using in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature you use every day, multiple times, to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it actually works,” he says. “There's a lot of deep learning going on personally on your phone to implement that feature. But for the user, it disappears.”
Federighi says experiments with OpenAI's GPT-3 model, which was released in 2020, fueled his imagination. “Things that were on the way to being possible suddenly started looking extremely possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to leverage the technology the Apple way.”
Apple soon had multiple teams working on transformer based AI model. So when ChatGPT wowed the world in November 2022, there was no need for Apple to assemble an internal task force to develop AI products — work was already underway to create features that would do just that. Like “will just disappear.” “We have ways to bring together functional expertise across the organization to accomplish large product changes,” says Federighi. “When it came to making a big step publicly, we pulled together many of those threads, in a way that is very familiar to us at Apple.”