Published in Svenska Dagbladet, 2024-06-11. Translated from Swedish.
Apple’s AI debut revealed a crack in the facade of the tech giant. The desire to keep pace with the AI frenzy appears to be pushing the company to abandon the privacy-first strategy that made it so successful.
It was the worst-kept secret in the tech world. On Monday evening Apple made its entrance into artificial intelligence — though perhaps not as grandly as hoped, given that virtually every announcement had leaked days in advance. Bloomberg had published a piece the previous week listing almost everything Apple would present at its annual developer conference, WWDC.
Even without good journalistic sources the news was fairly predictable. How could one of the world’s largest companies stand without new AI products, in a moment like this? It could not. But it did things in its own way — in a way only Apple can.
Apple has mastered the art of packaging existing ideas as if it had just invented them. Most of the presentation showcased features that competitors have had for years. The Insight feature on Apple TV+, which shows which actors appear on screen in a TV series? Essentially identical to Amazon’s X-Ray. The ability to redesign your home screen? A feature Android has had for a long time.
But Apple speaks about its novelties as if they exist in a vacuum. It is an odd phenomenon that says something about the strong market position the company holds — it can afford to ignore the rest of the world in many cases. But there are questions where that attitude is harder to maintain, and AI — the single topic that has consumed all the oxygen in the tech world for the past eighteen months — is exactly one of them.
Apple is fine with not launching new product categories first, as long as it believes it will be better when the time comes. Look at the iPod or the iPhone — neither was first to market, but both quickly became best in class.
In keeping with that approach, Apple did not launch generative AI — it launched “personal intelligence.” In substance it was largely the same thing, but the services were woven into Apple’s products and operating systems. The company also appropriated the acronym by calling its version “Apple Intelligence.”
For many years Apple has positioned itself as the only tech company that genuinely cares about your privacy. Your data stays yours and is not shared with others. That Apple would lean into this framing for its AI push was therefore predictable. The “personal” element is that the system knows you and your data — but the data goes nowhere else. Apple’s vertical integration across hardware and software makes that promise harder for competitors to replicate.
So far, all fairly normal and predictable. But then the facade cracked.
Near the end of the presentation came what everyone had been waiting for — the much-discussed partnership with OpenAI. ChatGPT will be integrated directly into Apple’s operating system. Ask Siri a question and it will try to answer using its own capabilities, or with the help of services in what Apple called a “private cloud” — outside your device and on Apple’s servers. And beyond that, if Siri believes ChatGPT can give a better answer, you can, with a single tap of approval, choose to get that answer instead.
Apple’s long-standing argument about privacy and security — that your data stays on your device — can thus be bypassed with a simple button press. That is uncontroversial for most users, but not for Apple.
The solution points to the strategic dead end Apple has chosen. Your iPhone is not — at least not yet — powerful enough to offer the same quality of AI services as ChatGPT and similar tools. If users want this kind of functionality, more computing power is needed. Apple therefore faces a difficult choice: compromise on quality or compromise on privacy? The answer here is neither — it passes the question to the user instead.
In that choice one can glimpse an insight that many Apple executives probably do not want to acknowledge. Perhaps privacy around one’s data is not such a sensitive issue for users after all — at least not when the alternative is a service that can simplify both personal and professional life.
