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After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all â Apple â was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology.
Finally, at its annual World Wide Developersâ Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, âAIâ would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated â something called âApple Intelligenceâ. It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but âa marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and servicesâ. Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel. And, of course, it also made it easier for Apple to say that users who wanted to have all of these fancy features would have to buy an iPhone 15 Pro, because older devices wouldnât be up to the task.
Needless to say, this columnist fell for it and upgraded. (Verily, one sucker is born every minute.) As a piece of kit, the new phone was impressive: the powerful new processor chips, neural engine etc worked a treat. And the camera turned out to be astonishingly good. But the Apple Intelligence features enabled by the upgrade seemed trivial and sometimes irritating. It immediately started messing with my photo collection, for example, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted and annoying. And there was a new pre-installed app called Image Playground that apparently âmakes communication and self-expression even more funâ â which might possibly be true if one were a four-year-old with a short attention span, but is otherwise a turkey from central casting and should have been strangled at birth.
There was one feature, though, that looked interesting and possibly useful â a serious enhancement of Siri, Appleâs attempt at a virtual personal assistant. Henceforth, the company announced: âSiri will be able to deliver intelligence thatâs tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, âPlay that podcast that Jamie recommended,â and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, âWhen is Momâs flight landing?â and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.â
On closer inspection, though, Siri â even running on my expensive new phone â could do none of these useful things. In fact, it mostly seemed as banal as ever. And then, on 7 March, came an announcement from Apple: âWeâve also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. Itâs going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.â
For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that âwhat Apple showed regarding the upcoming âpersonalized Siriâ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisisâ. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video â the so-called âKnowledge Navigatorâ video â it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.
Until â says Gruber â now.
Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isnât in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cookâs stewardship of the company. If thereâs one thing Jobsâ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. Itâs clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadterâs Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadterâs Law.
What Iâve been reading
A million monkeysâŠ
ChatGPT Canât Kill Anything Worth Preserving is a marvellous essay by John Warner on AI and writing.
Machines of loving grace?
AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? Read Stephen Fryâs unmissable inaugural lecture to Kingâs College Londonâs Digital Futures Institute on the obsession du jour.
Itâs written in the cards
Jillian Hessâs account on her Substack of Carl Linnaeusâs groundbreaking note-taking practice is illuminating.