AI: Apple does AI at its own pace. RTZ #560

...Tim Cook focused on personal and private AI done 'inside out'

I’ve been clear about my conviction that Apple is very well positioned for the long-term in this AI Tech Wave. Apple Intelligence and all. From its ‘inside out’ AI for the masses strategy across its unique global hardware and software ecosystem.

Impacting the daily lives of billions going about their daily local business with their phones, macs, ipads, watches, headphones, vision pros, and soon rings and smart glasses. With its unique focus on Privacy for its customers.

CEO Tim Cook has so far ‘threading the needle’ with Apple’s massive footprint in China and its ‘Made in California’ business here in the US. And he has placed his long-term on early areas like the Vision Pro, while down-throttling Apple’s ambitions for Apple cars.

Wired revisits with Tim Cook this week in “Tim Cook Wants Apple to Literally Save Your Life”, and highlights Apple’s key priorities going into the new year and beyond:

“Much as the CEO seems awestruck by AI and his just-released Apple Intelligence, he’s more convinced that the tech giant’s health apps will define the company’s legacy.”

The venerable Steven Levy sets the stage for the feature piece:

“We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.”

And goes into the Apple AI bets to date:

“In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)”

And of course Apple’s ace card in AI, it’s focus on Trust and Privacy as it scales AI inside out with its products and services:

“Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI—at least according to Apple—is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools, which are rolling out through software updates on the latest iPhone and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself—you don’t send your data to the cloud. The computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.”

And of course Apple’s core conviction investments in Healthcare and Fitness done as right as Apple can across its product sets:

“It’s clear to me that if you zoom out way into the future, and you look back and ask what Apple’s biggest contribution was, it will be in the health area. That’s what I really believe. When we started pulling that string with the Apple Watch, it was a cascade of events. We started with something simple, like monitoring your heart rate, and then figured out we could pick up heart signals to get to an EKG and an AFib determination. Now we are monitoring sleep apnea. I’ve gotten so many notes over time from people who would have not survived had it not been for the alert on their wrist.”

And of course Tim Cook is a bit nonchalant on the current AI industry focus on multi billion dollar AI data centers, something it participates indirectly in via its relationships with OpenAI, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and others. And draws the line at nuclear power plants:

“So you won’t have to reactivate old nuclear plants or anything?”

“I don’t see that.”

The whole piece is worth reading in full, to get the relaxed but focused pace of Apple’s attention on Apple Intelligence and AI in general.

It’s clear that this is a company that will march to its own AI tune for a while. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)