Apple CEO Tim Cook opened the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday marking his final keynote before stepping down in September. Cook will be replaced by John Ternus, who did not speak at the company's main keynote address.
"One of the greatest highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this, sharing powerful new tools with all of you and what you create with them has been a constant reminder that imagination has no limits... I truly believe the best is still ahead. At Apple, creating the best products in the world to deliver experiences that enrich people’s lives has always been our north star," Cook said in a video message to a rousing reception
The Cupertino-headquartered firm rolled out a plethora of new features and updates at its annual developer conference while also providing a glimpse of its artificial intelligence strategy, including an update on the eagerly anticipated overhaul of Siri AI and its widely discussed partnership to use Google’s Gemini models.
The new version of Siri will work across other Apple products and apps, and will also feature a new app. Apple's introduction of Siri AI comes after criticism that the company has been a laggard in the AI race with peers forging ahead. However, Apple is differentiating itself as a player that views privacy as being the centre of their AI endeavour. It assured that Siri AI would draw from a user's past interactions with the app, an understanding of images, as well as broad-world knowledge and would serve as a more capable and conversational assistant than its current iteration.
The company also flagged that Siri AI won’t be available in Europe and China because of regulatory challenges. Siri AI will be available as part of the developer beta starting Monday. Users will need the latest devices for the new Apple AI foundation models. Non-programmer users will get the new Siri this fall as part of a software update alongside new hardware.
Senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi also criticised companies that were building "AI for the sake of AI" without considering the people it's supposed to be able to serve.
"We believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Federighi said, adding that Apple's new Siri AI experience was designed with privacy in mind "at every step."
While shares of the iPhone maker were up about 2% shortly after the open on Monday, the stock price slid during the WWDC keynote and was around 1.89% down as of 3pm. Analysts attributed the slide to lack of clarity on Siri AI timelines. The company said the software updates revealed on Monday at WWDC will launch alongside new hardware in the fall. Specific
Another significant talkpoint at WWDC surrounded Apple Foundation Models (AFM) on cloud which are the product of the company’s collaboration with Google. The company said that the AFM Cloud Pro model is for the most demanding tasks. Amar Subramanya, vice president, AI at Apple said that AFM Cloud Pro is comparable to Google’s Gemini frontier models.
Senior executives of the company also confirmed that it will run in the cloud on Nvidia GPUs, which are part of Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. “We work with both Google and Nvidia to extend our private cloud compute infrastructure to Nvidia GPUs in Google’s cloud, while maintaining Apple’s unmatched privacy guarantees,” Subramanya said while addressing the press after the keynote.
The company, however, emphasised that it isn’t collecting as much data as competitors and is using its access to locally-stored user information and world knowledge to personalize AI features.
The author was in Cupertino at the invitation of Apple.
