Ep 3. Apple’s Vision for Supercharging Product Line with AI | AI Insights and Innovation

[David Linthicum]

Introduction

Did Apple just announce an innovative AI platform? Or is it just another ploy to upgrade your iPhone? Let’s see.

AI Insights and Innovation Podcast Introduction

Welcome to AI Insights Innovation, your go-to podcast for the latest news, trends, and insights in artificial intelligence, including generative AI. Join us as we explore groundbreaking developments, interview leading experts, and provide in-depth commentary and advice on how you can find AI success with your organization. I’m your host, David Linthicum, author, speaker, B. Ellis Geek, longtime AI systems architect and analyst at theCube Research.

Apple’s New AI Platform

Let’s get into the topic. Well, anyway, unless you’ve been sitting on a rock, you’ve seen that Apple has come out with a new version of an intelligence layer that they’re going to put on top of all their existing ecosystem products, so mail, messaging, word processing, calendaring, all these sorts of things are going to be driven by this new layer that they call Apple Intelligence.

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Apple’s Integration of AI into Products

And so they had a big announcement a couple of days ago. And while I’m not a consumer electronics person or analyst that governs consumer electronics, it’s interesting to see how they’re integrating AI into their product. And it’s also interesting to look at the angle in terms of how enterprises can potentially leverage this product to provide a more productive vision for, or more productive capabilities of what their systems can do.

Hybrid AI Model and Privacy Focus

So what’s unique about this versus some of the other AI that’s out there is it’s a hybrid model kind of an AI platform. So the majority of processing takes place on the phone or the device, and they’re going to support iPads, they’re going to support iMacs, and they’re going to obviously support iPhones. This comes with the new iOS 18 that’s forthcoming toward the end of the year.

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You’re going to get it free if you’re an Apple user. So it’ll be interesting to see how people use this technology in a productive state. So the idea is that by putting it on the iPhone, at least they did this in the press release, that they’re going to focus on privacy. In other words, they’re going to be able to provide better security, better privacy for the systems. And I think that ultimately that may be the case, other than the fact that because your phone’s stolen and they’re able to break into it, there could be some sensitive data that’s on the phone itself. So sometimes when people get concerned about updating their personal information, some sort of a centralized server like we do with social media and cloud computing and things like that, they get kind of overly paranoid about the sensitivity and the privacy concerns with that.

Security Concerns with Device-Based AI

So obviously, if it’s on my phone, I’m going to have more control over it. But my phone, as we’ve seen in many instances, can get lost, can get stolen.

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And so we still have security issues to deal with there. So Apple’s private cloud compute ensures that personal data is used for specific AI tasks, and they only reach out to some sort of a back-end AI system if it’s needed. So this is truly a layered AI environment where we’re doing things that don’t require a lot of processing power on the phone or on the device. And then when needed, they go to some sort of a back-end system, which is able to carry out more complex processing.

Apple’s Deal with ChatGPT and OpenAI

They also have a deal with ChatGPT and the OpenAI stuff. And so they can leverage that LLM as well. And I suspect that other LLMs will be integrated into this. So ultimately, this is about an AI product that’s the front end to the Apple ecosystem. And we’re going to see similar kinds of moves from Microsoft and other systems out there, probably the Google Office products, even cloud-based systems, where we’re interacting with an AI interface to allow us to orchestrate and integrate the various back-end services.

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Productivity Applications of Apple Intelligence

In the case of the phone, it’s for productivity. In other words, the ability to bring up the weather in a particular location that we’re moving to and then tell it to set a calendar invite for travel to that location, and the ability to map out a path that optimizes our travel, and the ability to send a message to people, providing them with the itinerary, and doing it all through a natural language processor kind of system, just basically talking to your phone. So that ultimately is going to be what it is.

Is Apple Intelligence Revolutionary?

So is this revolutionary? Not really. I mean, we’ve had systems that you can use to front end different ecosystems now and things we can use on our phones and on our computers that can do things like this.

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Probably what is unique is that Apple’s fronting their own stuff. They own the ecosystem. They deal with Apple Mail. They deal with messaging. They deal with calendaring systems. All that stuff comes as part of the OS. And their ability to provide productivity through those disconnected environments, I think, is going to be pretty helpful to lots of individuals.

Enterprise Implications of Apple Intelligence

So what does this mean for enterprises as they’re looking to upgrade this technology? Are there security issues that they have to deal with or performance issues they have to deal with? Is this going to force a phone upgrade for employees? The answer is probably yes. I think when they come out with a new iPhone, they’re going to talk about how it’s optimized for Apple Intelligence using a new processor. And if we are running AI on these devices, obviously they’re low power devices because they’re devices. And the ability to get the fastest processor and the best battery life and things like that is probably going to mean upgrading your iPhone.

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And so that may be the reason why they’re doing this. So in other words, it’s about providing an AI front end so we can be more productive with the device, with our iPads, our iPhones, and our iMacs. But it’s also going to be promoting that we go to the next generation of the technology. That’s just got to be part of this.

Challenges and Vulnerabilities of Device-Based AI

So what are the challenges and vulnerabilities in this thing? Well, we’re running complex AI tasks on device. And that, I think, is going to pose a technical challenge. We’re going to find that a lot of the more complex AI processing systems run out of horsepower on the device. And obviously, these devices don’t have GPUs on them. They’re CPU-based systems. And so we’re going to find that going out to a back-end system is probably going to happen more often than we think on fairly complex tasks. And so we kind of have to keep that in mind. So even though it is going to be a disconnected AI environment, which is going to be convenient if we’re on an airplane and we don’t have connectivity or we’re in our cars, we’re using Siri via Apple CarPlay, it doesn’t have to have connectivity to carry things out.

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And that kind of drives me nuts now when I try to read my messages or something like that on Siri via Apple CarPlay. If it’s not connected, it just doesn’t work. And security experts are warning about potential vulnerabilities when passing requests to cloud-based AI models. And so there is a security vulnerability as it moves from the existing device to the back-end systems. And obviously, we’re transmitting, in many instances, personal information. And any time we’re transmitting data in flight, even if it’s encrypted, it can run into issues.

Positive and Negative Effects of Apple Intelligence

So this is going to have some positive and negative effects. Positive, I think people are going to find that having an AI system to front-end the Apple ecosystem, making that system easier to use once they figure out how to use Apple intelligence correctly, and there’s going to be a learning curve in doing that, is going to provide some productivity gains. The ability to operate systems across siloed applications, calendaring, messaging, word processing products, things like that, is going to have a positive effect.

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The negative effect, at least for the enterprise, is it’s probably going to force an upgrade of very expensive devices. I don’t know if you price an Apple iPhone, they’re $1,200 normally for a fully powered device and on up. So that’s going to drive a lot of upgrades within the enterprises, and that could increase costs.

Security Concerns for Enterprises

The other thing is going to be the security concerns of this. Obviously, there’s some vulnerabilities that pop up when we provide additional capabilities. And the enterprise security folks are going to take a look at this stuff before it’s going to be deployed to ensure that they’re not taking an overt risk. So in other words, there’s not going to be a great amount of risk of loss of data around utilization of these systems by their employees. And obviously, Apple has a huge part of the enterprise market out there when it comes to devices, and even compute devices, things like that.

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I use an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad, just like most of my other colleagues do as well. And we do so for productivity gains and also having a familiar ecosystem that’s able to operate across devices. This is an AI layer that is going to go across that ecosystem.

Privacy Advocates’ Perspective

So what do the privacy advocates say? Well, acknowledge that Apple’s efforts in privacy protection is their first informants. And I notice in the announcements, they keep saying privacy. And obviously, there are some privacy benefits in running AI on your particular device versus sending everything to some sort of a backend system. Besides the performance benefits of that, there’s some privacy benefits to that. As long as you’re able to keep your device secure. In many instances, a lot of these devices are lost or stolen, and they can be easily broken into via some very handy tools out there that hackers are using. And so we have to keep that in mind as well.

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So there is going to be some privacy trade-offs, but I think it’s just going to be a different set of risk and vulnerabilities that we have to deal with.

Adoption Delay and Security Concerns

So independent verification of Apple’s claims in response to research findings ultimately are going to be what leads us to using this technology in a productive way. I think there is going to be an adoption delay by the enterprises out there that are looking to leverage this thing because of the challenges that come with securing an AI system. And also, the security professionals out there, the ones I’m speaking with, are still confused about what kind of security AI is going to need. And AI is going to be a different beast to secure than traditional systems and dealing with applications and databases. We have to look for prompt poisoning and all these other things that can occur where we’re providing additional attack factors, in this case, by leveraging AI.

Apple Joins Other Tech Giants in AI

So Apple joins the other giants leveraging the model. This is kind of a me-too thing. Obviously, Microsoft is all over AI. Google is all over AI.

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And certainly, Apple has had their toes dipped in AI within many of their products. Now they’re all in providing a common AI interface to their ecosystem. And so we need to look at some of the security issues here, some of the privacy issues here, and some of the forced upgrade issues that I think enterprises are considering right now.

Is Apple Intelligence Groundbreaking?

So is this something that is ground shaking? No, it’s not. In other words, I think everybody expected that Apple would jump into the AI pool. And obviously, having AI that operates across their ecosystems, their different application systems, provide better productivity and a better user experience is something that they were bound to do. Now we know how they’re going to do it and when the thing’s going to show up in an operating system release, and also some of the challenges in looking at the next generation of devices and how they’re going to be tailored or engineered around utilization of these AI systems.

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All that stuff is in front of us.

Apple’s Marketing Prowess and Enterprise Applications

Apple’s an amazingly effective marketing company. They have lots of people that are very loyal to their products and services. I probably am one of them, I think if I’m honest with myself. However, we still have to look at the enterprise applications of this technology and the ability to use this technology in a much more effective and productive way.

Challenges and Opportunities for Enterprises

And I think that’s where the challenges come in. So that’s kind of it in a nutshell. So this is coming in your operating system upgrade if you’re an iPhone user and iOS 18, which is coming out later this year, whenever that’s going to drop. So you’re going to have a chance to play around with it and see if it’s productive for you or not. Meantime, the enterprises are going to look carefully at what this means in terms of the upgrade, what this means in terms of enterprise security, and also ultimately what this means to the whole AI industry.

Personalized AI Systems and Tactical Use Cases

In other words, the ability to use personalized AI systems that are on our device, I think, is going to be a large growth area.

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We’re realizing that the tactical use of AI is typically going to be the use cases. Most businesses aren’t building LLMs like GPT. They’re building tactical use cases for AI systems that can run on devices, fairly low powered systems.

Apple’s Proof of Concept for Device-Based AI

And I think Apple’s kind of proving that out. So it’s interesting to watch this evolve, how we’re moving into a personalized, lower powered solution for AI.

Productivity Opportunities with Integrated AI

We’re looking for the productivity opportunities to leverage AI in a way where it’s able to integrate various systems. I think we’re going to be able to do that at the device level within our iPhones, but also do that within the enterprises as well.

The Future of AI: Integration and Automation

We’re able to leverage our CRM system, which is communicating with our inventory system, which is communicating with our supply chain system, all with some sort of an overreaching AI system that’s able to bind these things together. And that’s the future of this technology.

Conclusion and Call to Action

Well, anyway, that’s all I have for you this episode. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, but don’t forget to rate us. And I’ll see you next time. You guys take care. Cheers.