Big Technology Podcast - Dispatch from WWDC: Apple AI News + Reaction

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Alex Kantrowitz joins on site from WWDC, where Apple just made its big AI announcement. Tune in for a quick recap of the event's news and the implications. We cover Apple Intelligence, Genmoji, Writing Tools, & more. And what it meens: 1) Apple needing to go bold 2) Opening the device up to take advantage of the next 18 months of AI development 3) The OpenAI parternship 4) How Google reacts to this 5) How Microsoft reacts to this 6) The financial implications. Did you like this episode? Any feedback on this style? Please email [e-mail]

Hey everyone. Alex Cantorwoods here. I'm currently coming to you solo from right outside the Steve Jab's Theater. I am sitting directly outside of it. It's a large circular building where all the action actually happened to underground and to my right is all the TV risers where CNBC and Bloomberg and others are set up. And I found this nice little quiet place where maybe some birds or some talking around me but altogether let's spend like 15 minutes together talking a little bit about what Apple announced today ahead of our week of programming we're going to talk about in more depth the event with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass. He's been on before. We love his analysis. Anyway, let's get right into it. So overall, the vibe today really was, well, that was it.

And you could see that the stock market didn't seem to be overly enthused about Apple's big AI announcement, right? We're talking about an event that was probably that was built. as maybe Apple's most important in a decade. And on the day, Apple closed down 1.91%. I also tweeted out a poll asking people for their reaction to the AI stuff that Apple had announced so far. This was basically towards the end of the presentation. 21.4% said, wow. 29.2% said cool.

49.5% said me. But let's actually run through what happened. and the implications, and then you can see what you think, because there is a strategy here. It may work, it may not, but let's talk about it because this is a very big bet that Apple is making. We've been talking about it on the show for a while, and I think it's important to talk about where this might be going, because as Apple goes, often, so goes the tech world, and they are going to drive a lot of this change, especially when it comes to consumer. So first of all, what did they announce? All right, to me, the biggest announcement was, of course, Apple intelligence.

And that's AI, not like a chatbot, but it's AI that goes really throughout the operating system. I'll just list a couple of the features that set out. So first of all, Siri. And Siri is now going to understand the context of people's devices, and you'll be able to give it commands and operate the devices. So we all know the graphical user interface. This might be more like a voice interface that helps you operate your phone. It's not going to turn over everything.

But it seems like, and especially over time, this may roll out that there's going to be a lot that you'll be able to do with just your voice in Siri. So, for instance, there was one example where someone was like in the demo, find me a photo, and then it said enhance this photo and Siri enhanced it using Apple's photo editing tools. And it said drop it into my note about X and they dropped it and then Siri dropped it into the note. So this type of operating of the device is kind of interesting. And then you could also go deeper, and I think this one was my favorite, and I tweeted out and got some action, was play the podcast that my wife sent me the other day. And I think this matters because we're so fragmented in our devices, right? Like we have the phone, and then on the phone there's messaging, maybe three or four messaging apps that most of us use regularly. There's email. We could have written it down in a note.

and the interesting thing here is that this new Apple intelligence, that's what they're calling it, will be able to scan all that stuff and through natural language will be able to call up what you're talking about and hand it over to you. So a much more easy operation of the device if it works, if it works. And we're going to talk more about that momentarily. Now some of these potential updates really get crazy and there was a one process that they showed where someone gets a meeting put on their calendar, but they have to pick up their daughter shortly afterward, and the AI crunches how long it's going to take them to reach the school after that new meeting ends. I think this would be super valuable, and Apple is portraying it as something called personal

intelligence. Like that's the main takeaway. What they're saying is we're going to take what Apple knows about you, and we're going to use AI to make your life easier. It's not chat GPT like at all, actually. It's not like speak with Syrian, you know, you'll be able to have conversations with our smart bot. It's effectively, we're going to use artificial intelligence in your personal context to make the things that you do every day a little bit easier. That's the message. It honestly, it felt a little bit Google-like, right? Google's been talking about this stuff with the Google Assistant. And of course, they have mail and maps and they've been, you know, et cetera, et cetera, they've been working photos. They've been working really hard and diligently to

bring that all together and it's gotten decently okay i think that's probably what you could say about it it's not like people are using the device 100% for this personalized experience but that's what the google android experience is like and that's what they've always been building toward uh and that seems to be a direction that apple's taking very interestingly they are going also assistive it's not informational it's assistive the uh syri goes from friend which is how steve I initially anticipated it to functional. So the operating system controlled with the voice. But I do want to be clear here.

This is technology that you can make look really good in a demo, but it's just very difficult to deploy in practice. That if it works thing, it's a very big question. We're going to wait and see whether Apple can actually deliver on the promises made here today, because if I know anything from covering tech for as many years as I have, It's that it can look really great on demo day, but then when you get the device in your hands, it just doesn't work exactly the way they showed it. And I think that's worth keeping in mind.

Okay, we have a few other features. Sorry if you're hearing some of the wind blow by me and the leaves rustle, but that's just sort of the environment we're in right now. One was called gen moji. It creates emojis with generative AI. So if you're like saying you're relaxing, they might make an emoji with like cucumbers in the eyes. that will be interesting but we also wonder about the cross-platform stuff there Apple and this is something that's worth noting too they are going to give you the opportunity to create images of your context your contacts with AI so there was one

example of someone saying my mom is like superwoman and the Apple's Apple AI takes the photo of the mom and puts her in like a superwoman type of image obviously that's risky you don't know what people are going to do with this stuff our kids are going bully themselves each other with this stuff big question they're also but we're going to come back to that in a moment they're also writing tools that will help you write better and revise your writing this is a kind of a table stakes AI piece of piece of technology that we're seeing everywhere and they're also going to use intelligence to prioritize some of your notifications so we have all these notifications what's the most important thing we can get lost in them if AI can figure out

given your context what's most important that's interesting okay so that is the news And here's how I think about what we saw. So the first thing, and I think we've talked about this on the show, is that Apple just needed to go bold. They needed to change the operating system. And if you view this as a computing shift, and I think it very well might be, right, this move to AI, we're going to go from a place where people were tapping through,

where we are all tapping through our phones, to a place where you're going to start to be able to navigate your phone with voice, using AI as an assistant. And we've seen two really bad attempts at making this happen so far with the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin. And so a lot of people have written this off. But I think that if one of those hit and Apple wasn't doing these things, then there was a chance that we would see Apple fall behind in a big way. So it had to get ahead of this in some way. So it did make the changes to the operating system. It wasn't just AI to make it. emojis. It wasn't just AI to read your voice memos. It was AI to change the way that you

operate the phone. And I think that's the kind of the bold move that it needed to make also took some risks. Again, going back to this creating pictures of your contacts with Gen AI, Apple could have played it completely safe, right? The company likes to be in control, and they'll be in less control now. I mean, you're going to have AI, effectively, Apple's AI, creating, making decisions on the phone. But without a lot of giving up a little bit of that control, it would have been very difficult for this company to really say we're deep into AI. And, of course, some of that's market-driven, but there's a technology aspect to this, too,

and I think Apple saw that, and that's why they're making the move. So another point that I think is worth making is that this opened the device up and provides channels for it to take advantage of the next 18 months of AI development. So we all know that OpenAI has just begun to train. its next big model and all the big computing platforms or AI research houses really are working to train their next models. And there's a belief that within the next 18 months, we're going to see whether the progress that we've seen to date from like, let's say, GPT 1, 2, 3, and 4 can continue its exponential progress as we move forward. And if it does, you don't want to only then

start building your product to have an operating system. that reflects that. You want to open the door. And so even if what's happening right now isn't exactly, you know, if we're going to take the 45% me response to today's event as reflective of the general public, and it may and may not. But let's say it is, then you're, it almost doesn't matter because you have to put your device, if your Apple, you have to put your device in position to be able to take advantage of those next updates. And Apple did today. And Apple did today. So that was important. Also, something weird is that the open AI partnership was really a lot smaller than I expected. I think a lot of us expected. Sam Altman showed up. Many of us thought

maybe he's going to be on stage, but the integration with open AI's chat GPT is basically that Siri is going to suggest it. And it won't exactly have open AI technology throughout Apple devices. I thought maybe like some of this intelligence might be open AI powered. Some of the images generation might be AI powered. No. And they gathered a bunch of us, a lot of reporters, analysts, into the theater after the big event. And there was a Q&A with I Justine. She moderated it. And we had John G. Andrea, who runs AI at Apple and Craig Federi, who is their VP of engineering. And she asked about the partnership of, Justine asked about the partnership with open AI and Federique basically comes right out the back and he says sorry senior vice president

of software engineering that's Federee he says Apple intelligence and all of the experiences we talked about with Apple intelligence are built on top of Apple models before even beginning to answer the question about open AI so clearly Apple built a lot more in-house than the early reports led on and chat chit is kind of like a feature within a feature And if Open AI had built like all throughout, and we had talked about this in the past few weeks all throughout, that would have been pretty interesting from Open AI standpoint. But right now, it's a future within the future. And I just want to shout up Brian McCullough, you know, as we talked about this on the podcast a couple weeks ago for saying, hey, look, you might be underwhelmed. I wouldn't say fully underwhelmed, but especially when it comes to Open AI's interaction here, it wasn't what we thought.

said, Google must still be, I think, a little bit pissed. So think about Google. Google pays Apple $20 billion a year. And now OpenAI is going to suggest actions to people, for instance, recipes, things like that that they might otherwise have gone to search for. Google did not have its model included here, so there was no Gemini here, although Apple suggested that Gemini or other models are going to come in the future, but there was no Google. In fact, they even said that OpenAI is the best. And if I'm Google, I'm like, why am I paying you $20 billion? I mean, obviously they're making money on the other side. But this is effectively the risk that a lot of folks have talked about for Google in terms of potentially being displaced by a platform shift. And there will be a

counterpunch. They will integrate eventually. But I don't think it was a good day for them. And it was also a little bit of a weird day for Microsoft. Even though opening I didn't play a massive role in this release, Sam Altman was here today. There is going to be chat GPT involved. So it is kind of interesting for Microsoft that they were there. That opening I was there. All right. Let's conclude and talk about the money.

So I mentioned at the start that Apple is down 1.91% today. Actually, I think that's a much better performance than I and many others anticipated. There was a view here that unless Apple knocked the socks off the audience, that this company's stock was going to get sold. And remember, Nvidia has passed it as the second most valuable company, as the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Microsoft is number one. And Apple, I don't think, fully knock the socks off of people, but still, it's been up 15% since it started talking about AI a few months ago. And 7% on the month before this, ahead of this event.

And it's only up 6% over the past year, 6 and change. So overall, almost all of all. of Apple's growth in the stock market if you think about the past year has come over the past month and and it's even more impactful when you think about the 15% that that it's gone up since it started talking about AI so clearly there was a decline and then bounced back up so this is allowing this story is allowing Apple's products to its stock's market valuation to go up now where's this tech available interestingly it's only on available on the 15 iPhone 15 Pro and up, and it will happen when iOS 18, the next operating system comes out in the fall. And a lot of people have said this is going to spark a massive upgrade cycle. I don't know. I don't know about that. My perspective here is that it's going to really hinge on the early adopters. If the early adopters use this technology and they love it, then we might see that upgrade cycle. But one of the biggest problems with generative

AI is the possibilities are so vast, but the direction is sometimes vague. Like Chatchipati had 100 million people use it in the first two months. And that was November 2022. We're sitting here in July, 24, and the latest publicly available number is still 100 million. And people have said maybe it's at 200 million, but even still, it's this vast potential that you can use open AI, you can use generative AI for, that people still haven't found natural uses that make it kind of tricky as a consumer bet. So even if these early adopters love it, I don't know if it's going to spark this massive upgrade cycle. And we should point out that Apple has had five of the last six quarters with revenue declines that it's reported. So it might not spark

this massive increase in sales for Apple that a lot of of people are hoping for. So let me just close by reading a little bit of what M.G. Siegler wrote in the run-up to the event thinking about how Wall Street is going to handle this stuff because ultimately that's going to drive a lot of the company's strategy. He says at the end of the day, Wall Street wants a narrative around growth and Apple's hasn't been providing much of one in the past few quarters with smartphone penetration nearing a ceiling in many of their key markets

and China being erratic at best and the iPhone still being too expensive for the developing world and the Vision Pro not having a clear path to impact the company's finances anytime soon and the car project not having a clear path to impact the company's finances ever so it's going to be services

and he points out about Apple that where's the path to make money from AI he says they don't sell cloud platforms in the same way that Microsoft and Google do I'd add Amazon. They don't sell chips in the same way that NVIDIA does. In a way, it's more like meta, where they'll be using AI to augment their products,

and that hasn't played so well for at least Wall Street, although meta is doing great, but that's largely on the strength of its advertising growth. So here's the deal. I mean, we're still in this moment where we're not 100% sure how this wave of, latest wave, of generative AI is going to work for consumers. businesses it's great go ahead and find out what's going on within the company this stuff

really helps connect workflows workflows this stuff really helps consumer devices consumer applications that's really tricky but for apple a move it had to make uh i think bold in a way that it needed to be and lots of questions for apple for google for microsoft for open ai remain to be answered And that's sort of what makes this fun. So we'll be back on the feed on Wednesday morning with M.G. Seagler talking in more depth about what was announced today. Just wanted to get on the feed today and do a quick recap and share with you what I felt here on the ground. Because, I mean, flew all the way out to California. Might as well give you and sat here for the event.

Might as well give you this perspective as the event is coming to a close, or at least the first day of it. So there you have it. M.G. Siegler on the feed with me on Wednesday, talking more deeply about what this means for Apple. He's going to go way more in depth than I did today. And then Ranjan and I will be back on Friday, hopefully with another guest, hopefully with Mark German. We'll see how that plays out. All right. Thanks so much for listening. And we'll see you next time on the technology podcast.