The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Apple Intelligence - Everything You Need to Know

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, everything you need to know about Apple's new Apple intelligence tools. Before that in the headlines, are we at the beginning of an AI super cycle? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a little bit of a narrative watch. Wall Street is real confused when it comes to AI.

Starting point is 00:00:35 On the one hand, there is growing questions around whether it is priced appropriately or whether it's overhyped. We've talked endlessly this summer about exactly that. And I've also mentioned that I believe that it has to do with the beginning of the rate cutting cycle coming up, providing an alternative narrative. At the same time, there is a counterpoint that's arguing that AI is in a super cycle or a super cycle for AI is coming up. Case in point, this article from the New York Post, Apple launches AI-powered iPhone 16,

Starting point is 00:01:02 but Wall Street split on whether it will spark a super cycle. Nominally, the article is about Apple, which we cover in the main part of the episode today, and whether Apple intelligence can actually help sluggish iPhone sales recover. But the larger question is just how significant Apple intelligence is going to be and what it's going to say about users and their adoption of artificial intelligence tools. Interestingly, that wasn't the only time I saw that word yesterday. AMD CEO Lisa Sue, who is obviously not an unbiased observer, was quoted as suggesting that the AI super cycle is just beginning. Sue told Yahoo Finance, we've accelerated our AI roadmap and are on a one-year cadence of new products. It is an AI supercycle. Now, what exactly

Starting point is 00:01:40 super cycle means is, I think, up for interpretation. Presumably, this refers to some combination of financial performance and market results, as well as just business prioritization in general. I will say that the last time someone called for a super cycle, it was in Web 3, and that did not go well for that particular person or for the industry as a whole. Mostly, I just think it's funny because we have these two totally different conversations that are happening at the same time. is on the one hand the idea of AI's relationship to markets and whether it's overhyped and overpriced in markets. And then there is the inexorable transformation of professional and personal experiences that AI is undertaking day by day, regardless of what happens in the stock

Starting point is 00:02:19 market. I think it's fairly important to be able to separate those two things as we discuss whether or not AI is in a super cycle, because in short, when it comes to our actual lives, of course it is. The question is just whether the markets will agree the whole time. Speaking of markets, a company that's getting some positive coverage around its AI approach is Oracle. The Wall Street Journal flag that mistakes that Oracle made at the beginning of cloud computing are now actually helping it as it digs into AI. They write long, stagnant stock is up 34% thanks to its neutral status in the booming market for AI computing power. Last night, the company reported results and they were actually better than expected. As part of that, they also announced

Starting point is 00:02:55 partnerships with Amazon and Google, which led to analyst Patrick Morehead saying that Oracle is, quote, on a role, and that its partnership with Amazon Web Services is monumental as, quote, these two companies have essentially been at war with each other since AWS was formed 15 years ago. Yahoo Finance Rights, combined with the Oracle partnership, Moorhead explains that the Oracle database is very much alive and well, and their enterprise customers are demanding it. Morehead explains why Oracle's on-premise rather than cloud approach to data could be valuable in the world of AI. As AI becomes more of a priority, Moorhead notes that data will be the company's biggest play. He explains, quote, the biggest obstruction from enterprises

Starting point is 00:03:29 going hardcore into AI is the AI problem. It's getting the data right. It's commingling the right data data to give generative AI the right solutions without leaking confidential information. And for the customers I talked about, Oracle is the place to go. So they will be the data broker for the generative AI age. Another AI-related company continuing to perform well is TSMC. Their revenue was up 33% last month in what Bloomberg calls a positive signals to investors betting on a smartphone market recovery and sustained demand for Nvidia's AI chips. Bloomberg writes, while just a month's snapshots, the results could assuage concerns about whether the market has overestimated the durability of AI infrastructure spending. TSM now makes more than half of its revenue from its AI-driven business line.

Starting point is 00:04:08 A couple stories about AI voice avatars to round us out. Audible is inviting a set of U.S.-based narrators to train AI on their voices. The idea is to add more audiobooks to Audible in a quicker, cheaper way, in a way that cuts in existing narrators. This comes after an initiative last year where Amazon began offering U.S.-based self-publishing authors who are using the Kindle store, the option of having their works narrated by a generic virtual voice. As of May, more than 40,000 books had taken advantage of that. The idea of this new arrangement is to increase the quality of that type of work. The company said, this beta offering will empower participants to expand their production capabilities

Starting point is 00:04:43 for high-quality audiobooks, generate new business by taking on more projects simultaneously, and increase their earning potential. The company says that payments will be made on a title-by-title basis through a royalty-sharing model. This will increase narrator's ability to have their voice, with certain projects, but on the flip side, you have to think that what they'll make from an AI version of their voice will be very different than what they make in the traditional way, and the big question in the long term will be whether there continues to be a market for original voice acting, or whether it will all move to AI. Last story today, and once again on the question of AI voice rights,

Starting point is 00:05:16 Vanity Fair reports that before he died, James Earl Jones signed over the AI voice rights to Darth Vader. James Earl Jones died on Monday morning at the age of 93 and was famous for, numerous roles, especially anchored by his voice, which is probably most famous for being Darth Vader in the Star Wars trilogy. Vanity Fair reported that in 2022, Jones, who was at the time 91 years old, signed over the rights to his archival voice work to a Ukrainian startup called Reespeacher. As with everything in AI right now, this is a Rorschach test. Is this an affront to the way things should be? Or does this mean that generations in the future will get to enjoy new renderings of Darth Vader's perfect voice, even if the original himself is not there to do it?

Starting point is 00:05:57 discuss it in the comments or anywhere you like, but for now, that is going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Fractional. When we wanted to build an AI-powered feature of Superintelligent, our AI tool finder, I went straight to Fractional. The Fractional team is a group of senior engineers in San Francisco working on some of the most exciting projects in applied AI. Working with them is basically like hiring an absolute top-flight AI engineering team, but in a way that you can customize exactly for your particular needs. Like I said, that AI Toolfinder feature that we built with them is already a key part of the

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Starting point is 00:07:44 Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent, which is, of course, our platform that helps you learn how to use AI tools and perhaps even more importantly, gives you ideas on the best use cases that are actually going to help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. To recognize the end of summer and back to school slash back to work, we are running our best promotion ever when you sign up for Super Intelligent between now and the end of August using code so back your first month will be 100% free. The platform features over 600 fun, highly practical AI tutorials that get you using AI fast and with an eye to actually transforming how you get things done. We've just launched Super for Teams. So if you have a group of people at your company that want to

Starting point is 00:08:29 figure out how to use AI together, I highly suggest you check it out. But for those of you who are using Super Intelligent as an individual, once again, if you sign up for Superintelligent between now and the end of the month using code so back, you will get your first month 100% free. Go to B-Supert.a.i and check it out today. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Yesterday was a very long-awaited announcement. Basically, ever since ChatGyPT came out and it became clear that Big Tech was going to reorient itself entirely around generative AI, a lurking question has been, when and how was Apple going to get into the game?

Starting point is 00:09:05 We finally started to get the answer to that question earlier this year at the Worldwide Developer Conference, when Apple announced its approach to Gen. which it called not artificial intelligence, but Apple intelligence. By and large, the theme of Apple intelligence seemed to be that this was AI for Normies. This was AI that was abstracted. This was AI that took out all of the complication and fancy language and just focused on use cases that would actually drive value in people's day-to-day lives. The rebranding, while very on-brand for Apple to do, was also, I think, an attempt to move it away from the techie language. But to analysts and market servers, the Apple Intelligence announcement was also about something else. Despite having lots of

Starting point is 00:09:46 very popular products, Apple's revenue is still driven in large part by the iPhone. One of the big challenges with that is that at some point you reach market saturation. And each individual iPhone update is not significant enough to get people off the fence to go buy the newest version. Part of the big hope then is that Apple intelligence is a significant enough inducement that gets people off the line to actually go upgrade their phones. Well, yesterday we finally got the full iPhone 16 announcement event, and today we're going to discuss what, if anything, we learned that was new and how people are thinking about the Apple intelligence side of the announcement. In an announcement post, Apple writes, today Apple announced that Apple intelligence, the personal

Starting point is 00:10:25 intelligence system that combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that is incredibly useful and relevant, we'll start rolling out next month with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1. Basically, this is a new feature for the most up-to-date operating systems, and in the case of the iPhone, using the latest A18 and A18 Pro Chips. Now, what features of Apple intelligence does Apple choose to highlight? The first they call out as writing tools, with which they say users can refine their words by rewriting proofreading and summarizing text, and that's across the suite of Apple applications, including mail notes pages, as well as third-party apps. There's a new feature in the photo section called

Starting point is 00:11:02 memories that allows people to create movies by simply typing a description. In addition, Apple says natural language can be used to search for specific photos and search in videos to find specific moments. A new tool called cleanup can identify and remove objects in the background as well. In the notes and phones apps, users have the ability to record, transcribe, and summarize audio, which is one feature that I'm particularly excited for. And then, of course, there's Siri. Siri, they write, becomes more natural, flexible, and deeply integrated into the system experience. They claim that Siri has richer language understanding capabilities, allowing allowing Siri to follow along when users stumble over their words, and Siri now has the ability

Starting point is 00:11:36 to maintain context from one request to the next. But those aren't all the features. And of course, the trusty crew of AI newsletter writers and tweeters had their own summaries. For example, the iPhone and Mac now come with ChatGBTGPT for free. ChatGPT can be accessed through Siri, and you can also share photos and create images and text within documents with ChatGPT. Another feature that people noticed is the ability to ask questions about files, a time saver in the form of finding documents and auto-filling forms For example, when you're filling out a form, you could ask Siri to go find a photo of your driver's license from your photos application and use the details to auto fill the document. On-screen awareness is a feature that I actually think is less a specific feature and more a platform change that will have incredible impact in the long run.

Starting point is 00:12:19 And then, of course, there's the things we already discussed like AI power text editing, cleaning up images, generating AI images, and those AI powered call transcripts. It seems to me that the feature that people are most excited about or at least most chattering about is visual. intelligence. It's basically where you point your camera at something, use a new side button to capture it, and you can get all sorts of contextual information. Suppose you're out for a stroll and you stumble upon a restaurant you haven't been to before. Just click and hold the camera control and point your iPhone. With just a click, boom, your iPhone instantly pulls up restaurant hours, ratings, and quick options to check out the menu or make a reservation. And you can learn more with just a tap. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:13:04 On the one hand, I think this feature is going to be total table stakes for smartphones going forward, but at the same time, I believe that because it's actually going to be hugely useful. This is already a sort of workaround that I've used when traveling with chat GPT, although it still involves manual text input rather than just pointing my phone at something to get information. One of the cool things about this feature, if it plays out how I think it will, is that this is an example of AI actually obscuring in a positive way the lines between the digital and

Starting point is 00:13:32 physical worlds. When you engage with your phone in this sort of way, you're not being ripped out of the real world, instead just experiencing the real world more fully. Now let's talk, though, about the questions that people have about these announcements. One of the big ones is the timing. As people were watching the presentation, some expressed confusion around why they were regurgitating so much of Apple intelligence that was already announced back at WWDC, to which Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs on Twitter said, for those confused by all this Apple intelligence regurgitation, don't forget that Normies don't watch WWDC. Still, prominent YouTuber wrote,

Starting point is 00:14:03 This long rehashing of Apple Intelligence is going to be awkward if the iPhone launches with iOS 18 and has none of these features out of the box, which appears to be the case. Axios points out, Apple's slow AI rollout threatens iPhone upgrade cycle. They write, Tim Cook touted the new iPhone 16 series on Monday as the first phones designed for Apple Intelligence, but the company slower than expected rollout of its AI services

Starting point is 00:14:24 and features could put a damper on this year's upgrade cycle. This is what we were talking about in terms of the financial implications of this launch. that Apple and Apple investors more specifically are really looking to Apple Intelligence to be a driver of new iPhone sales and upgrades more specifically, and that because the Apple intelligence features have been delayed, they're not rolling out right away when the phone ships, but are coming about a month later, that could delay the initial wave of upgrades, which is a big thing that Apple usually counts on. Even though Apple has been clear about this timeline, Axios writes, Monday's announcements made clear that early iPhone 16 buyers will be paying for the eventual ability to run Apple intelligence rather than anything immediately available. out of the box. They point out that as that's happening, iPhone rivals in Samsung and Google are racing ahead with their own AI features. Another dimension or another skepticism or question when it comes to this rollout is the international dimension of this. Roiders writes Apple's AI

Starting point is 00:15:16 gap and new iPhones disappoints China users. Basically, the artificial intelligence features will not be available in China because the company hasn't yet announced an AI partner for China, which is a requirement of working in that country. Effectively, they can't bring chat GPT into China, they need a local provider playing some of that role. The other place that isn't getting Apple Intelligence features is Europe. As Philip Jobert points out, Apple Intelligence is illegal in the EU, so the headline feature for the new iPhone is the camera slider. This comes after the EUAI Act and other data regulation, and again, is not a new announcement, but this really puts a fine point on the fact that this

Starting point is 00:15:52 entire market is getting locked out of these cutting-edge features. Lazare Riddick writes, To be clear, I think the lack of Apple intelligence on the iPhone 16 and the EU not only harms consumers, but also business users and professionals who will be put at a disadvantage compared to non-EU rivals. I think this balkanization of AI availability is going to be a conversation that increases in the future. Another point of conversation is this one summed up by Rachel Tobac who writes, let's talk about risks with Apple's new camera button and visual intelligence, AI tools, and integrations, the potential ability to learn a stranger's identity by simply taking a picture. Without big third-party integration guardrails, this new camera button plus AI could invade privacy. Basically, if you see a person in the real world, all you have to do is take a photo and you can learn everything about them. Again, a lot of these criticisms are less about something right now and more

Starting point is 00:16:36 about the future that we might be heading into. We also just saw a guy take a photo of a woman and her dog, which led to this tweet, imagine encountering a puppy and its owner, and instead of asking them what kind of dog it is, you kneel down, point your camera at it, and wait for the result of Apple Intelligence. Of course, this is tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately we will have a new set of social social interactions that we have to figure out. Still, by and large, I think right now, the tone is optimism. As summed up by former Evernote CEO Phil Libbon, who writes, I'm impressed with the Apple intelligence stuff because it isn't super flashy. Apple is leaning into the toothbrush test, low stakes, high utility functionality that people will use multiple times a day. The AI industry

Starting point is 00:17:11 needs more of this. That's sort of my belief going into it too, and I am excited to get my hands on these features in a couple of weeks. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Apple Intelligence - Everything You Need to Know

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