AI: Weekly Summary. RTZ #388

Michael Parekh AI: Reset to Zero

9 months ago

4 MIN READ

Apple reinvents AI as ‘Apple Intelligence’ at WWDC 2024: Apple’s reframing of ‘AI’ as ‘Apple Intelligence’ with a well-received WWDC 2024 keynote. With a post WWDC move of over 7% ($300 billion + in market cap), Apple may for now have flipped the narrative that it was ‘behind’ in AI vs its peers. With a thorough rebuild of its ‘machine learning’ and ‘Apple Intelligence’ driven revamp of major Apple apps and services, Apple showed its unique opportunity to introduce practical AI services to its 2 billion plus mainstream users. This would of course be ACROSS all its AI driven Apple Silicon devices, powering all of its 8+ Operating Systems, and third party Developer driven application ecosystems. Apple also clarified its OpenAI GPT-4 Omni+ deal as an ‘Opt-in’ off-ramp to external LLM AI systems as needed (see next item). More here.

OpenAI’s Apple ‘AI’ deal: Bloomberg later clarified that the OpenAI/Apple deal for now is a ‘non-cash’ deal, with OpenAI receiving access and traffic from Apple users on an ‘Opt-in’ basis. OpenAI does offer advanced versions of ChatGPT subscriptions to Apple users, with possible revenue share to Apple on upgrades. The deal also means that OpenAI pays for the inference costs of processing Apple requests, leveraging its Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and other data center relationships. Also, the deal is not exclusive, with similar deals possible with Google’s Gemini service, Anthropic’s Claude, and others. In the meantime, OpenAI continues to see robust growth overall in 2024 and beyond. Apple with this deal also gets to separate any negative ‘hallucination’ and/or other performance issues from its own branded ‘Apple Intelligence’ services. More here.

Elon now targets Apple and OpenAI: Elon Musk reacted negatively to the OpenAI/Apple deal with threats to ban Apple devices off X/Twitter and xAI Grok services. OpenAI’s CTO Murati promptly responded to Musk characterizations of the Apple partnership as ‘creepy spyware’, clarifying the details of the relationship. All this as Elon quietly dropped his case against OpenAI and founder/CEO Sam Altman, around the company’s founding mission. With this deal, Apple now falls in the cross-hairs of Elon Musk’s xAI and broader AI ambitions. More on those plans here.

Microsoft self-recalls Recall for AI Copilot + PC: After making its rollout of its signature AI ‘Recall’ feature on its new Copilot AI PCs, ‘Opt-in’ a week ago, Microsoft is not rolling out the feature at all for now. The feature will now be more extensively tested before being released broadly. The episode again highlights the importance of trust and privacy concerns amongst mainstream users. These moves highlight also the importance of clarity of LLM AI embedding on local devices, as Microsoft and others race to enable AI throughout its operating system, applications and services. Microsoft maintains its strong AI roadmap.

AI on Local Devices more key after Apple moves: Regardless of Microsoft’s short-term local AI feature rollouts, the move towards more Local and ‘On-Prem’ AI features via LLMs and particularly ‘Small AI’ models and chips on local devices, is now made crystal clear post the Apple ‘Apple Intelligence’ announcements this week. These initiatives are both closed and open source on the LLM AI front. This upgrade cycle on local PCs, laptops, smartphones and other devices will possibly alleviate some pressure on the AI compute pressure on AI data centers and power infrastructure. And also provide faster, more private, and far more personal ‘smart agent’/Agentic workflow capabilities to billions of mainstream users worldwide. More here.

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