Apple is about to go all in on AI. The power of Apple intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before. Why the delay? This is a big lift, and we feel like we want to get it right. This is a many-year, honestly even decades-long arc of this technology playing out, and so we're going to do it responsibly. Yes, Apple software chief Craig Federighi is leading our iPhones into the future of generative AI cautiously. That is, in late October when iOS 18.1 hits, the company will begin releasing the first of many promised Apple intelligence tools that work only on the iPhone 15 Pros and iPhone 16 models. They're coming to Macs and iPads too, but while other companies are rushing AI to market, Apple's behind or at least taking its time, focusing on privacy and doing it all responsibly. I sat down with Federighi to get a better look inside Apple's AI strategy. Apple's late to generative AI; it's almost 2 years since ChatGPT.

launched, but Apple's never really been first to a new tech product category. What is new with Apple intelligence? We looked at this as not how do we build another chatbot and bolt it on the side of our existing experience, but how do we create something that's deeply integrated. Most importantly, we view it as personal. The bulk of the focus in chatbots historically has been around products that don't know you at all. They're powerful and interesting, and they have some fantastic uses, but I think the real power of intelligence as it pertains to how our customers would use our products is intelligence that understands you. And with that comes a great deal of responsibility because to do that, that intelligence has to traffic in information that you've stored on your device, and that means privacy is a tremendously important consideration. Chat GPT and other large language models send every prompt to their powerful Cloud servers. Apple, however, is prioritizing privacy by running AI models directly on the device only when

more processing power is needed. Does it tap its encrypted cloud-based models? Apple calls it private Cloud compute. Explain to me how you're deciding what should be done locally and what should be going to private Cloud compute. Right, there are some cases, let's take a long-form summarization. An on-device model could try to do that but would probably not provide the best result. If we run that in the cloud, it can both be faster in that case, and also provide a higher quality result. But the important part is that message that you asked to be summarized was encrypted to a trusted device in the cloud that then performed artificial intelligence processing on it to return you the result and never recorded anything about that data, that email. Apple had no access to that email, no one else did, it's gone. Why doesn't all cloud computing work this way? It's hard to build for one. I think it also runs counter to many companies' entire philosophy about how they see data. For many companies, I think their answer is

send us all your data. Store all your data with us in a way that we can read and process. And so when you ask our Cloud a question, we already have your data and we're going to use whatever processing we've done on it to answer your question. But as a user, you're not quite sure, is that all they're going to do? And maybe they aren't doing anything with it right now, but they have my data. What are they going to do with it in the future? I don't know. But when it comes to AI plus Apple, there's long been one promise. Siri was introduced 13 years ago, which is kind of hard to believe. Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. Is Siri gonna finally live up to that promise? The journey never ends. You know Siri processed today, I think it's something like 1.5 billion requests every day. And Siri gets things done for me. With Siri, I'm opening my garage, I'm closing my garage, I'm turning on my lights, all kinds of

things I'm sending messages. I'm setting timers. There are all kinds of things that I and hundreds of millions of other customers are doing every day. So Siri does a lot of that, but as humans, our expectations for what it means to use our voice to communicate and ask for things is almost unbounded. The great news is Siri's useful today, has been useful in many ways for many people for years, but it's getting more and more useful because this power of Apple intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before and is going to have access to more tools on your device to do more for you than ever before. But is there going to be one moment where we say Siri is now my, you know, sentient pal? You know that? No, it's, you know, it's going to continue to get better and better. Apple has promised that Siri will be able to answer deeper questions based on your calendar, messages, and more. Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a

meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenell. You met Zack Wingate at Cafe Grenell. It will also incorporate Chat GPT to answer certain questions, but none of that is out yet. Where is this smarter Siri coming? It's coming in waves with Apple intelligence. We've created this foundation that understands personal context and the ability to take action. Siri is adopting that in stages and will benefit in stages over the coming year. Recently, OpenAI released advanced voice mode. How does Craig Federighi do his hair? Craig Federighi's hair is a full silver mane with a naturally voluminous look, typically brushed back. And then there, Siri, I found this on the web. Is that kind of large language model integration on the horizon for Siri? Well, I'm not announcing anything here today, but I'll say that I think those things are great. It's just showing how quickly this field is moving and what has all of us so excited about the potential for this kind of technology, the properties of something.

like that, uh, OpenAI voice advanced voice mode and Siri are quite different. That OpenAI mode is great if you want to go ask a question about quantum mechanics and have it write a poem for you about it, and then answer another question, and so forth. It's not going to open your garage. It's not going to help you send a text message. There are many, many useful things Siri does for you every day, does them quickly, does them locally on your device. There's a spectrum here. There's a trade-off across capabilities. Will these worlds converge? Uh, of course, that's where the direction is going. One of the tools that is in Apple Intelligence now, notification summaries. I get too many notifications every day about my garage door opening and closing, and then it not. It summarizes it, and then it will tell me, like the last one, it was closed. Yes, it's very helpful. I mean, all this technology, and we can now solve garage door problems. We've done it, but some have found it off-putting, and yes.

humorous when AI summarizes a personal message, say about a breakup or a fight. You're right, there's a variety of kinds of communication that can come through. Sometimes those are sensitive matters, and there are a few cases where we would say the kinds of cases where today we would say we're not trained on that, we're not going to deal with it, where we actually won't automatically summarize the notification because we're saying like we're probably not going to do a good job with this. Other cases though where we go ahead and I mean there was a story recently about someone I guess who got broken up with and it gave a very sort of clinical description of what had happened. I don't think it did a horrible job summarizing it, but I mean no one wants to get broken up with on a text anyway, so it was not going to be a winning moment no matter what. Another one of the AI tools that is ready now, cleanup. I want to see if we

can take a quick photo together. Okay, select cleanup, and you can tap to remove items you don't like in the shot, and AI will fill in the rest. I can edit the mic out. I can edit that water bottle out. Some companies have chosen to go in a pretty extreme route, being able to generate new parts of the photos, a lion here sitting in front of us. I was, it was maybe thinking an explosion, you know, and then 5:00 news, here we come. You've taken a different approach. Yeah, why? Yeah, I would say even the ability to remove that water bottle is one that there were a lot of debates internally. Do we want to make it easy to remove that water bottle or that mic? Because that water bottle was there when you took the photo. The demand for people to want to clean up what seem like extraneous details to the photo that don't fundamentally change the meaning of what happened has been very, very high. And so, you know, we were willing to take that small step, but we are concerned that there's a great

history to photography and how people view photographic content as something they can rely on is indicative of reality and our products. Our phones are used a lot, and it's important to us that we help purvey accurate information, not fantasy. We make sure even if you do remove a little detail of a photo, we update the metadata on the photo so someone can go back and check that this was an altered photo. Right now, Apple intelligence is limited compared to what you showed in June. A lot of those features are not there, right? Why the delay? Yeah, we knew at the time when we started out this year that the breadth of our vision for Apple intelligence and the road to deliver it all was not a all of it landing in September with a bang kind of moment, and we communicated that from the moment we introduced it at WWDC. This is a big lift, and we feel like we want to get it right. You know, you could put something out there and have it be sort of a mess, or you know, Apple's point of view is

more like let's try to get each piece right and release it when it's ready, right? When we think about the road for any of our features, but certainly Apple intelligence, this isn't a one-and-done kind of situation. This is a many-year, honestly even decades-long arc of this technology playing out. And so, we're going to do it responsibly. But on the other hand, you also are marketing this. You launched the iPhone, you marketed this, which makes sense. We want customers who are excited about what's to come to know, Okay, if I buy this phone, is this the right phone that's going to do those things? And yes, it is. And so, I think we're communicating that while trying to make sure everyone understands that this is going to be coming over the coming months, not all today, but what is coming soon. Best way to clean your AirPods. We're putting out a guide for doing that soon. That'll be much better than my current technique, which is too unsanitary to mention. Is that a

scoop there, and I have. I think I'm afraid you might have a scoop, scoop on how to clean your. Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this, click here to watch my full interview with Apple's Craig Federighi on wsj.com.

Apple’s Craig Federighi Explains Apple Intelligence Delays, Siri’s Future and More | WSJ

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