Google, Meta and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push in June. Conventional wisdom suggested that this entry was unfashionably late.
Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time – and has been secretly preparing for this moment for years.
That's part of the message I got when I spoke with key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior vice president for software engineering Craig Federighi is a well-known character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as keynote product launches. Less publicly recognizable is John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who previously led machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke with Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of global marketing. (These conversations helped me prepare for my interview with Tim Cook, which I did the next day.) All executives, including Cook, emphasized that despite AI's hugely disruptive potential, Apple would take a smart approach to this groundbreaking technology . the same clarity and rigor for which the company is known. To paraphrase a song by some musicians who also founded a company called Apple: the Cupertino crew was always waiting for this moment.
“In 2015 we were doing intelligence, like predicting which apps you would use next and helping predict routes on maps,” says Joswiak. “We didn't always talk about it publicly, but we were there and leading the way.”
In 2018, Apple poached Giannandrea from Google, a move that Cook said showed Apple was anticipating the coming AI transformation. The company created a new senior VP position for him, an unusual move for Apple that broke with traditional hiring norms. Upon arrival, Giannandrea was struck by the extent to which Apple was already using advanced AI in some of its most popular products. “Face ID is a feature you use every day, many times a day to unlock your phone, and you have no idea how it really works,” he says. “A lot of deep learning goes on privately on your phone just to make that feature work. But for the user it just disappears.”
Federighi says experimenting with OpenAI's GPT-3 model, released in 2020, fired his imagination. “Things that seemed to be possible along the way suddenly turned out to be eminently possible,” he says. “The next real question was whether it was possible to take advantage of the technology in an Apple way.”
Apple soon had multiple teams working on transformer-based AI models. So when ChatGPT captivated the world in November 2022, Apple didn't have to create an internal task force for AI product development; work was already underway to create features that would 'just disappear' in the same way. “We have ways to bring together functional expertise from across the organization to drive larger product transformations,” says Federighi. “When it came to taking a bigger step in a public way, we brought a lot of those threads together in a way that's just very familiar to us at Apple.”
