Last week during WWDC 2024, Apple presented its modern artificial intelligence system – Apple Intelligence. It will be available on iOS, iPadOS and macOS devices, specifically for iPhone 15 Pro, iPads and M-series Macs. As modern AI features become available in newer products, Apple’s AI chief recently revealed why the modern AI system is narrow to the flagship smartphone and the company’s silicon iPads and Macs Apple.
Emerging Live talk show (spotted by Edge), Apple’s vice president of machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy, John Giannandrea, explained that running enormous language models (LLM) requires a lot of processing power, so the LLM-enabled device must be brisk and powerful enough to handle it.
“Making inferences from large language models is extremely computationally expensive,” Giannandrea explained. “So it’s a combination of device throughput, ANE size, and device performance that allows these models to be created quickly enough to be useful. Theoretically, you could run these models on a very old device. But it would be so slow that it wouldn’t be useful. “
As you listened (or read this), you’d probably think this was Apple’s excuse to sell new devices, and in particular to push for more iPhone 15 Pro sales. However, Apple Chief Marketing Officer Greg Joswiak rejected the idea, saying: “No, not at all. Otherwise, we were smart enough to design the latest iPads and Macs too.”
Apple Intelligence will bring a host of AI-based features to appropriate devices. Some of the features available through Apple Intelligence include writing tools, which will enable the AI to rewrite and correct documents (similar to the features available through Grammarly), Genmoji, which will use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create new emojis based on text descriptions provided by the user and Siri overhaul.
Since its launch last year, the iPhone 15 Pro has placed greater emphasis on making it a “flagship” smartphone. With the A17 Pro system on a chip (SoC), Apple made iPhone 15 Pro the first iPhone to feature Apple Intelligence, the first iPhone to support hardware ray tracing, and the first to receive console-quality ports that work natively on the device .
In our September 10 review of the iPhone 15 Pro, IGN wrote: “There’s more going on with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max than their similar exteriors suggest. Even more professional camera features, plenty of gaming power, and long-awaited freedom from proprietary Lightning cables make this a significant improvement over last year’s phone.
Taylor is a reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.
