Apple’s new artificial intelligence is on the horizon, with the first features due with the release of iOS 18 on September 16, and the rest expected to roll out incrementally over the following year. Apple’s AI-powered features are collectively called Apple Intelligence, and they promise to super-power Siri, generate images from text prompts, rewrite your emails in different tones, summarize web pages or emails, and much more. But these features rely on the neural engine hardware built into the phone, and only the very latest generations of iPhone will sport neural engines powerful enough to unlock Apple Intelligence. So, is it worth an upgrade?
What Is Apple Intelligence?
The name is a little hard to pin down. Unlike its competitor, ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence is not to be found in one specific app or website, and it’s not even something you can call up to ask a question. Instead, it is a suite of different capabilities that all rely on the same underlying AI technology and infrastructure.
The technology of Apple Intelligence allows diverse features. With Apple Intelligence, you can select some text and have it summarized or rewritten in a different style or tone of voice, or you can generate a new unique emoji based on a text prompt. Possibly its most exciting feature is just a more powerful Siri, better able to understand your questions and give context-aware answers. Apple Intelligence can show you summaries of your emails and text messages instead of just the first few words, it can transcribe phone calls, it can let your phone recognize what’s going on in a photo so you can search for photos of specific kinds of events, and more. All of these features are Apple Intelligence, even though they are found in different apps, using different menus and interfaces.
The guts of Apple Intelligence are the neural engine hardware built into Apple’s processors, which can analyze and generate text and images. But when a task requires more processing power than your device can provide, Apple Intelligence will reach out to Apple’s custom-built servers, engineered to do AI tasks in the cloud while preserving your privacy, which will process the request without retaining any data.
Only the Most Recent Phones
Apple Intelligence features will be available on any Mac or iPad running an M-series processor; but if you want them on an iPhone, you need an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or one of the brand new series 16 iPhones. Any of the series 16 models will do, even the base models. Apple changed up its normal hardware upgrade process, giving the base model iPhone the same generation of Bionic processor, the A18 Bionic, as the Pro models (the 16 Pros have the A18 Pro chip), presumably just to make sure it could keep up with Apple Intelligence.
Privacy, Security & Other Concerns
Apple Intelligence is a similar technology to ChatGPT, Google Bard, and other AI systems that have taken off in the past two years. Collectively, these are called generative artificial intelligence, or large language model artificial intelligence. These systems consist of a program, called a model, that is “trained” by feeding it very large databases of human language and images, then asking the model to generate outputs that look like the human language and images in the database. It tries and fails, compares its results with what’s in the database, adjusts its algorithms, and then tries again until it can consistently produce results that look to it like they belong in the database.
Once it’s been trained, a model is able to summarize the content of an image or go the other way and turn a summary of an image into an image. It can rewrite or recontextualize text, and answer questions by amalgamating an averaged answer based on the contents of the database.
While AI systems are powerful, privacy and security experts have raised numerous concerns regarding their privacy, their reliability, their ethics, and their outsized environmental impact, even as artists, writers, and educators are worried about the acceleration of plagiarism and the overall social impact, and social scientists raise alarms about their systematic discrimination.
These concerns are serious and substantial. In our estimation, based on the announcements and previews, Apple seems to be attempting to address the concerns in different ways. The company addresses privacy and security concerns with Private Cloud Compute, where the servers that process your AI requests are built by Apple, cryptographically certified at the hardware level, and retain no knowledge of past requests. They address the energy costs by claiming that the data centers for Private Cloud Compute will be run on 100% renewable energy. In what may be an attempt to address the plagiarism concerns, Apple Intelligence doesn’t generate text; it can only rewrite text you have already written. Similarly, regards to the plagiarism concerns of artists, the images it generates from text prompts all seem to match a specific style easily identified as a product of Apple Intelligence.
But many concerns remain unanswered, such as where Apple acquired its training data, how it retains the on-device context that Siri uses to understand your questions, and how to train students to detect when Siri provides hallucinated answers to their questions. Though Apple Intelligence does not write your emails, it does generate summaries, and those summaries may not always cite their references or supply credit where it is due.
Should You Buy a New Phone Just for Apple Intelligence?
Apple Intelligence includes many exciting features implemented in ways engineered to address many, though not all, of the concerns that plague AI. We’re excited to try out Apple’s Intelligence! If there is one AI to try, it is probably this one. But the set of features rolled into Apple Intelligence will not all arrive with the release of the iPhone 16 series, or even soon. Only a few features will be available at launch time in mid-September 2024, and the rest will roll out with iterative updates over the course of the year, so they may not be out until closer to the release of the iPhone 17 series next year.
If Apple Intelligence is the only reason you are thinking about upgrading, then you may as well wait. Waiting until next year will give Apple Intelligence time to shake out the bugs, and to roll out piece by piece. If you wait until the iPhone 17 series next year, you’ll get all the updates at once.
