I was traveling on Monday so I wasn’t able to tune into the Apple WWDC 2024 keynote until later in the day. When I did, I skipped through the first hour (with the various OS updates) and went immediately to the discussion of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s name for the application of generative artificial intelligence. I was blown away.
I expected Apple to leverage its unique privacy-protecting access to our data stored securely on our mobile devices – but I didn’t expect the technical elegance that Apple applied to its approach.
Apple’s AI discussion reminded me of a similar feeling I had back when Apple Pay was introduced. As someone who had grown up in the credit card industry working at Visa and being a “techie” who enjoyed following technology developments, I could see the piece parts to a mobile payment solution based on contactless/NFC technology. But I didn’t anticipate the elegance with which Apple applied the technology as well as the creativity it brought to the business aspects of working with the payment card industry to introduce perhaps the best possible mobile payment solution.
Utilizing our private information with locally executed machine learning models makes logical sense. The challenge is how to do so when the compute or memory resources required of the model are beyond the capabilities of the mobile device. That’s where Apple’s invention of Private Cloud Compute provides the answer. And it’s brilliantly architected to provide access to those resources in a privacy protecting fashion.
We don’t yet have any access to these new Apple AI capabilities – and the proof will be in the pudding when we do – but the promise laid out by Apple in Monday’s keynote is very exciting. I’m looking forward to seeing how well Apple executes on its very differentiated approach.