The rise of the highly personal, private, context-aware AI
Apple playing the long game with Apple Intelligence
A QUICK HISTORY
Over the past 18 months, we have seen some incredible innovations in AI: large language models, image generation, music generation, text-to-video, and more. In the past few months, we have seen the launch of ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro with 2M tokens, Midjourney V6, Perplexity, and so much more.
I have integrated these tools into my daily workflow and dramatically overhauled my productivity. Yet the technologies I rely on the most every day to run all these tools—my iPhone and MacBook Pro—have seemed to become less relevant.
THE VISION: HIGHLY PERSONAL, PRIVATE, CONTEXT-AWARE AI
As I’ve considered where this technology is going over the next 12-36 months, I think we’ll see significant innovation in what I call ‘highly personal, private, and context-aware AI.’ I’ve been looking for that virtual AI assistant (for lack of a better phrase) that truly knows me. It knows how I write emails. It knows how I like to respond to messages across different platforms and in various styles depending on the audience.
It knows the relationships I have with the multiple contacts in my contact list. It understands my family calendar, work schedule, priorities, travel preferences, food preferences, etc. It has perfect recall of everything I’ve done, whether it’s on my phone or my laptop. It has context and transcripts of every meeting I’ve been in and every interaction I’ve had. In some ways, it’s the perfect digital twin of me.
Earlier in the year, I got access to one tool that I thought would help me on this journey – Augment AI. It’s pitched as a personal assistant that remembers everything. Microsoft recently released something similar with their ill-fated (and meme-named) Recall service. After using Augment for a few weeks, I had second thoughts about using this and shut it down. I truly wanted a service that provided perfect memory (recall) for me – but I did not want all of this data sitting in the cloud – regardless of how encrypted and secure it might be.
While you can turn off certain things – everything I typed and looked at would be sitting out there, and some of it is being fed into AIs where I don’t know how my data is really being used. Augment says they don’t capture passwords or incognito browser sessions, and I know you can tell it not to capture certain apps (say signal) – but it’s still a massive leap of faith and, in the end, something I decided I was not ready for with them.
I still really wanted my highly personal, private, and context-aware AI, though – my perfect digital twin. Enter Apple and their Apple Intelligence announcement at WWDC back on June 10th, 2024.
ENTER APPLE
While they didn’t announce all of the things I’m looking for (yet), they are without a doubt the furthest along now in having the building blocks to achieve this—the right kind of privacy and security model and an on-edge (device) AI model structure that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Apple has been laser-focused on privacy and security for years, and their business model is built on selling devices – not monetizing me.
“We think AI’s role is not to replace our users but to empower them,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. For many people, their next iPhones, iPads, or Macs will be their first real exposure to AI – and if history is any guide, it will be seamless and work like magic. People might have tested out an early (and usually free) version of ChatGPT or had Gemini create an image – but Apple will embed AI throughout the user experience to make everything better and do things people didn’t even realize were possible.
Let’s start with Siri – the assistant everyone loves to hate because it’s been so bad over the years. The functionality has been so limited that it’s almost useless except to set a timer or respond to a text message while driving. The new version of Siri will have access to all of my info, can see what’s on my screen and should be able to work with and likely control different applications on my device. In many ways, it’s fulfilling the promise of the Rabbit R1 product – but actually working. You will be able to give it very complex instructions (“fill out this PDF with my contact information, create a calendar entry next Tuesday at 6PM for the next guys night out, and send my GNO group on signal a notice and calendar invite.”)
You will also be able to access ChatGPT through Siri (and other models in the future) on a permission-based model to access information from the world without giving up your privacy or security. The on-device models powering Siri should allow conversations and interactions to happen completely naturally.
Apple announced many other AI-based capabilities as well – writing tools (summarization, rewriting and proofing notes, suggested responses and tone), voice transcription, image generation, prioritized notifications, and more. Apple’s multi-tiered approach to AI: on-device specialized AI models (adapters), larger specialized server models running on Apple silicon in Apple’s private cloud compute, and the ability to access third-party large language models like ChatGPT provides the best of all worlds – speed, security, flexibility, and best of breed content. It optimizes the experience at all levels.
For the last year, it felt like Apple was missing in action regarding AI. Every day, it felt like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and hundreds of other companies were leapfrogging Apple and that, at best, they would be an also-ran. WWDC showed us that nothing could be further from the truth. Apple presented the most comprehensive AI strategy that will bring a powerful, secure, and highly personalized experience to hundreds of millions of customers around the globe. I’m excited to see where they take this.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I spend hours each day working with different AI tools, researching new use cases, writing, and presenting. Over the past year, I’ve provided AI overviews and customized AI training sessions to over 200 organizations across the technology, legal, fintech, venture capital, private equity, and higher education industries. I finally took some time to update my website (https://www.revopz.net) – check it out if you get a minute.
As always, I am ending with a picture of Ollie. He is gone but will never be forgotten.
Best,
Steve
steve@revopz.net
