Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, my mind flashes to a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”
Today I am returning to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The tech world is at an inflection point. The mightiest companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.
Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of first-movers and, with a strong grasp of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies relatable and even sexy. Think back to how the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their tunes.
Cook also contends that Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution all along. As far back as 2018, he poached Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. Then he pulled the plug on a long-running smart-car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and marshaled the company’s machine-learning talent to build AI into its software products.
In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)
Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI—at least according to Apple—is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools, which are rolling out through software updates on the latest iPhone and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself—you don’t send your data to the cloud. The computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing I’m reminded of on my return to the Ring is how skillful Cook is at touting the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips, which unleashed innovations that boost Apple phones and laptops. (And not mentioning decisions that didn’t pan out, like that multibillion-dollar smart-car project.) When he strolls into the conference room where we’re meeting, I know Cook will be meticulously cordial, displaying manners honed during his Alabama boyhood, while calmly hyperbolizing the virtues of Apple’s products and fending off criticisms of his very powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results, which came in after our talk, he chose to keep his views to himself.) Steve Jobs would come at a journalist like the rain in Buenaventura, aggressively pitching his message; Cook envelopes his interlocutors in a gentle mist and confides awed assessments of his company’s efforts.
The ultimate assessments, of course, will come from users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it is this: Should this first iteration of AI fall short, an unrepentant Cook will show up at a future pretaped keynote hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat.
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