Name: Apple's Software Chief Craig Federighi Explains AI Delays, Future of Siri and More
Uploaded: 2024-10-23T01:00:00Z
Duration: 11 min 5 s
Description: While others rush AI to market, Apple is taking its time. WSJ’s Joanna Stern talks with the company’s head of software Craig Federighi about the future of Siri, privacy, funny notification summaries and Apple’s slower approach.

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While others rush AI to market, Apple is taking its time. WSJ’s Joanna Stern talks with the company’s head of software Craig Federighi about the future of Siri, privacy, funny notification summaries and Apple’s slower approach. Photo: Annie Zhao

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While others rush AI to market, Apple is taking its time. WSJ’s Joanna Stern talks with the company’s head of software Craig Federighi about the future of Siri, privacy, funny notification summaries and Apple’s slower approach.

Apple's Software Chief Craig Federighi Explains AI Delays, Future of Siri and More

Joanna: Apple is about to go all in on AI, kind of.

This power of Apple Intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before.

Why the delay?

This is a big lift, and we feel like we want to get it right. This is a many year, honestly, even decades-long arc of this technology playing out, and so we're gonna do it responsibly.

Yes, Apple Software Chief, Craig Federighi, is leading our iPhones into the future of generative AI, cautiously, that is. In late October, when iOS 18.1 hits, the company will begin releasing the first of many promised Apple Intelligence tools that work only on the iPhone 15 Pros and iPhone 16 models. They're coming to Macs and iPads, too. But while other companies are rushing AI to market, Apple's behind, or at least taking its time, focusing on privacy and doing it all responsibly. I sat down with Federighi to get a better look inside Apple's AI strategy. Apple's late to generative AI. It's almost two years since ChatGPT launched, but Apple's never really been first to a new tech product category. What is new with Apple Intelligence?

We looked at this as not how do we build another chat bot, and bolted on the side of our existing experience, but how do we create something that's deeply integrated? Most importantly, we view it as as personal. The bulk of the focus in chat bots historically have been around products that don't know you at all. They're powerful and interesting and they have some fantastic uses, but I think the real power of intelligence, as it pertains to how our customers would use our products, are intelligence that understands you. And with that comes a great deal of responsibility because to do that, that intelligence has to traffic in information that you've stored on your device. And that means privacy is a tremendously important consideration.

ChatGPT and other large language models sends every prompt to their powerful cloud servers. Apple, however, is prioritizing privacy by running AI models directly on the device only when more processing power is needed. Does it tap its encrypted cloud-based models? Apple calls it Private Cloud Compute. Explain to me how you're deciding what should be done locally and what should be going to Private Cloud Compute.

Right, right. There are some cases, let's take a long-form summarization. An on-device model could try to do that, but would probably not provide the best result. If we run that instead in the cloud, it can both be faster in that case and also provide a higher quality result. But the important part is that message that you asked to be summarized was encrypted to a trusted device in the cloud, that then performed artificial intelligence processing on it to return you the result and never recorded anything about that data, that email. Apple had no access to that email, no one else did. It's gone.

Why doesn't all cloud computing work this way?

It's hard to build, for one. I think it also runs counter to many companies' entire philosophy about how they see data. For many companies, I think their answer is, "Send us all your data, store all your data with us in a way that we can read and process." And so when you ask our cloud a question, we already have your data, and we're going to use whatever processing we've done on it to answer your question. But as a user, you're not quite sure. Is that all they're gonna do? And maybe they aren't doing anything with it right now, but they have my data. What are they gonna do with it in the future? I don't know.

But when it comes to AI plus Apple, there's long been one promise. Siri was introduced 13 years ago.

About that.

Which is kind of hard to believe.

Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

Is Siri gonna finally live up to that promise?

The journey never ends. Siri processes today, I think it's something like 1.5 billion requests every day. And Siri gets things done for me. With Siri, I'm opening my garage, I'm closing my garage, I'm turning on my lights, all kinds of things. I'm sending messages, I'm setting timers. There are all kinds of things that I and hundreds of millions of other customers are doing every day. So, Siri does a lot of that. But as humans, our expectations for what it means to use our voice to communicate and ask for things is almost unbounded. The great news is Siri's useful today, has been useful in many ways for many people for years, but it's getting more and more useful because this power of Apple Intelligence and large language models means that Siri can understand you better than ever before and is gonna have access to more tools on your device to do more for you than ever before. But is there gonna be one moment where we say, "Siri is now my sentient pal," that... No, it's gonna continue to get better and better.

Joanna: Apple's promised that Siri will be able to answer deeper questions based on your Calendar, Messages, and more.

Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?

Siri: You met Zac Wingate at Cafe Grenel.

It'll also incorporate ChatGPT to answer certain questions, but none of that is out yet. Where is this smarter Siri?

Coming. It's coming in waves. So with Apple Intelligence, we've created this foundation that understands personal context and the ability to take action. Siri is adopting that in stages and will benefit in stages over the coming year.

Recently, OpenAI released Advanced Voice Mode. How does Craig Federighi do his hair?

AI: Craig Federighi's hair is a full silver mane with a naturally voluminous look, typically brushed back professionally...

Joanna: And then their Siri.

Siri: I found this on the web.

Is that kind of large language model integration on the horizon for Siri?

Well, I'm not announcing anything here today, but I'll say that I think those things are great. It's just showing how quickly this field is moving and what has all of us so excited about the potential for this kind of technology. The properties of something like that OpenAI Advanced Voice Mode and Siri are quite different. That OpenAI mode is great. If you want to go ask a question about quantum mechanics, and have it write a poem for you about it, and then answer another question and so forth. It's not gonna open your garage. It's not gonna help you send a text message. There are many, many useful things Siri does for you every day, does them quickly, does them locally on your device. There's a spectrum here. There's a trade off across capabilities. Will these worlds converge? Of course, that's where the direction is going.

One of the tools that is in Apple Intelligence now, notification summaries. I get too many notifications every day about my garage door opening and closing. And then it summarizes it, and then it will tell me like the last one, it was closed.

Craig: Yes.

It's very helpful. I mean, all this technology, and we can now solve garage door problems.

We've done it.

Joanna: But some have found it offputting, and yes, humorous. When AI summarizes a personal message, say about a breakup or a fight.

You're right, there's a variety of kinds of communication that can come through. Sometimes, those are sensitive matters. And there are a few cases where we would say the kinds of cases, where today we would say, "We're not trained on that. We're not gonna deal with it." Where we actually won't automatically summarize the notification because we're saying like, "We're probably not gonna do a good job with this." Other cases, though, where we go ahead and... I mean, there was a story recently about someone, I guess, who got broken up with-

Yes. Yes.

And it gave a very sort of clinical description of what had happened. I don't think it did a horrible job summarizing it, but I mean, no one wants to get broken up with on a text anyway, so it was not gonna be a winning moment no matter what.

Another one of the AI tools that is ready now, Cleanup. I wanna see if we can take a quick photo together.

Okay.

Select Cleanup, and you can tap to remove items you don't like in the shot, and AI will fill in the rest. I can edit the mic out, I can edit that water bottle out. Some companies have chosen to go in a pretty extreme route, being able to generate new parts of the photos.

We got a lion here sitting in front of us, yeah.

I was maybe thinking an explosion, and then 5:00 news, here we come. You've taken a different approach.

Yeah.

Why?

Yeah, I would say, even the ability to remove that water bottle is one that there were a lot of debates internally. Do we wanna make it easy to remove that water bottle or that mic? 'Cause that water bottle was there when you took the photo. The demand for people to want to clean up what seemed like extraneous details to the photo that don't fundamentally change the meaning of what happened has been very, very high. And so, we were willing to take that small step. But we are concerned that there's a great history to photography and how people view photographic content as something they can rely on is indicative of reality. And our products, our phones are used a lot, and it's important to us that we help purvey accurate information, not fantasy. We make sure even if you do remove a little detail of a photo, we update the metadata on the photo so someone can go back and check that this was an altered photo.

Right now, Apple Intelligence is limited. Compared to what you showed in June-

Sure.

A lot of those features are not there.

Right.

Why the delay?

Yeah, we knew at the time when we started out this year that the breadth of our vision for Apple Intelligence and the road to deliver it all was not all of it landing in September with a bang kind of moment. And we communicated that from the moment we introduced it at WWDC. This is a big lift and we feel like we want to get it right. You could put something out there and have it be sort of a mess, or Apple's point of view is more like, "Let's try to get each piece right and release it when it's ready, right?" When we think about the road for any of our features, but certainly Apple Intelligence, this isn't a one-and-done kind of situation. This is a many year, honestly, even decades-long arc of this technology playing out, and so we're gonna do it responsibly.

But on the other hand, you also are marketing this. You launched the iPhone, you marketed this.

Which makes sense. We want customers who are excited about what's to come to know, "Okay, if I buy this phone, is this the right phone that's gonna do those things?" And yes it is, and so I think we're communicating that, while trying to make sure everyone understands that this is gonna be coming over the coming months, not all today.

But what is coming soon? Best way to clean your AirPods.

We're putting out a guide for doing that soon. That'll be much better than my current technique, which is too unsanitary to mention.

Is that a scoop there that I have-

I think... I'm afraid you might have a scoop.

Scoop on how to clean your AirPods?

Yeah.

Apple's Software Chief Explains AI Delays, Future of Siri and More

Everything is now a tech thing. In creative and humorous videos, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern explains and reviews the products, services and trends that are changing our world.

Apple's Software Chief Explains AI Delays, Future of Siri and More

Tech Things With Joanna Stern

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