(Bloomberg Opinion) — If you read Bloomberg Businessweek’s deep dive into Apple’s blundering work with artificial intelligence, a consistent theme is the lack of any clear idea within the company as to what good AI on an Apple device should actually do. On Tuesday, with the company looking no closer to have come up with the answer internally, we learned it would soon open things up so others could have a go at figuring it out.
“The iPhone maker is working on a software development kit and related frameworks that will let outsiders build AI features based on the large language models that the company uses for Apple Intelligence,” Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman reported, citing people with knowledge of the company’s planned announcements at its coming and critically important Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9.
I say critically important because it’s Apple’s best chance to reset the negative energy around its AI work to date. At last year’s event, executives announced a great sweep of features that, 12 months on, still aren’t available on devices — despite glitzy (and carefully worded) advertising campaigns suggesting they would be. What has launched, such as the error-prone news summaries, has been disappointing, and the personal assistant Siri continues to embarrass the Apple brand. Apple’s decision to team up with OpenAI to help it deal with more complex AI tasks was an acknowledgment of its position as a laggard. The news on Tuesday might be seen as another.
Then again, as I’ve said before, Apple has the luxury of time to get things right with AI. The iPhone is still the dominant smartphone, and its user lock-in has not yet shown any signs of being weakened by the appeal of AI features on competing devices.
But that time isn’t limitless, and opening up its foundational AI models for outsiders to build with is an indication of how desperately Apple wants to solve its problems sooner rather than later. Gurman writes:
The new approach would let developers integrate the underlying technology into specific features or across their full apps. To start, Apple will open up its smaller models that run on its devices, rather than the more powerful cloud-based AI models that require servers.
It gives developers the chance to come up with better applications for Apple’s AI than the company has been able to manage itself. Using Apple’s on-device AI models gives developers a chance to layer AI into their apps without needing to send information to the cloud or expect users to put up with lag times as the AI “thinks.”
In many ways, it is a repeat of the strategy that made the iPhone a breakthrough device in the first place. Apple introduced a software developers kit in time for the device’s second generation despite Steve Jobs not initially being sold on the idea. The iPhone’s place in history would have surely been vastly different had he not been brought around. According to Businessweek, there had been a similar reluctance to mount a full-throated effort to build AI, with senior Apple figures unconvinced as to its true utility — which, in fairness to them, is still an open question. Regardless, opening up the challenge to third-party developers increases the likelihood that the iPhone will get a killer AI application before its competitors.
Now the question is how close Apple will let developers get to the real nuts and bolts of its AI and the user data that it harnesses. Historically, the company has been notoriously protective — some argue anticompetitive — around how much access to give third parties to its core functionality, preferring to keep some exclusively for its own products and services. It’s why Apple has allowed only tap-to-pay cards in a user’s Apple Wallet rather than a third-party bank app. It’s also why the Apple Watch works better with iPhone than smartwatches from other brands. Apple says this is all in the name of privacy and a superior user experience.
Its stubbornness in the matter has been extraordinarily lucrative, allowing it to levy a 30% tax on sales made through apps downloaded on iOS devices. Over the years, this fee has been seen as unjustifiable and exploitative. Developers have grown weary of Apple’s values, a problem for the company as it looks to that same developer community in the hope they can do for Apple’s AI what they did for the iPhone.
Persuading them to build features with Apple AI, setting up what could be a new decades-long generation of lock-in, will require a carefully and sincerely extended olive branch. As I pleaded in a column not so long ago, perhaps Apple’s best chance of succeeding at AI means adopting the spirit of that famous chant from a onetime rival. Do I expect Tim Cook to cross the WWDC stage shouting “Developers! Developers! Developers!”? No, I do not. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News.
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