Confirming rumours circulating since April, Apple has unveiled Apple Intelligence, a groundbreaking personal intelligence system set to redefine user experiences on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

However, unlike many well-known rivals, Apple Intelligence places much of the workload back on the user’s device in an effort to maximise trust. Ever privacy-focused, Apple’s innovative system integrates powerful generative models with personal context, providing highly relevant and useful intelligence without such a heavy reliance on data sharing with the cloud.

Apple Intelligence is anticipated to be seamlessly embedded into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, leveraging the power of Apple silicon to enhance language and image processing. It also introduces Private Cloud Compute, which dynamically balances computational loads between on-device processing and secure, server-based models, ensuring unmatched privacy and security.

– Advanced Writing Tools: Users can now rewrite, proofread, and summarize text across apps like Mail, Notes, and Pages. Features like Rewrite, Proofread, and Summarize help users craft perfect messages, emails, and documents with ease.
– Enhanced Mail and Notifications: Priority Messages and Smart Reply in Mail, along with Priority Notifications, keep users on top of important communications.
– Image Playground: This feature allows users to create fun and engaging images within apps like Messages, Notes, and more, using styles such as Animation, Illustration, or Sketch.
– Genmoji Creation: Users can generate unique Genmoji by typing descriptions, adding a new layer of expression to their communications.
– Enhanced Photos and Memorie: Improved search capabilities and the new Clean Up tool make managing photos and videos easier. Users can create personalized Memories with suggested music from Apple Music.

Apple’s longstanding Siri virtual assistant is to become more natural and contextually aware, now supports richer language understanding, on-device support, and new actions across Apple and third-party apps. ChatGPT is also being integrated into the Apple ecosystem, allowing users to leverage its expertise directly within iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. Privacy protections ensure that user data remains secure, with ChatGPT’s capabilities enhancing Apple’s system-wide Writing Tools and image generation features.

Apple Intelligence will be available in beta with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this Autumn in U.S. English, expanding to more languages and features over the next year. It will be supported on devices with M1 chipsets, and newer.

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Rumours of an Apple AI product have spread rapidly following release of four small language models to developers.

Open source and free to use, ‘Open-source Efficient Language Models’ or ‘OpenELM’ are a set of efficient text generation models available for Apple developers to begin experimenting. So far, the low-key release online without major fanfare has prompted only a handful of downloads.

Unlike Microsoft, Google and Facebook, many believe Apple are working on ‘on-device AI’ models that would not involve sharing large quantities of data with cloud-based platforms – a major step for the future of more privacy-focused AI. With a 3-billion parameter option available, it’s possible Apple may be quietly preparing something every bit as capable as Google Gemini, albeit behind the scenes.

In February, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook revealed that AI features are planned for future mac releases, but did not give further details, and has so far not released general purpose models for commercial use.

This has led to intense speculation that Apple are considering heading in a slightly different direction to the rest of big tech – perhaps keen to differentiate themselves in key areas.

However, Apple have already launched machine learning frameworks that hint at AI models running on M-series chipsets, an image editing model, and a UI-based model that would allow an AI to navigate a smartphone or tablet.

All this leaves Apple fans waiting until at least the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, or other annual announcements during September, to see what’s waiting behind the scenes.

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Microsoft Copilot will release to users worldwide from 26th September 2023.

The flagship natural language AI tool that previewed back in March of this year brings ChatGPT functions to a whole range of Microsoft productions including your favourite Microsoft 365 apps, Azure, Bing and into Windows itself.

At a colourful launch event in New York, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella debuted the official release of Copilot and demonstrated ways AI can revolutionise everyday tasks – whether that be writing emails, interpreting or generating images, transcribing handwriting into maths, or intelligently answering questions.

Copilot assistance aims to make Microsoft 365 apps including Teams, Word, Excel and more increasingly powerful – with users able to simply request complex data handling tasks rather than manipulating the data manually themselves. For more creative work, Copilot can also generate visual results within longstanding Microsoft apps like Paint.

This presents some fascinating opportunities for companies using the Microsoft 365 suite – common tasks such as ‘Re-write this email more professionally’, ‘Summarise this meeting’ and ‘Make me a set of PowerPoint slides based on this document’ would all be achievable within a few seconds.

Features from the Bing public preview have also made it into the release version – with users able to choose ‘More Creative’ ‘More Balanced’ and ‘More Precise’ language options to give the AI’s output a different tone, and draw on the wider web-based dataset that is previously unknown to the user.

For example, in another impressive example of Copilot using web and user data intelligently, an American user uploads a photo of a UK plug adaptor and asks ‘Will this work in London?’ Copilot is not only able to check based on an understanding of the image, but understands what the user means by ‘work’ and is able to confirm that the plug is the correct choice.

Some interesting guard rails have also been rolled in – Microsoft have previously stated that a firebreak exists between user data and the web dataset used to train the AI, but Copilot can use both to respond to prompts. Images created using the next version of DALL.E will also be crytographically signed as ‘Created by AI’, effectively signing the content as AI-generated.

Copilot will soon begin appearing to most users on the Windows toolbar – coinciding with the new upgrade of Windows 11 that is due on 26th September. Within Microsoft 365, Copilot Chat functions will begin appearing in app updates for Enterprise licence customers from 1st November 2023.

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Microsoft have released an early preview of AI-powered search integrated into Bing.

Available via Bing.com, the new tool is the first sign of Microsoft’s multibillion dollar investment in artificial intelligence company OpenAI – and uses the same technology first seen in the open preview of ChatGPT 3.5. AI ‘Copilot’ now not only delivers search results, but can generates longer text-based responses to questions, and form responses to more abstract queries that don’t have an obvious web destination.

The move comes just 48 hours after Google’s rival AI chatbot, Bard, generated a factual error in a promotional video, wiping an estimated $100bn off Google’s total market value.

ChatGPT’s ‘chat prompt’ format also allows the user to respond to Bing in turn, and continue the conversation to get a refined response without having to restart their search from scratch.

In each case Bing’s responses contain automatically embedded links that allow the user to follow-up the origins of each recommendation, even where the citations originate from a wide range of sources.

A new sidebar in Microsoft Edge takes this one step further by allowing Bing to ‘read’ each web page you visit, and intelligently re-format the results – picking out key details or presenting data back in a new format.

Sample queries and a waiting list are already available via Bing.com, but the preview is expected to be made widely available to millions of end users within weeks as Microsoft bets big on the future of search.

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