Apple went all in on AI after Craig Federighi tested Github Copilot during his Christmas break

As we await Apple’s tantalizing iOS 18 and other announcements at its WWDC conference next week, the Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile about changing attitudes towards AI inside Apple, and how the company became more comfortable with taking risk.

In particular, it pinpoints the moment when Apple’s approach on AI shifted. The report says SVP Craig Federighi was testing Github’s Copilot code completion features in late 2022, during his Christmas holiday break, and came away impressed. This swiftly led to an internal mandate in the software engineering group to explore and productize as much artificial intelligence functionality as possible.

The Wall Street Journal article also details a bit of the history, and prior tensions between the OS software groups led by Federighi and work being doing by the AI and machine learning division headed by John Giannandrea.

Due to cultural conflicts and indecision on deadlines, the software group and the AI team struggled to integrate their work. The software group would concurrently develop its own image and video recognition tools, as it found it easier to work independently. Giannandrea’s work was stunted by limited access to compute resource.

These organizational frictions appears to be talking about events prior to 2022; it seems Giannandrea and Federighi are now more closely aligned. The Apple executive team also seems more willingly to be closer to the cutting edge and take risks with LLM technology, even if it means sometimes the technology will hallucinate and speak bad answers.

We’ll see the fruits of their work very soon. Apple is expected to infuse AI across its new cycle of operating system releases, set to be officially announced on Monday. Features will include a dramatically upgraded conversational Siri (with more assistant features teased to arrive next year), automatic messages and notification summaries, AI-enhanced quick replies to messages and emails, deeper integration of audio transcription services across the system, upgraded Spotlight search, generative AI photo editing, AI-assisted document generation in Pages, and more.

The company is also expected to unveil rich AI-powered autocomplete for Xcode, bringing back full circle to what allegedly inspired Federighi in the first place to give these efforts serious priority.

One of the big question marks is how Apple will balance the appeal of new features with its privacy standards. The company is expected to unveil a multi-pronged strategy, using a combination of on-device technology, AI running in its cloud in a virtual ‘black box’, and a partnership with OpenAI for a ChatGPT-like chatbot experience. Device compatibility, and whether users will have to pay a subscription to use all or some of these features, remains unclear.