Three advantages Apple Intelligence has over its AI competitors

The first Apple Intelligence features are launching next week with iOS 18.1, and beta testers have even now gained access to wave two in iOS 18.2. I’ve been using many of these AI features on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac since July. Here are the three advantages Apple Intelligence has over its AI competitors.

#1: Tapping into existing apps and features

Apple is a product company. Its AI competitors have made attempts at being product companies, with wildly varying success.

I’m a big fan of the Apple Intelligence motto, ‘AI for the rest of us,’ because I think it’s true.

Apple Intelligence is baked into the existing apps, features, and devices that millions upon millions of people use every day.

That’s a tough advantage to match.

Here’s a sampling of Apple Intelligence features that demonstrate what I mean:

• everyone receives notifications, and summaries make them better
• we all love emoji, and Genmoji offer a fun twist on the feature
• millions rely on Siri, and it’s finally getting better
• email inboxes can be messy, so priority mail is clutch
• Photos is a key app, and it gets three AI upgrades

Most of Apple’s competitors are trying to create new AI experiences that come with a learning curve of sorts, or a habit curve at least.

Apple Intelligence is built into the existing habits and tools we all rely on. That makes it unique.

#2: Integrating the best of the AI competition

Here’s a key advantage Apple Intelligence has over its competitors: it integrates some of the best of those competitors, and the exchange isn’t mutual.

In iOS 18.2, ChatGPT is baked into Siri and Apple’s own writing tools.

Essentially, one of Apple Intelligence’s premier competitors is giving its full intelligence capabilities to Apple.

You can send your Siri requests directly to ChatGPT, bypassing permission prompts altogether, giving you the best of both company’s AI tools in one package.

Visual intelligence similarly integrates not only ChatGPT, but also Google image search. And there’s a solid chance Google Gemini will come fully baked into Apple Intelligence at some point in the future.

Apple, meanwhile, isn’t giving its Apple Intelligence tech to these other companies.

Obviously there are mutual benefits for each company. But from a user-facing standpoint, only Apple Intelligence offers Apple’s AI plus that of its competitors.

#3: Protecting user privacy

I’m not claiming that other AI companies are bad actors out to trample all over users’ privacy. But Apple Intelligence has privacy tenets that its competitors just don’t.

Apple’s go-to for AI tasks is on-device processing. This means the data used for AI notification summaries, photo object removal, and more will stay on your device. Only someone who can physically access your device will have access to that data.

Then there’s Private Cloud Compute. Apple has a highly detailed research paper outlining everything PCC can do. But essentially, Apple has built an innovative way for AI tasks to run in the cloud with, in theory, just as much privacy protection as local tasks provide.

You can read more about Apple Intelligence and privacy here, and the details of how privacy works with the ChatGPT integration here.

Apple Intelligence advantages: Wrap-up

Much has been said about Apple being ‘behind’ when it comes to AI. Whether that’s true or not, Apple clearly has several key advantages with Apple Intelligence that could help it best the competition before long. We’re just on the cusp of Apple Intelligence’s launch, but the future looks bright.

How do you see Apple Intelligence’s position relative to competitors? Let us know in the comments.

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