GoKawiilApple's AI upgrade has been rumored for a long time, but we got a look Monday at the company's WWDC developers conference, when it announced new Apple Intelligence models it built in a partnership with Google, using that company's Gemini technology.
Apple Intelligence is expected to be built into lots of Apple tools, especially a revamped Siri personal assistant.
"We believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said during the WWDC keynote video presentation.
Some things about Apple's AI aren't really new: The company is leaning particularly heavily toward on-device AI, meaning smaller models built to run on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, rather than in the cloud. It also touted privacy as a cornerstone, noting that Apple doesn't store your data or chat logs with AI.
AI-forward features like its upgraded Siri look largely like more powerful versions of what we've already had for years. A Siri that better understands what you say? That's an upgrade, but hardly revolutionary. Allowing Siri to better understand context by giving it more access to your information means the assistant will be more useful.
What is new? A more powerful on-device model is multimodal, meaning it can understand speech and images, Federighi said. It's also more accurate with dictation and language understanding. A system orchestrator can coordinate across models, while Apple Intelligence can also work across your apps.
Compared to rivals like Google, Apple has been relatively slow on the AI front. Its models and tools haven't become household names like ChatGPT, and it hasn't had viral moments like Anthropic's Claude Code or Google's Nano Banana image generator. But the company has been thoughtful about how it integrates generative AI into its products, gradually rolling out new AI-powered features.
Rather than having AI stand out, Apple appears to want it to disappear into the operating system, said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices at analyst IDC. He said in an email that Apple's goal is for its AI to be trustworthy and invisible to the user.
"The impact could be significant," Jeronimo said. "If Apple makes AI feel natural, private and useful for mainstream users, it will not just strengthen its ecosystem. It could redefine what consumers expect from every device they use."