CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 05:
Apple CEO Tim Cook stands next to the new Apple Vision Pro headset …
[] is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 05, 2023 in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference with the announcement of the new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Getty Images
Apple’s efforts to narrow its artificial intelligence gap with rivals by partnering with OpenAI did little to move Wall Street. The iPhone maker’s stock price fell about 2% in Monday after-hours trading.
Tuesday morning, investors changed their mind — sending Apple stock up 6% to $205 a share, reported Forbes.
“Apple Intelligence” — the term repeated about 60 times at Apple’s June 10 Worldwide Developers Conference, according to the Wall Street Journal — features a partnership with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It aims to breath new life into Siri, Apple’s aging voice assistant.
Apple’s deal with OpenAI has enraged Elon Musk, who threatened to ban Apple devices from his companies — namely Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Why? On June 10, Musk called the Apple/OpenAI deal “an unacceptable security violation,” CNBC reported.
Apple sees good times ahead. “We think Apple Intelligence is going to be indispensable to the products that already play such an integral role in our lives,” CEO Tim Cook said in his presentation, the Journal noted.
Apple — which suffered a 4.3% revenue decline in the March 2024-ending quarter — needs new growth to revive its stock. Investors are not convinced the announcement will supply the needed revenue. Many analysts see the OpenAI deal as further reducing iPhone demand.
What Is Apple Intelligence?
Apple Intelligence aims to add generative AI technology to billions of iPhones. The system will “result in a major upgrade for Siri,” according to the New York Times. The Times reported Apple’s technology would perform tasks such as the following:
- Proofread and suggest what users write in emails, notes or text;
- Prioritize messages and notifications;
- Answer user questions, create images and write software code;
- Check whether a rescheduled meeting would overlap with a user’s family commitments;
- Summarize audio recordings;
- Enable users to create movies from photos by writing a description;
- Clean up photos by taking out distracting background images;
- Reduce hacking risk by processing user requests on the iPhone rather than at a data center;
- Operate the service on an Apple-controlled cloud service using Apple semiconductors; and
- Divert user requests Apple can’t handle to ChatGPT.
Apple will also revive the languishing Siri. The voice assistant fails to recognize “various requests” and is unable to converse because it follows each individual command, the Times wrote.
Siri will remember the context of a user’s request and repurpose information in an image for a text application, Apple said. For example, “If someone asks for the weather in Muir Woods National Monument and later asks to schedule a hike there, Siri will now know that the hike it is scheduling is in Muir Woods,” the Times reported.
Siri will also help people fill out forms faster. How so? The assistant will find “an image of a user’s driver’s license” and extract the information to fill out a form on the user’s behalf, the Times wrote.
