Dave Lee: Apple must make peace with developers for AI success
After several false starts with Apple Intelligence, Apple Inc is ready to open up access to the large language models (LLMs) it uses for external developers to create AI applications with. But its tight-fisted stance on technology means it must win them over first.
If you read Bloomberg Businessweek’s deep dive into Apple’s blundering work with artificial intelligence, a consistent theme is its lack of clarity over what AI on an Apple device should actually do. On Tuesday, with the company looking no closer to an answer internally, we learnt it would soon open things up so others could have a go at figuring it out.
“The iPhone maker is working on a software development kit and related frameworks that will let outsiders build AI features based on the large language models that the company uses for Apple Intelligence," Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman reported, citing people with knowledge of the company’s planned announcements at its coming and critically important Worldwide Developers Conference on 9 June.
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I say ‘critically important’ because it’s Apple’s best chance to reset the negative energy around its AI work to date. At last year’s event, executives announced a great sweep of features that, 12 months on, still aren’t available on devices—despite glitzy (and carefully worded) advertising campaigns suggesting they would be. What has been launched, such as error-prone news summaries, has been disappointing. Apple’s personal assistant Siri continues to embarrass the brand. Apple’s decision to team up with OpenAI to help it deal with more complex AI tasks was an acknowledgment of its position as a laggard. This week’s news might be seen as another.
Then again, as I’ve said before, Apple has the luxury of time to get things right with AI. The iPhone is still the world’s dominant smartphone, and its user lock-in has not yet shown any signs of being weakened by the appeal of AI features on competing devices.
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But that time isn’t limitless and opening up its foundational AI models for outsiders to build with is an indication of how desperately Apple wants to solve its problems sooner rather than later. Gurman writes: “The new approach would let developers integrate the underlying technology into specific features or across their full apps. To start, Apple will open up its smaller models that run on its devices, rather than the more powerful cloud-based AI models that require servers."
It gives developers the chance to come up with better applications for Apple’s AI than the company has been able to manage itself. Using Apple’s on-device AI models gives developers a chance to layer AI into their apps without needing to send information to the cloud or expect users to put up with lag times as the AI ‘thinks.’
In many ways, it is a repeat of the strategy that made the iPhone a breakthrough device in the first place. Apple introduced a software developers kit in time for the device’s second generation, despite Steve Jobs not initially being sold on the idea. The iPhone’s place in history would have surely been vastly different had he not been brought around.
According to Businessweek, there had been a similar reluctance to mount a full-throated effort to build AI, with senior Apple figures unconvinced as to its true utility—which, in fairness to them, is still an open question. Regardless, opening up the challenge to third-party developers increases the likelihood that the iPhone will get a killer AI application before its competitors.
Now, the question is how close Apple will let developers get to the real nuts and bolts of its AI and the user data that it harnesses.
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Historically, the company has been notoriously protective—some argue anticompetitive—of how much access third parties get to its core functionality, as it prefers to keep some exclusively for its own products and services. It’s why Apple has allowed only tap-to-pay cards in a user’s Apple Wallet rather than a third-party bank app. It’s also why the Apple Watch works better with an iPhone than smartwatches from other brands. Apple says this is all aimed at user privacy and a superior user experience.
Its stubbornness in the matter has been extraordinarily lucrative, allowing it to levy a 30% tax on sales made through apps downloaded on iOS devices. Over the years, this fee has been seen as unjustifiable and exploitative. Developers have grown weary of Apple’s values, a problem for the company as it looks to the same developer community in the hope it can do for Apple Intelligence what it did for iPhone apps.
Persuading developers to build features with its AI and setting up what could be a new generation of lock-ins will require a carefully and sincerely extended olive branch. As I pleaded in a column not so long ago, perhaps Apple’s best chance of succeeding at AI would be to adopt the spirit of a one-time rival’s famous chant. So, do I expect CEO Tim Cook to cross the WWDC stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers!"? No, I do not. But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t. ©Bloomberg
The author is Bloomberg Opinion’s US technology columnist.
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