Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, a tour I took months before construction was completed, when there was dust on the terracotta floors and mud, where lush vegetation now thrives, comes to mind. My guide was Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. With the pride of an owner, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was “a 100-year decision.”
Today I return to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The technology world is at an inflection point. The most powerful companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. We’re here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the upcoming launch of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it an afterthought. All year long, Apple’s rivals have been gaining traction, dazzling investors and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) has been showing off expensive, bulky augmented reality headsets. Apple needs to get the AI right. After all, corporations are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.
Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of firsts and, with a keen understanding of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technology relatable and even sexy. Remember how the iPod redefined digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store excited people with a new way to consume their tunes.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
Cook also claims that Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution all along. Already in 2018 he brought in Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. He then pulled the plug on a long-standing smart car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and mobilized the company’s machine learning talent to build AI into its software products.
In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its entire product line. Cook had also struck a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that its users could access ChatGPT. I had gotten a few demos of what they planned to unveil, including a tool to create custom emoticons with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revival of Siri, Apple’s weak AI agent.)
Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI — at least according to Apple — is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools that roll out via software updates to the latest iPhone and relatively recent Mac computers will largely run on the device itself—you’re not sending your data to the cloud. Computations for more complex AI tasks, Cook assures, take place in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing I’m reminded of on his return to the Ring is how adept Cook has been at touting the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips that unleashed innovations that power the phones and laptops of Apple. (And not to mention decisions that didn’t work out, like that billion-dollar smart car project.) When he walks into the conference room where we’re meeting, I know Cook will be extremely cordial, demonstrating manners honed during his Alabama boy as he calmly hyperboles the virtues of Apple products and deflects criticism of his very powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results that emerged after our conversation, he preferred to keep his views to himself.) Steve Jobs would pounce on a journalist like rain in Buenaventura, aggressively targeting his message; Cook envelops his interlocutors in a gentle haze and entrusts them with glowing assessments of his company’s efforts.
The final ratings, of course, will come from the users. But if 40 years of covering Apple have taught me anything, it’s this: If this first iteration of AI fails, an unrepentant Cook will appear on a future pre-recorded keynote, hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence that we’ve ever had built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see how is sweating.
