Apple's Push Into AI Allegedly Happened After Craig Federighi Tried Microsoft AI Coding Tool

[bigboy29]

I feel like a lot of people are taking this story very literally.

Literal interpretation: Craig Federighi discovered AI in 2022. This is when Apple discovered AI. After a single exec used Copilot and that exec then had to sit down and teach others what AI is or hire someone who knew.

Much more likely: Craig Federighi's experience inspired him to create focus and unify various AI efforts that were already going on at Apple and helped define a strategy. He was the exec sponsor, so to speak, for those efforts.

 

[GMShadow]

The more inside baseball we get, the more I realize lead times aren't what I expected. That Craig only started playing with Copilot for Visual Studio last year and then was like we should do this is not at all how I expected their machine learning development to have gone, I thought they would have been working on something years back and were just later to deploying it.

They put these cores in the A11 in 2017. They have been using machine learning for years, long before it became trendy with this latest trash.

 

[kirky29]

Now imagine if he tried using an Android, with multitasking, number row on the keyboard, installing apps from other sources and not getting any malware!

 

[gmanist1000]

Apple employees probably laugh at articles like this. You think Craig wasn’t actively involved in these things before he randomly decides to try Copilot?

 

[satchmo]

Craig: "Okay team, quickly finish up the iPad calculator app, I have a new project for you!"

 

[garranhado]

The development of these resources, however, has not happened without their mishaps. Also according to the report, the team led by Federighi began to work on its own AI models (focused on images and video) independently, which caused a certain discomfort with the team led by John Giannandrea, head of AI and machine learning of the company.

While the software team had a more regulated style of work, with certain deadlines for the completion of projects, the AI and machine learning team adopted a more relaxed workflow, similar to what can be found on Google - which makes sense, since Giannandrea left just from there to work at Apple.

- The Software team works in a traditional approach
- The AI team works in agile approach

This explains the disaster of Siri from some years ago.

Also seams that the new AI generative research don’t come from AI team but from Craig team.

In old times (Jobs) the AI team be fired in years.

 

[rehkram]

Well actually, Apple are now in a good position to do it right, on the desktop and mobile devices anyway. IBM are way ahead in the corporate space and likely to remain there.

I can't think of a time when a new-ish whizz bang software app (AI) so directly drove next generation chip development to make it feasible. I believe Apple saw it coming and brought the design & development capability in house.

Don't forget AI is just an app that sits on top of a system that can support it. It's quite possible that this realization drove the move from Intel to Apple silicon, IMO

In fact, I'd bet on it, given how quickly the M1 appeared after the first rumors. I believe they knew they had something workable long before going public and pulling the plug on Intel. Speculating on dates, other than announcement- and release dates, is just that, speculation.

 

[progx]

Kind of pathetic. It's like great grandpa being introduced to a microwave while it has already become people's daily tool for a long time.

Uh... long time? ChatGPT and these AI tools have only been around to the general public for almost two years. Think you're jumping the shark a little bit there on Grandpa. If anything, Apple is fast this time toward AI than they've been to other features others had been using for five years or longer.

 

[The_Gream]

There's about 18 months between December 2022 and May 2024. M4 was probably well into the design cycle but it shouldn't have been too late to make changes to focus on NPU.

If Apple had stepped on the NPU gas earlier, Apple should be occupying the bright orange bar.

View attachment 2385825

I do love this chart. It’s about as good as any other showing how great one company’s product is better than another’s (sarcasm. These comparisons generally never mean anything until real world people get their hands on stuff and break it)

The M4 is a base line unit. The M4 Pro
/Max/Ultra (whatever they call them) could easily have been designed with more NPUs. The M* Ultras have traditionally doubled the NPUs, so if we just go off that then an M4 Ultra would be 76 TOPS.

A better way to measure these TOPS would be cost per TOPS for the consumer.

 

[progx]

I think AI still has a long ways to go. It has barely arrived, now people are welcoming these tools if they're our new overlords. How many lawyers have been disbarred from these tools now? Much like the smartphones, people have been doing some less than intelligent thinking toward these AI tools 🤣

 

[cuencap]

Not many people here realize the GitHub co-pilot serves a complete different experience than their now mainstream co-pilot. GH copilot is amazing, especially for novice coders who understand the concepts and when to apply them, just a little green on syntax.

 

[macos9rules]

Hopefully they didn’t use GH Copilot to code iOS 18!

 

[mozumder]

I feel like a lot of people are taking this story very literally.

Literal interpretation: Craig Federighi discovered AI in 2022. This is when Apple discovered AI. After a single exec used Copilot and that exec then had to sit down and teach others what AI is or hire someone who knew.

Much more likely: Craig Federighi's experience inspired him to create focus and unify various AI efforts that were already going on at Apple and helped define a strategy. He was the exec sponsor, so to speak, for those efforts.

Yah I think headline is largely clickbait.

 

[antiprotest]

Uh... long time? ChatGPT and these AI tools have only been around to the general public for almost two years. Think you're jumping the shark a little bit there on Grandpa. If anything, Apple is fast this time toward AI than they've been to other features others had been using for five years or longer.

In tech, especially in AI and such things, this is very, very, very, very long, and Apple STILL hasn't announced anything.

And, after WWDC, nothing will be released until September.

Then, not all the features announced will be released in September.

And then, unless Apple breaks their schedule, we will have to wait a whole other year for more major features to be announced.

Meanwhile, other companies continuously improve in terms of weeks and months.

This is even worse than the great grandpa analogy.

But you are right that Apple is already reacting faster than usual.

 

[Pakaku]

Yeah right.

More like every other tech company on the planet developed generative AI, and Apple release a $3,500 headset instead.

I would gladly take a headset over that cesspool they keep trying to call "AI"

 

[rehkram]

I believe AI is a trojan horse jacked up on gateway drugs, being used to push chip design onto the next stage. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, on the contrary, so long as I don't have to pay through the nose for it.

For example, internal AI calls will be embedded within OS's to solve decades old problems within the fundamentals of computing, with no actual end user external access to them.

The AI that most people seem to be thinking about at present is as a human public interface to similar functionality for playing party games, or pretending to be smarter than they really are. For better or worse, it's waaay more than that!

 

[Harry Haller]

Well actually, Apple are now in a good position to do it right, on the desktop and mobile devices anyway. IBM are way ahead in the corporate space and likely to remain there.

I can't think of a time when a new-ish whizz bang software app (AI) so directly drove next generation chip development to make it feasible. I believe Apple saw it coming and brought the design & development capability in house.

Don't forget AI is just an app that sits on top of a system that can support it. It's quite possible that this realization drove the move from Intel to Apple silicon, IMO

In fact, I'd bet on it, given how quickly the M1 appeared after the first rumors. I believe they knew they had something workable long before going public and pulling the plug on Intel. Speculating on dates, other than announcement- and release dates, is just that, speculation.

AI is not just an app that sits on top of a system.

 

[boss.king]

In tech, especially in AI and such things, this is very, very, very, very long, and Apple STILL hasn't announced anything.

And, after WWDC, nothing will be released until September.

Then, not all the features announced will be released in September.

And then, unless Apple breaks their schedule, we will have to wait a whole other year for more major features to be announced.

Meanwhile, other companies continuously improve in terms of weeks and months.

This is even worse than the great grandpa analogy.

But you are right that Apple is already reacting faster than usual.

It's not that long, considering most of the stuff that's out there now is objectively garbage. Apple shouldn't be rushing to put out something that tells us to put glue on our pizza or can't read dates or gives questionable medical advice.

If Apple comes out with genuinely useful implementations of this tech that are reliable and don't stomp all over copyright protections, it'll be worth the wait.

If they bring out features now that suffer from the same problems as the tools that Google, Open AI, etc are slopping out then they would be better off just holding it back another year.

 

[Jimmy Bubbles]

One of the major factors that contributed to Apple's heavy focus on artificial intelligence in iOS 18 was an experience that software chief Craig Federighi had with GitHub Copilot, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In a report on Apple's AI ambitions, WSJ says that Federighi became an AI "convert" after testing the Copilot coding tool introduced by Microsoft-owned GitHub. Copilot, which uses OpenAI technology, was created to help programmers write, troubleshoot, and translate code into different programming languages.

After "playing around" with GitHub Copilot in December of 2022, Federighi explained that he had "come to appreciate" generative AI, and he reportedly tasked engineering employees with creating new ways to integrate AI features into Apple's apps and features. Prior rumors have suggested that Apple is aiming to integrate AI into as many apps as possible with iOS 18 and future software updates.

Apple accelerated development on internal generative AI development, even recruiting some former Apple Car employees to work on the technology, but it has also held discussions with OpenAI and Google and is expected to rely on both its internal AI models and external partnerships.

Rumors about features coming in iOS 18 indicate that Federighi has been successful in incorporating AI into the operating system in a number of ways, with Apple planning to add AI features to Messages, Mail, Photos, and other key apps. Siri will also be overhauled with generative AI, making the personal assistant smarter and more capable.

A rundown of all of the new features rumored for iOS 18 can be found in our roundup.

Article Link: Apple's Push Into AI Allegedly Happened After Craig Federighi Tried Microsoft AI Coding Tool

So CoPilot was the inspiration..? 😆
It’s only tapped into nearly every single repo on GitHub.

 

[JoeG4]

I can't wait to see how Apple innovates MacOS by shoving AI into every friggin workflow.

Sticky notes? Calculator? Actually ya know what let's get rid of the keyboard. Just tell your computer what you want and it'll do it for you. Like magic.

 

[smulji]

I can't wait to see how Apple innovates MacOS by shoving AI into every friggin workflow.

Sticky notes? Calculator? Actually ya know what let's get rid of the keyboard. Just tell your computer what you want and it'll do it for you. Like magic.

May as well call it macOS AI

 

[macduke]

This is what happens when you let a bunch of olds run a tech company. Nobody there in leadership thought to build this tech, they were just shocked when they first tried it and then decided to play catchup. Lame.

 

[ApAx]

When did we become so helpless that we can’t write an email reply without artificial intelligence? Even my employer has spent enormous amounts of time and money building our own internally developed AI email helper…

 

[turbineseaplane]

When did we become so helpless that we can’t write an email reply without artificial intelligence? Even my employer has spent enormous amounts of time and money building our own internally developed AI email helper…

Can AI read the emails and respond ?
Perfect!

AIs can just email each other all day and we’ll go to the beach

 

[ApAx]

Can AI read the emails and respond ?
Perfect!

AIs can just email each other all day and we’ll go to the beach

People fear AI taking our jobs. Honestly the majority of my daily work is playing email jockey. Ready to hit the sand