Every time I visiting the Apple Park campus comes to mind a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust and mud on the terrazzo floors where lush vegetation now thrives. My guide was Tim CookCEO of Apple. With the pride of the owner, he walked me through the $5 billion circular behemoth, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”
Today I return to the Ring, pulsating with energy seven years after it opened, to see Cook again. The world of technology is at an inflection point. The most powerful companies will stumble or maintain their dominance for decades. We’re here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the upcoming release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the red-hot field of Generative AI. Some consider it late. Over the course of the year, Apple’s competitors have piqued interest, wowed investors, and dominated the news cycle with their chatbotswhile the most valuable company in the world (at the time of writing) was showing off an expensive and bulky augmented reality headset. Apple needs to use AI the right way. After all, companies are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.
The cook did not panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe sooner is better. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of pioneers and, with a strong grasp of novelty over utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies recognizable and even attractive. Think again like the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their music.
Photography: Joe Pugliese
Cook also argues that Apple has always prepared for the artificial intelligence revolution. Back in 2018, he mocked Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. So it pulled the plug on a long-standing smart car program (an open secret Apple never publicly acknowledged) and mobilized the company’s machine learning talent to integrate AI into its software products.
In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of artificial intelligence for its entire product line. Cook had also negotiated a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that its users could have access to ChatGPT. I had received a few demos of what they planned to reveal, including a tool for creating custom emojis with verbal suggestions and an easy-to-use AI image generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the relaunch of Siri, Apple’s bare-bones AI agent.)
Perhaps what distinguishes Apple’s AI most, at least according to Apple, is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. AI tools, which are rolling out via software updates on the latest iPhones and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself — you won’t be sending your data to the cloud. Computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.
Another thing that comes to mind upon my return to the Ring is Cook’s ability to tout the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips, that have unleashed innovations that power phones and Apple laptops. (And not to mention the decisions that didn’t pan out, like that multibillion-dollar smart car project.) When he steps into the conference room where we meet, I know Cook will be meticulously friendly, displaying manners honed during his time in Alabama childhood , while calmly hyperbolizing the virtues of Apple products and dismissing criticism of his all-powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results, which arrived after our talk, he chose to keep his opinions to himself.) Steve Jobs was addressing a reporter like rain in Buenaventura, aggressively throwing the his message; Cook envelops his interlocutors in a light fog and confides amazed assessments of his company’s efforts.
The final ratings, obviously, will come from the users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it’s this: If this first iteration of AI fails, some unrepentant chef will show up in a pre-recorded future keynote hailing the new version as “the best Apple intelligence we’ve ever had.” view”. built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets himself be seen sweating.
