Being different
The other issue is differentiation. Apple is a product company, and for all the blather about artificial intelligence, the only thing that matters is how the tech can become part of its product family. If you glance at the many existing machine intelligence features already in its products, you’ll see that most of these supplement existing hardware. When it comes to Apple Intelligence, for Apple the North Star must be the need to ensure it continues to offer something unique.
To some extent, doing this with AI is fundamentally difficult, as this kind of general purpose intelligence will eventually become a homogenous block of different models using similar data (all the data in the world) to inform responses to similar questions.
With that inevitable homogenization, AI services may yet become utilities rather than differentiated products. So, it could make sense for Apple to avoid developing its own general purpose AI, resolving to create specific solutions that work much more effectively for specific use cases and relying on partnerships with these emerging AI-as-a-Service companies (AI-ASS?). That seems to be the Apple Intelligence way.
