Microsoft and Google are the current AGI leaders and in the competitive pace of AI development have rushed offerings into the market that have been somewhat problematic. What’s the latest flavour of Google’s offering? Is it Monica? Is it Gemini? Microsoft has CoPilot, AzureAI, and recently released Recall only to recall it because of privacy and security concerns.
Apple hopes privacy and security will be its key differentiators. It has a native advantage because it has developed its operating system for Apple-only devices. In comparison, Microsoft and Google are generalists with the former’s Windows operating on numerous vendor platforms, and the latter’s Chrome and Android doing the same.
The Apple ecosystem is interconnected and focused solely on the family of its own devices and services creating a cohesive environment for its AGI offering and future developments. No doubt, Apple’s choice of building OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its devices and services is likely a short-term strategy as the company plays catchup while its investment in AI startups and hiring of AI experts bears fruit as early as 2025.
For OpenAI, the deal to put ChatGPT on Apple devices is a big win in its battle with Google. It also gives Microsoft a bit of a win as the prime investor in OpenAI.
The computer industry has gone AI crazy and Apple has joined in. At its announcement, CEO, Tim Cook, told those in attendance that his company’s AI features will prove to be game changers, indispensable, ethical and mindful of the social impact of AGI. Take that Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon. Unlike these companies, Apple will not be exploitive in entering the AI ring.
How so? What will differentiate Apple Intelligence? Think of Siri voice assistant with capabilities far beyond what it can do today. Call it Siri on steroids.
Not only will Siri know what’s out there in the world accessible through the information it gleans from the Internet, but it will also know about you. It will know your interests. It will know about the people in your life so when you ask it about a message you received from mom last week, it will find it whether in text, email, or video, and deliver it to the Apple device you are using at the time.
Apple has one distinct advantage over its competition: its enormous homogenous user base. The iPhone and iPad remain top sellers in their product niches. iMacs have a look and feel that makes them distinctive when compared to competitors’ desktops and laptops running Windows and Chrome.
As a testbed for its AGI features and releases, Apple’s promise to understand its users and reflect this in Apple Intelligence will make the 2013 movie “Her” seem closer to becoming reality. That might creep you out but Apple will reassure you that its AGI will not abuse the privilege of knowing you intimately. Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon can only hope to achieve a similar level of understanding of their users.
How will it know you without creeping you out? At the announcement of Apple’s entry into the competition with OpenAI, Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, stated, “Understanding this kind of personal context is essential for delivering truly helpful intelligence. But it has to be done right. You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehouse and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud.”
It’s a tall order to deliver what Apple is telling the market about its AGI plans. To not use the cloud means Apple will have to incorporate AGI chipsets into all of its devices with the intelligence fully onboard.
Apple will find it will have competition for onboard AGI. Both Nvidia and AMD announced recently the development of new AI chips for desktop computers capable of running generative AI applications with AMD claiming its latest boards will include a neural processing unit (NPU) designed to handle AI tasks.
Staying ahead of the competition when you are playing catchup will not make Apple’s foray into AGI as easy as Federighi and Cook indicated in launching Apple Intelligence. The corporate AGI gold rush will continue largely unabated in a Wild West where governments remain slow off the mark in applying guardrails, while cybercriminals begin to exploit the security flaws of the technology.
]]>To add to this growing human presence we have another dilemma. Our population is aging with more humans living longer lives. What was rare in1950 by 2050 will be common – millions of centenarians, and many in our 70s, 80s and 90s still capable of gainful employment. So we will have a new generation of people under 50 and an almost equal number over 50.
Now throw a real spanner into the works. Artificial intelligence and robotics. Whether our home is the Western or Eastern Hemisphere, the world of work, in particular, the world of manufacturing, is undergoing a revolution because of intelligent machines with articulated arms and the ability to work 24 x 7, day or night, with or without the lighting and heating humans require, and with a precision no human can match. And it is not just in manufacturing where intelligent, articulated machines are impacting the workforce. Warehousing and distribution is also witnessing a transformation from humans to machines. And coming soon to that white collar job near you, the artificial intelligence revolution. It’s already creating waves in the stock market with recent headlines showing just how disruptive a technology computer-based trading can be.
In an article that appeared in the New York Times on August 18, John Markoff tells the story of a number of companies that today are deploying robots instead of people to do repetitive work under minimal supervision. Here are some of his examples:
To the examples Markoff provides add these recent announcements:
These are all examples of what is being called the great restructuring by researchers, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book “Race Against the Machine.” The authors see encroachment by robots and artificial intelligence into human skills and describe this digital progress as a challenge that is leaving many of us in the dust. In fact, they attribute part of the reason for the slow recovery of employment numbers globally to the rise of machines.
It is true that there are lots of things we as humans can do that robots and computers cannot. But the race against the machines is now “full on.” Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing. Robots are moving into every aspect of our domestic lives and we will see profound changes over the next decade particularly as our population ages.
These machines will employ natural language, voice recognition, mobility and dexterity. They will be self aware. They will be attached to the web with access to our human-built knowledge base. They will be able to learn and assimilate information of use to them in doing the jobs we have instructed them to take on.
So what can we non machines do to retain work? Do we have to reinvent humanity in order to compete in the world we are creating? One thing we know will still be needed, someone will have to know how to program machines because today’s computers are lousy at it. But that will not employ the many billions of us on this planet. So on this Labour Day, September 3, 2012, all of us need to be part of a conversation on how we move forward as a society to co-exist with the machines of our creation because we have let the genie out of the bottle. For parents raising children in this new machine age my advice is get your kids to engage both the left and right-side of their brains. A balance of the arts and sciences should be part of every child’s education. And remember neither East or West has any advantage any more. Wikipedia is at the fingertips of every one of us with a smartphone. Today that number is 2.7 billion. By 2020 it will be 5.7 billion. With all of that on-hand knowledge easily accessible to the majority of us on the planet, our world will rapidly become a very different place.
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