Apple made waves this Monday at its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference by joining the AI trend in a major way. Apple Intelligence is coming to iPhone, iPad, and Mac this fall, bringing an upgraded Siri, ChatGPT integration, writing tools, and image generation with it. But even Apple will have to deal with the same AI issues as every other company.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook was queried about his confidence level that Apple AI won’t hallucinate (which is when AI models generate incorrect or misleading information and present it as fact).
“It’s not 100 percent,” Cook could admit. “But I think we have done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we’re using it in. So I am confident it will be very high quality. But I’d say in all honesty that’s short of 100 percent. I would never claim that it’s 100 percent.
His answer is unsurprising but also a reminder that Apple felt it couldn’t wait any longer to jump aboard this train (even if it should have). As impressive as the rapid proliferation of AI has been, we also see the growing pains on a daily basis. Remember when Google’s Gemini-powered AI Overviews were telling people to put glue on their pizza?
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It’s also worth noting that Apple Intelligence will lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT in some instances. The new GPT-4o model is incredibly impressive, but it’s also imperfect. The issue for Apple was that it didn’t have its own AI chatbot ready in time, so it partnered with OpenAI for now. Much like using Intel chips in Macs, Apple will likely move away from third-party solutions once it develops its own chatbot, but it can’t make any promises about ChatGPT hallucinations.