Apple Intelligence is a compelling privacy-first take on generative AI. Unfortunately, it’s not accessible to third-party developers. As Manton Reece points out on Core Intuition #603:

It appears that the super low-hanging fruit that I thought we had, which is that there would be APIs for developers to use these on-device models, let alone the cloud models, it appears that’s not true, at least not yet. It doesn’t appear there’s a way for me to just use the on-device model. It seems like a lot of Apple Intelligence is for Apple.

Daniel Jalkut then quickly coins this as Apple’s Intelligence. I also hope that Apple just didn’t get to it yet, as it would be fantastic for developers to have access to these privacy-friendly, local capabilities.

Generative AI enables many great use cases:

  • Summarisation and extensive search across your notes app of choice; or have it transcribe and summarise voice recordings as a note.
  • Have a share extension that extracts data from a website that’s relevant to your app, like Sequel’s Magic Lookup, or to import recipes into your recipe app.
  • When an app lets you create groups or collections, the app could suggest titles, descriptions, or a symbol, emoji, or create a mini image for it.
  • Provide much smarter in-app help by having an LLM digest the app’s user guide and letting you ask that questions or search it in a more free-form way.

Apps currently need to either ship their own models or send data off device to external APIs which comes with privacy concerns, risks, and costs.

Apple did introduce new machine learning tools to compress your own models and optimise them for Apple Silicon, but that’s complex and lower level than most developers would be comfortable with. Also, it still means bloating up your app with several GBs of data.

Let us use those new foundation models directly. Let us write these adapters that sit on top of a model to optimise them for app-specific use cases. Give us APIs for them and the private cloud compute; or a smart wrapper around it that then decides which to use. Let us use make those neural engines sweat and bring our apps under the Apple Intelligence umbrella.