As Apple enters AI race, iPhone maker turns to its army of developers for an edge

As Apple prepares Apple Intelligence to jump into Silicon Valley's AI race, it's relying on one of its strongest advantages: Its army of 34 million app developers.

IPhone users will get their first taste of Apple Intelligence, the company's artificial intelligence system, later this month. The company is relying on Apple Intelligence to be the strongest selling point for the iPhone 16, its latest generation of smartphones.

Apple's AI isn't as advanced as the state of the art coming out of the most advanced labs, such as rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama. Apple isn't using the biggest models, nor can it pull off some of the more show-stopping tricks of the bleeding-edge voice models — OpenAI's latest can sing, for example.

Where Apple is hoping to distinguish its AI is that Siri may actually be able to do things on your phone — send emails, decipher calendars and take and edit photos. That's something other company's AI chatbots cannot currently do, and to accomplish this, Apple is beckoning its army of third-party developers to fine tune their apps to collaborate with Apple Intelligence. Eventually, Siri may be able to trigger any action in an app that a user can take, part of the company's long term vision for Siri, Apple said in June.

"Siri will have the ability to take hundreds of new actions in and across apps," said Apple's Kelsey Peterson, director of machine learning, in the Apple Intelligence launch video.

Apple can easily make this happen for its own apps, but for Apple Intelligence to interact with the millions of non-Apple apps, it needs developers to embrace a new way of programming their apps. This means developers will need to create as many as hundreds of snippets of additional code