Has Apple lost the AI plot?

The fact that Apple hardly made any artificial intelligence (AI) announcements at last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has had the internet in uproar.

The world’s most valuable tech firm has been the de facto smartphone leader – alongside Samsung – for most of the last twenty years. In the beginning, Apple tended to set the tone for the industry, before losing out to superior work being done by Android (on the software front) and hardware manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, and plenty of others.

Apple’s fundamental problem is that it overpromised and underdelivered at its big iPhone launch last year. It announced a range of AI features under a new banner called Apple Intelligence. Most of these have not yet shipped, and Apple’s earliest target to bring out these much-needed features is 2027, Bloomberg reports.

A bunch of iPhone users in the States are suing Apple, obviously, claiming they were duped into buying a new phone without the features that came with it. I also bought the iPhone 16 Pro, and I’m pretty happy with it, particularly with the new camera button and USB-C upgrade.

Apple’s bizarre and over-elaborate focus on its new design language – called Liquid Glass – has done nothing to dispel commentators’ concerns that it is in serious danger in the second coming of Steve Jobs. If nothing else, the announcements show a tone-deafness and an obvious sign that Apple doesn’t have its eye on the ball.

The problem with AI is that it is used as a catchphrase for everything. It is either a tsunami that’s going to wipe away everything that came before it, or a rising tide that will lift humanity higher. There are profound advances happening in AI, that much is certain. But, as always, the hype is out of kilter with the actual possibilities or features of a new service or technology.

In other cases, the hype fails to match just how advanced AI is and the threats it poses to the existing businesses, if you listen to any tech executive. But what is certain is that AI is arguably killing off the first few rungs of the career ladder for many juniors seeking work experience and on-the-job training.

The most immediate – and scary – threat is the death of entry-level jobs for professionals in the legal, accounting, finance and software development spheres. I’ve spoken to lawyers, accountants, and bankers who are all watching the first wave of these AI services that are good enough to do what these ranks of juniors used to do. It doesn’t help matters that they also cost less.

In the next few years, there will be no jobs for candidate attorneys or accountants. How will next year’s class of graduates get the training and work experience they need? “My generation is fine,” a senior lawyer told me. “But how will the next generation get trained?”

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Similarly, the head of a trading desk for a major bank told me that “we just don’t need junior quants.” It’s cheaper and faster to use AI services, he says, and he’s “all in” on AI.

These are two smart people at the top of their respective games, watching the human capital of their specialised industries being decimated by a sudden technology advance. The problem is just as stark for software developers, whose junior ranks will quickly be replaced by some form of AI coding, I’m told by friends in that industry.

But what does AI mean for us little people? In the case of Apple’s iPhones and AI in general, what are the real use cases? For instance, I am dictating much of this column to my phone. In the past, I’ve used a variety of custom software packages, third-party apps, and various hacks to get to this point. Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard app has been my go-to for years.

Now, I just open a note on my iPhone 16 Pro and a few clicks later, I can speak in a natural, easy way – including long pauses as I rethink the structure of a sentence. What I get is pretty useful — a mostly accurate transcription of my thoughts (in seconds) that I can later edit myself in Microsoft Word.

Am I using AI, or am I just using a new feature on my phone?

The most significant offering from the generative AI hype, in the beginning, was its ability to summarise lots of information. For lots of people, that’s a killer feature. But not for journalists and, specifically, not for me.

I don’t need articles or white papers summarised for me. That’s my job. Journalists are the original big data scientists, I’ve been arguing for the last few years, because we have summarised world events into 400-word news articles for decades. Sifting through all the facts to prioritise them, order them, and ask experts what to think about them is what we humans have been doing for, well, all of our existence. We’ve found mechanical and silicon means to enhance our productivity, for want of a better way to describe evolution.

Meanwhile, I’m astounded that the device and interface used by the fewest number of Apple users – the clunky, expensive and heavy Vision Pro headset – is the language Apple decided to replicate for all its devices. People are already complaining that the see-through nature of this new Liquid Glass makes it harder to read.

It seems either absurd or astute that Apple has focused on this visual enhancement as an obvious fillip for its lack of innovation in AI, the most pressing of technology upgrades, and has unveiled “Liquid Glass” as its solution to an obvious innovation slump.

• This article first appeared on Business Live