Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late.
Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time—and that it’s been stealthily preparing for this moment for years.
That’s part of the message I got from speaking with key Apple executives this fall about how they created what is now called Apple Intelligence. Senior vice president for software engineering Craig Federighi is a familiar character in an ongoing web series in the tech world known as keynote product launches. Less publicly recognizable is senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea, who previously headed machine learning at Google. In a separate interview, I spoke…
