Apple Intelligence delayed

Happy Monday, wizards.

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Check out this GPT shared by Ethan Mollick. It does scenario planning for different futures of AI development. You tell it a personal or business plan and it will test your plan against different trajectories AI can take.

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Dario’s Picks

The most important news stories in AI this week

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1. Google and Meta CEOs confirms over-investing narrative. Venture capital firm Sequioa is making the case that AI investment is moving fast primarily because of FOMO, a sentiment now seemingly being echoed by Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg. Summary and the CEOs’ statements below.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The massive spend on AI infrastructure doesn't match up with the revenue being generated today, or likely anytime soon. The big companies are saying the risk of under-spending at this point is too great, so they keep pouring record amounts into data centres. That benefits startups in the space, but investors might be in for a ride (not financial advice).

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2. Apple delays Apple Intelligence. The AI features Apple announced at WWDC (called Apple Intelligence) are getting postponed, according to Bloomberg. Instead of rolling out together with the release of iOS18 in September, Apple Intelligence will roll-out gradually in the weeks after the iOS 18 update. Some features for Siri, which is supposed to be able to take actions across your apps using AI, are postponed even further, possibly delaying until 2025.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Apple joins the likes of OpenAI and Google in postponing AI features in the last months. As AI is getting increasingly advanced, more precaution is needed as novel concerns and challenges pop up. Apple also signed Biden's voluntary commitment to develop safe AI on Friday, which might've pushed Apple to prioritise increased cautiosness with the upcoming release. Apple generally has a reputation for reliable systems, and probably doesn't want to jeopardize by releasing something unstable or unsafe.

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3. Airtable launches Cobuilder. It drafts up an app based on the prompts you give it using AI, then lets you customise and iterate upon it. If you're already using Airtable to store your data, connecting the app to your data is just a matter of point and click.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Airtable is like a superpowered spreadsheet in the cloud – useful for SO many things. It's still early days for this AI feature, but I think Airtable might be the perfect foundation for teams to build data-driven AI apps on. Particularly calendars, CRMs, dashboards, and the like. I've been using it for years now, and it powers all the content you see on whatplugin.ai. If you'd like to try it out for free, you can support me by signing up using my invitation link.

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Behind the news

Google and Meta CEOs confirms over-investing narrative

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A week ago the venture capital firm Sequioa laid out their viewpoint that investments in to infrastructure for AI are going too fast, and that there is an arms race between leading AI infrastructure providers.

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The potential price of being left behind is smaller than investing too much now, so they keep pouring in new capital. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this week that "the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing", which is similar to Mark Zuckerberg's view on the subject.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ AI will be a deeply transformative technology on the world – but investment is moving at a speed which it wouldn't if it weren't for intense competitive forces. This will likely upset investors at some point, as the bigger the overspend, the bigger the correction will eventually be. However, it currently has positive effects for startups building products on top of these infrastructure providers – they're benefitting from the rapid advances in the tech and competitive pricing.

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