The central element of the presentation, in fact, was one of the most intangible things ever thought of by the tech giants: Apple entered the artificial intelligence sector with Apple Intelligence, a new approach to the world of AI, more personal and more protected ( the promise is that our data will not be shared with other companies or used improperly). The example of Apple represents a revolution that leads technology companies from a device-centric approach – the race to find the most innovative, most beautiful, fastest smartphone – towards a more immaterial one, where the software and the operating system become the real object of wish. It is certainly not just Apple that follows this path, indeed historically Cupertino arrives when the market is mature enough to be conquered. There are several examples: in January Samsung launched Galaxy AI, the new general artificial intelligence project which, starting from the new Galaxy S24, will be available on all the other devices of the South Korean group. The same question applies to Google and Microsoft – companies historically more linked to the world of software and less to that of products – which in the last year, since OpenAI invented a new market by presenting ChatGPT, have focused almost exclusively on AI : Google with the Gemini model and a series of services built around it, Microsoft with Copilot and with an 11 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, with which it controls 49%.
To understand how this revolution is happening it is essential to look at the numbers: this year Google plans to spend 12 billion dollars on artificial intelligence per quarter, Meta has just raised the money it intends to put into the sector by 10 billion in 2024, while Microsoft it spent 14 billion dollars in the last quarter and plans to increase this item “significantly”. This does not mean that the smartphone era has come to an end, as already in 2022 a long article from The Verge explained: «Tech companies have promised Alexa, Quest Pro, Hololens, the metaverse and many other things that they would eventually destroyed the smartphone market”, we read in the analysis which underlines how in reality phones are still “the best thing we have”. And what is happening with the AI revolution could be a confirmation of this approach: the smartphone will remain, but it will no longer be the object of desire, which instead will be the service with which to have access to the best AI model. In fact, we will have AI in our pockets and we will certainly pay more attention to the service than to the product. “We are moving into the era of smart smartphones, so we can say we are moving from smart to intelligent,” Nabila Popal, a researcher at International Data Corporation, told Cnet.
Another piece of data that shows how attention is focused on this revolution towards an increasingly immaterial sector is the terrible sales results of Ai Pin, the wearable device from Humane which was supposed to replace smartphones. The startup expected at least 100,000 orders and instead received only 10,000, another sign that if what matters is the software, the device on which the service is made to work is much less relevant than in the past. “We’re building AI for the rest of us,” Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, said last week. And if the subscription to a service becomes the most important element, then Apple’s promise to defend our privacy and to bring ChatGPT to all products at no additional cost – today its Plus version costs 20 dollars a month – would seem like a very interesting way to retain consumers and win over potential new customers.
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