You're Not Tired of Artificial Intelligence, You're Tired of AI
Yes, this is partially about Apple's WWDC
I. The perils of a double standard
There’s a naming problem in this place.
Everything tries to force itself under the glorious acronym—companies, writers, builders, founders, journalists—because it has more power than the systems that supposedly (because not all do) fall under its umbrella will ever have.
The TikTok algorithm is powerful (yes, that’s AI) but nowhere nearly as powerful as the term “AI” itself. Presenting your project as an AI startup has more power over investors’ beliefs and willingness to lend you money than them using ChatGPT firsthand to see what the fuzz is all about.
It’s not accidental that a random company that uses a linear model to automate some obscure process rebrands as an AI company (for example, imagine a distributor that wants to automatically detect the remaining existence of tomato sauce at the storage facility and has trained a binary classifier because the only other product it could be confused with is Ketchup, which no one wants).
Once the competition gets harsh, it upgrades to an AI-first company.
Is that the sort of power that a scientific discipline should have? No. But it’s also a curse. It’s why the AI effect happens in the first place (huh, I wonder why it was named after this discipline in particular): Many of the things that belong to the category of AI in the strict sense—when we refer to AI, the field, e.g. a spam filter is an AI system—don’t belong to this same category when we refer to it as AI, the ultimate goal.
There’s an inherent conflict if you name your field after its goals. No one says physics is the “theory of everything” or medicine is “studies on immortality.” Just imagine. It’s 2020: “All hail Ozempic, a new immortality drug!” It’s 2030: “Ozempic? Don’t know what that is but I can suddenly fit inside these thin clothes.” That’d be weird.
That’s exactly what happens in artificial intelligence. Some new system gets announced. It’s AI. Once it works out just fine and gets implemented everywhere at a deeper level? Not AI anymore. No one thinks of a spam filter as AI—it’s just part of life.
There was a fun joke in the old days that said AI actually stands for “Almost Implemented.”
A double standard has its advantages, such as allowing anyone to easily find a place under the “AI umbrella,” but it also has its dangers, such as diluting the umbrella’s sense of identity so much that everyone gets wet in the end.
II. Apple has been reading the room
I think Apple has spent the past few years thinking the “Almost Implemented” joke was a recipe. Secrecy is their brand as much as the bitten apple so we just let it slide.
But come on, the largest third-largest company in the world is doing nothing about the most important tech revolution in history. That can’t possibly be.
It was not surprising (also because of leaks) that they finally surrendered to the power of the acronym for the WWDC 2024 event (This isn’t a review of the event, go watch the keynote if you haven’t yet, or MKBHD’s review—always fun).
Interestingly, for a company that has been preparing big things about AI for months, even years, they didn’t mention it much. Or at all. Tim Cook first said “artificial intelligence” after the one-hour mark. Not just that. In a typical Apple move, they rebranded the entire thing with “Apple Intelligence.”1
What’s going on? Why that blatant rejection of our good friend AI?