Apple Goes Live With Apple Intelligence

Apple confirmed the general availability of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. The point update is most notable for its inclusion of the first batch of Apple Intelligence features, which the company announced at WWDC back in June. However, only select Apple devices are equipped to run the new generative AI offering. This includes iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, all iPhone 16 models, iPads with an A17 Pro chip (including the new iPad mini) or M1 and later, or a Mac with an M1 or later. After downloading the update, Apple will ask whether you’d like to opt in to the feature. Once you do, you’ll be added to a waitlist, a process that shouldn’t last longer than a couple of hours. It’s an unusual move for the company, owing to the remote server requirement for the LLM-based offering. Essentially Apple wants to get its back end ready for some big compute demands. Not every function requires off-board processing, however. One piece that makes the system unique versus offerings like ChatGPT is its small model approach. The new Apple Intelligence features are trained on a selective dataset aimed at specific functions, rather than the massive, black box approach employed by others.