Apple intelligence and AI maximalism

Benedict Evans argues that Apple's WWDC strategy treats generative AI as a commodity technology rather than a product, with the chatbot playing a minor role. Apple's models power context-aware features such as email prioritisation and summaries, with no visible chatbot, and send open-ended world-model queries to third parties, currently ChatGPT. Evans says OpenAI gets distribution to Apple users in exchange for bearing inference costs, and that Apple could later shift queries to its own models or offer the default slot to Bing or Google.