The Prestige

You might have missed the most important thing about Apple's WWDC24 announcements yesterday...

There’s so much noise about AI these days, it’s hard to know what’s important and what’s not. Yesterday, amidst a whole load of bluster about minor customisation improvements to your watch-face Apple announced something truly remarkable.

This post is about what just happened.

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts.

The first part is called 'The Pledge'. The magician shows you something ordinary...

The second act is called 'The Turn"'. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary....

But .... making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back.

That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call 'The Prestige'.”

– Christopher Priest, The Prestige

Amusing Limericks & Creepy Photos

Most of us are pretty familiar with the kind of things AI has been trotting out for a few years now… fast, seemingly intelligent writing (“give me a famous Shakespearean soliloquy in the style of a Taylor Swift song lyric”) or remarkably photorealistic, often creepy images from the depths of some nerd’s imagination (I’ve used these myself many times).

More often than not this AI generated content is used for relatively facile purposes and I don’t think we’ve not even started to see this content proliferate yet. A lot of this content is already getting used in marketing, particularly across social media … and we use this content to improve the way you read the news.

But in terms of deeper applications of this tech – beyond writing words – we’ve yet to see this tech in the wild.

Context is King

All that is about to change.

With the advent of iOS 18 - due to launch to the public this autumn - we are going to see, for the first time, the wide scale deployment of AI technology in a way that not only upgrades the predictive text we’re all familiar with… but in a way that fundamentally changes our relationship with our devices.

Up to this point your phone (ie. Siri) has been able to take instructions to do small, simple, single tasks where you are responsible for all of the context and, so long as you’re really clear and kinda follow the script … you can get things done through conversation.

But what Apple are about to release makes Siri look like a clockwork toy.

By combing a deep understanding of the data within your phone (messages, emails, calendar) … an understanding of how to read your phone screen (going beyond its programme) … an understanding of how to leverage the apps you yourself use (getting traffic data from maps) … an understanding of your relationships, your location, your constraints and your tone …

… Apple is finally turning Siri into a remarkably capable, knowledgeable PA.

Take a look at this clip to see what I mean…

Should I care?

Ultimately, yes … because as much as this seems like just another cool trick a computer can do (and we’ve all grown up seeing those every year) … it’s illustrative of a change I’ve been trying to articulate for some time.

Not a change in tech … but a change in culture … and a change in our purpose in life.

This functionality is coming to your phone later this year: the ability to treat your phone like an intelligent companion who understands your world, your relationships and your manner in a way only a partner or PA might otherwise understand.

It is an astonishing leap when you consider that it will have been less than 2 years since ChatGPT was even launched.

And when I say “illustrative” what I mean is that … deep down, this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the vast “context window” of that tech … it’s ability to understand so much about your specific needs that sits outside of it’s precompiled model … and to understand so many different dimensions of the world: vision, time, relationship.

What is illustrates is that we’ve broken the cognitive boundary that set us apart from the animals we keep and the machines we make. We have created a machine, small enough for our pocket, which understands our world better than we understand it ourselves and which can act for us faster than we can think.

This. This is just the beginning.

This exponentially growing context window is coming to our medical institutions (comprehensive 360 diagnosis), to our ability to travel (AEVs), to our entertainment (total immersion VR gaming) and to our workplaces (context-aware autonomous robotics).

To all those who thought GPT was “just guessing the next word” they’ve missed the trick unfolding before their eyes.

Machine learning (which has been coming since I was a kid in the 90’s) was only ever the Pledge. LLMs, like ChatGPT were only ever the Turn.

Now it is time for the Prestige… and the world will never be the same again.