Apple CEO Tim Cook (L); John Giannandrea (C), senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy; and Craig Federighi (R), senior vice president of software engineering, speak during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images
Apple fully embraced artificial intelligence on Monday, as company executives explained the features and reasoning behind Apple Intelligence, the company’s new AI software suite.
But Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference launch event was carefully crafted to distinguish the iPhone maker from current AI leaders, such as Microsoft and Google, at a panel discussion Monday afternoon.
Software chief Craig Federighi and AI chief John Giannandrea said during the panel that Apple has a different approach to the technology than its Silicon Valley rivals. Unlike companies that are building AI for a broad range of products, Apple is instead focused only on the devices it sells and the personal data that AI could use.
Apple revealed a more limited approach that eschews future-focused thinking about the potential of the technology in favor of small tasks that can be done now without burning up battery life.
“We think AI’s role is not to replace our users but to empower them,” Federighi said.
Apple’s AI may be the first that its over 2 billion users interact with. If its AI features are favored over cloud-based competition from Microsoft or Google, it could change how billions of dollars in AI infrastructure per year is built and shift the direction of products that use the technology.
Much of the AI development that has captured investor and technological interest has focused on building or securing powerful supercomputers equipped with Nvidia chips to develop even more power-hungry AI models. In this scenario, users access the AI software by communicating with equally powerful servers over the web.
Apple’s AI is mostly on your device
Apple Intelligence was unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
Apple’s vision for AI isn’t about one big model — it’s a slew of smaller models that don’t require the same amount of computing power and memory, running on Apple’s devices and chips themselves. If the AI on the phone can’t do it, then Apple, or an app using Apple’s tools, reaches out to the cloud to access a larger AI model. Apple partnered with OpenAI, for example, to give users access to ChatGPT if Siri can’t provide an answer. These features come into play only if users allow it.
Apple executives don’t refer to this strategy as using one or multiple models. Instead, they package it as just “Apple Intelligence.”
“We think that the right approach to this is to have a series of different models and different sizes for different use cases,” Giannandrea said.
Giannandrea said the company worked to create a 3-billion parameter model as part of Apple Intelligence. ChatGPT’s GPT-3 model from 2020, in comparison, is much larger, at 175 billion parameters. The more parameters, the more memory and computing power needed to run the model.
Apple’s approach is faster than the cloud-based options and has privacy benefits. However, there can be issues when the models are too small to get anything done. Apple is betting that through a user’s iPhone, its AI can tap into personal data about appointments, location, and what the user is doing. One example provided by Federighi is that his phone knows who his daughter is.
Apple also says it’s making sure its small models work only on tasks they can excel at, rather than give users an open-ended chatbot interface.
“There’s a critical extra step, which is we’re not taking this teenager and telling him to go fly an airplane,” Federighi said.
Many AI features Apple announced on Monday are similar to products already announced this year. Apple’s AI can summarize and rewrite documents, generate small images, and translate conversations in real time. One notable feature will enable users to generate new emojis using AI without connecting to the internet. The new features will be released this fall in a beta version.
Apple’s approach to privacy
Private Cloud Compute unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
Privacy will be a challenge for Apple as it embraces AI. It has used privacy as one of its primary marketing tools for years, highlighting that Apple’s business model doesn’t require ad targeting and that it has the best interests of its users in mind versus data brokers and spammers.
Other AI companies collect user data and store it to improve their software, a practice that doesn’t fit Apple’s current privacy policies. Much of Apple’s presentation on Monday pointed to steps the company has taken to prevent the impression that it’s hoovering up user data to improve its AI.
“We’re not going to take that data and go send it to some cloud somewhere,” Giannandrea said. “Because we want everything to be very private, whether it’s running locally or on a cloud computing service, and that’s the way we want it so we can use your most personal data.”
Apple didn’t detail what data was used to train its AI models, beyond that it uses files scraped from the public web in addition to licensed data, such as news archives and stock photography.
Apple said it developed its own servers using its Apple chips, called Apple Private Cloud, to prevent user data sent back to an AI server from being stored or re-used. It will allow third parties to inspect the software, a notable move for a secrecy-focused company that usually doesn’t provide information about its infrastructure.
“Even if a company maybe makes a promise and says, ‘Well, hey, look, we’re not going to do anything with the data.’ You have no way to verify that,” Federighi said, explaining why Apple will allow inspection of its AI server software.
More AI to come
ChatGPT integration with Apple iOS 18 announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
At times, Apple officials seemed to downplay how big a shift this is in the company’s AI strategy, saying that it’s a continuation of the machine learning work the company has already done to edit photos or transcribe text, or to put AI-specific blocks on its chips.
“It’s only recently that others are starting to suddenly claim like there’s some new category there,” Federighi said. “But those are things we’ve been shipping for a long time.”
However, Apple didn’t bet it all on a single approach. It will offer ChatGPT built into its operating systems, allowing users to prompt OpenAI’s model for free and offering users a more powerful and larger AI model. However, OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be marked in Apple’s software, telling users that data will be sent to OpenAI servers, which run on Microsoft’s cloud. Answers will indicate that they were generated by ChatGPT, too, just in case they go off the rails.
Apple said it could offer different models in the future, signaling that Apple Intelligence is not the only AI system it expects its customers to use. Federighi said that one day some of its customers might want a medical AI system or legal AI model built into Apple products, for example. Or maybe one of Google’s models.
“We’re going to look forward to doing integrations with models like Google Gemini, for instance, in the future. I mean, nothing to announce right now,” Federighi said. “But that’s our direction.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “FIG.”
The offering would be one of the hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma’s growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the U.K. That led Adobe to pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Revenue in the first quarter increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in the same period a year ago, according to Figma’s prospectus. The company recorded a net income of $44.9 million, compared to $13.5 million a year earlier.
As of March 31, Figma had around 450,000 customers. Of those, 1,031 were contributing at least $100,000 a year to annual revenue, up 47% from a year earlier. Clients include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. More than half of revenue comes from outside the U.S.
Figma didn’t say how many shares it plans to sell in the IPO. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer last year, and in April it announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC.
Wall Street banks predicted a rush of IPOs after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November following a dry spell dating back to late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. While President Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April roiled markets and led a number of companies to delay their plans, activity has been picking up of late.
Stablecoin issuer Circle doubled in value in its early June debut and is now up more than sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of almost $43 billion. Online banking company Chime also debuted in June, following Hinge Health’s IPO in May. Artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in March, jumped 46% in June and has quadrupled since its offering.
Buy now, pay later company Klarna, based in the U.K., filed for a U.S. IPO in March, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.
Figma was founded in 2012 by CEO Dylan Field, 33, and Evan Wallace, and is based in San Francisco. The company had 1,646 employees as of March 31.
Before establishing Figma, Field spent over two years at Brown University, where he met Wallace. Field then took a Thiel Fellowship “to pursue entrepreneurial projects,” according to the filing. The two-year program that Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel established in 2011 gives young entrepreneurs a $200,000 grant along with support from founders and investors, according to an online description.
Field is the biggest individual owner of Figma, with 56.6 million Class B shares and 51.1% of voting power ahead of the IPO. He said in a letter to investors that it was time for Figma to buck the “trend of many amazing companies staying privately indefinitely.”
Databricks, SpaceX and Stripe are among high-valued companies that are still private.
“Some of the obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets apply,” he wrote, explaining the decision. “More importantly, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma — and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets.”
Field added that as a public company, investors should “expect us to take big swings,” including through acquisitions. In April Figma bought the assets and team of an unnamed technology company for $14 million, according to the filing.
The IPO will also mark another much-needed win for Silicon Valley venture firms, which are in need of returns after the multi-year slump. Index Ventures is the largest outside shareholder, with a 17% stake before the offering, according to the filing. Greylock owns 16%, Kleiner Perkins controls 14% and Sequoia has a stake of 8.7%.
Figma said it faces “intense competition” and that loss of market share would “adversely affect our business,” but didn’t name any specific competitors.
Over 13 million people use Figma per month, and only one-third of them are designers, according to the filing. In March the company announced Figma Sites, a tool that turns designs into working websites. It’s one of a few new products that diversify the company away from its collaborative service for crafting app and website designs.
As of March 31, Figma had $1.54 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.
Using its cash, Figma has begun investing in digital currencies. In 2024, Figma’s board authorized a $55 million investment into a Bitwise Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. As of March 31, the holding was worth $69.5 million, according to the filing. In May, the board approved a $30 million investment in Bitcoin, and Figma spent the money on USD Coin, which is a stablecoin.