As Apple enters AI race, iPhone maker turns to its army of developers for an edge
A view of Apple’s new iPhone 16 at an Apple Store on the Regent Street in London, United Kingdom on September 20, 2024.
Rasid Necati Aslim | Anadolu | Getty Images
As Apple prepares Apple Intelligence to jump into Silicon Valley’s AI race, it’s relying on one of its strongest advantages: Its army of 34 million app developers.
IPhone users will get their first taste of Apple Intelligence, the company’s artificial intelligence system, later this month. The company is relying on Apple Intelligence to be the strongest selling point for the iPhone 16, its latest generation of smartphones.
Apple’s AI isn’t as advanced as the state of the art coming out of the most advanced labs, such as rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama. Apple isn’t using the biggest models, nor can it pull off some of the more show-stopping tricks of the bleeding-edge voice models — OpenAI’s latest can sing, for example.
Where Apple is hoping to distinguish its AI is that Siri may actually be able to do things on your phone — send emails, decipher calendars and take and edit photos. That’s something other company’s AI chatbots cannot currently do, and to accomplish this, Apple is beckoning its army of third-party developers to fine tune their apps to collaborate with Apple Intelligence. Eventually, Siri may be able to trigger any action in an app that a user can take, part of the company’s long term vision for Siri, Apple said in June.
“Siri will have the ability to take hundreds of new actions in and across apps,” said Apple’s Kelsey Peterson, director of machine learning, in the Apple Intelligence launch video.
Apple can easily make this happen for its own apps, but for Apple Intelligence to interact with the millions of non-Apple apps, it needs developers to embrace a new way of programming their apps. This means developers will need to create as many as hundreds of snippets of additional code called App Intents.
Apple has a strong history of getting its developers to support new platform initiatives, and it’s running a well-worn playbook to get them on board — personal attention from developer relations, a party-like atmosphere at the company’s annual developer’s conference and most importantly, it dangles App Store promotion that can lead to millions of downloads for developers who get on board.
If third-party developers jump on board and the Siri system works as advertised, it could represent one of Apple’s biggest and most durable advantages in the AI race.
“You should be able to string things together and kind of get that future we’ve all been envisioning where you can use Siri conversationally, to do a bunch of things at once,” said Jordan Morgan, an iOS developer who’s written a tutorial about App Intents.
Whether Apple is successful at cajoling its millions of developers is a critical question, and the stakes are high for the company.
The company is relying on Apple Intelligence, which only works on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 models that came out this year, to spur a wave of upgrades and boost flat iPhone sales. If Apple’s improved Siri is poorly supported by developers or it fails to impress, it could cool iPhone sales, and customers could wind up choosing to use a rival’s voice assistant through an app instead of the built-in Siri.
Apple Intelligence photos
Apple Inc.
What are App Intents?
Inside the Music app, for example, Apple has built about 10 intents, including actions like “Add to Playlist,” “Play Music,” or “Select Music.” A single app intent should define a single action, programmers say.
If you take a caffeine tracking app, for example, one intent would be the ability to show an overview of exactly how much caffeine the user has logged today, Morgan said.
When that App Intent is finished, Apple’s various “system experiences,” such as widgets, live activities, control center and Shortcuts, will be able to quickly display a current running tracker of how much caffeine has been logged without the user ever opening up the tracking app.
System search is another big draw for some developers. App Intents will allow apps to surface specific emails or other more granular data inside Spotlight, Apple’s system search.
App Intents don’t take that long to write, developers say, often requiring only a few lines of code.
In previous years, Apple recommended that developers adopt App Intents for their most important features, said Michael Tigas, the developer of Focused Work, a productivity app.
“Now, if there’s a way to adjust your app to perform any general action then you should create an App Intent for it,” Tigas said.
Fortunately for developers, they still have time to write all the code necessary for App Intents. While Apple Intelligence is starting to roll out next month, the biggest improvements to Siri aren’t scheduled to be released until next year.
Apple has to incentivize developers
Apple’s new Siri system will better understand questions even if a user makes a speaking error, a direct result of Apple’s work with language models, a relative of the large language models that power systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
That means that Siri will be much more flexible in understanding the hundreds of different ways a user could phrase, for example, “apply a photo filter to an image I took yesterday.”
Apple has to train and test its model to understand the range of the most likely commands and questions for any given category of apps.
A downside to Apple’s approach is that only a few categories of apps will be supported by the new Siri at first, starting with photo and email apps. Eventually, Siri will support apps that focus on books, journaling, whiteboards, managing files, word processing, browsers, camera and photos, the company said.
Developers are already imagining how they might plan for users to interact with their apps with their voices.
A representative for Superhuman, a premium email app, told CNBC that it plans to use Apple’s AI system to enable questions about the contents of emails, such as “Hey Siri, when does my flight depart?” or “Hey Siri, when am I meeting with James to review his proposal?”
There’s a downside to Apple’s plan in the eyes of some developers who worry that users will spend less time inside their apps or confuse Apple Intelligence with the AI features they’ve built themselves.
“If this story were only about App Intents, developers would worry that their products might be reduced to the role of the plumbing that powers Siri, and leave them unclear on how to build sustainable businesses around it,” Igor Zhadanov, CEO under of Readdle, which makes email app Spark, wrote in an email.
Another drawback is that Apple Intelligence features will only be available on the latest iPhones, a small subset of the total iPhone user base. That limited market of iPhone users may discourage developers from investing time and effort into supporting the technology in the near term.
“Apple are limiting these kinds of Apple Intelligence features to the new 2024 iPhones and the expensive models from last year, so you won’t be able to build something for the masses anyway,” Tigas said.
WATCH: Apple Intelligence will mark a ‘renaissance of growth’ for the company, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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