Apple Intelligence and Acting are twins

This week, I will share with you two topics:

1. Apple Intelligence

2. Acting is an art form that you learn only by acting

Apple WWDC2024 was a wow!

Apple didn't disappoint. Last week, Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC, was packed with goodies.

Thousands of developers gathered at the Apple campus, and millions of us watched the live streams of the keynotes. While the updates for the basic functionalities and features of their operating systems (MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and AppleTV OS) were incremental and more finetuning than mindblowing, their AI announcement branded as Apple Intelligence was more than at least investors expected.

Apple's stock price closed at an all-time high of $207.15 per share, a 7.26% single-day jump the day after the announcements. This propelled Apple's market capitalisation to over $3.17 trillion, making it the world's most valuable publicly traded company again.

Apple Intelligence is the AI for the rest of us, as they said, nodding to the good old Steve Jobs in the spiritual cloud services. It also hinted at Apple's message about their AI. Like the original Macintosh in 1984 (or iMac, or iPod, or iPhone, or Apple Watch, or Vision Pro...), this could be their next big thing beyond just Large Language Models and chatbots and all the hype around AI with very few real tools for ordinary folks.

Apple has said it doesn't want to be the first but the best. And certainly, with its Apple Intelligence, it managed to show that AI is now mature enough to be an almost invisible but inevitable part of our daily work. I have been testing dozens of AI apps and trying to understand Google's cryptic approach and Microsoft's convoluted CoPilot. Apple's approach is like a breath of fresh air.

Apple showed compelling demos of how Apple Intelligence can improve your writing, help you visualise your thoughts, and use Siri almost like a mind reader. It happens mainly in the device you use—not in the dark dungeons of Microsoft Azure or any other scary cloud vaults where your information is just fodder for the ever-so-greedy web vampires.

Because of its own silicon and tightly integrated ecosystem, Apple has an advantage. It can embed AI to become a genuinely personal and practical productivity and creativity booster. Most Apple Intelligence happens locally on the user's device or using Apple's super secure private cloud service, where users' data is safe and inaccessible even to Apple. Unlike the others, Apple puts the user in the driver's seat, giving the user complete control of the AI. Read more from Apple's website. It is exciting stuff.

What about their collaboration with OpenAI's ChatGPT? That was a very juicy part of the announcement. Apple users will have free access to ChatGPT (and later, many other LLMs), but the users will control that access. Apple draws a very tight demarcation line between the LLMs other providers use and Apple users, who are safeguarded by security only the Apple ecosystem can offer.

So, this year is a significant breakthrough for the rest of us who use the Apple ecosystem. Apple gives us the upper hand and peace of mind when we use AI for fun, work, and making the world a better one token at a time.

I cannot wait to get these OS updates later this year—something to look forward to.

"In acting craft will come," Al Pacino

Abowe is a YouTube collection of wise words from Al Pacino on acting. It’s 9 minutes long and despite sometimes poor video quality worth of watching.

I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting a talented young actor studying at the local drama school. Because of my first profession as a theatre director, he sought my advice and maybe even coaching to hone his skills.

I was surprised to hear that during the first year of school, these young talents have hardly any opportunity to work towards a show and have a real audience. Instead, they focus on 'the basics' and should 'follow the process'.

Drilling deeper into those basics and processes, I felt sorry for the young people who have been putting all their passion into this nonsense. It is like if you want to study music, you are not allowed to play any instrument for a year because there is this process of learning music without playing it.

From my own experience, the opposite is true. You learn art only by doing it and then reflecting on what went well and where you fell on your face. When you are in the middle of rehearsing a meaty piece of script, you open your mind to take in the learning from the moment and link that experience to the theories, and you understand better why and how. For example, understanding your voice's physiology could improve your acting. You get the picture.

It's the same with everything. We don't learn to speak by listening to lectures about syntax and memorising words from the dictionary. We learn to talk because we want to say 'daddy' or 'mummy' or, in our son's case,' Densha'. Densha is a train in Japanese, and our son was more into trains than interested in his parents. Now, the key word for him is camera. He didn't go to the university to learn photography; instead, he took tens of thousands of pictures, analysed them, edited them, and used YouTube to learn more. As a result, he has already published four photo books of his work at age 21. And the fifth is on its way to print.

I spent three hours listening to this young actor and his big dreams, and as a result, I promised to help him after he returned from the semester break in three weeks. Let's see how things go. I am excited to direct a monologue after a small 34-year break from theatre. If we create a show, that's fine, but in any case, I am determined to help this young man build his acting muscles and embrace his potential as an actor.

If we have a show, I hope you all will buy the tickets :-)

Ngā mihi

Jussi

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht