This year’s WWDC keynote was an odd one. It was relatively short at around 76 minutes, for one thing. It also eschewed the usual OS-by-OS structure, but I think that’s for the best. The biggest change was that there was really only one major thing Apple wanted to talk about: “Apple Intelligence”.
I’ve been following Apple news and rumours since the year 2000, and I can’t remember being less excited for rumoured WWDC announcements. Apple’s software story is in rough shape, and I worry that this year’s event won’t do much to help. Perhaps it’ll be the beginning of an upswing, but we’ve got quite a way to go.
Yesterday, I wrote about the massive increase in security issues being identified by AI. Daniel Stenberg, the author of curl, was a key part of that story. At first he was being overwhelmed by a torrent of “AI slop” reports. In the last few months, the reports have become almost all legitimate, but the pace hasn’t changed. Today, Stenberg posted about his recent experience with Claude Mythos.
No matter how you feel about AI, it’s changing the world of software. The “T” in ChatGPT was invented to improve language translation, and large language models (LLMs) are very good at this. Interestingly, translating between French and Japanese is effectively the same as translating between English and Python for these systems. As LLMs improve, we’re also finding that there’s little difference between “help me fix mistakes in this document”, and “find the flaws in this codebase”. LLMs are now great at both tasks, but the latter has much larger implications.
I’ve been noticing a lot of service outages lately. Some with few enough nines that you’d think they were going for a low score. My guess: this is probably going to get worse before it gets better. But maybe not for the reasons you’d think.
Nilay Patel put out an excellent Decoder episode today. In it, he dove into the idea of “software brain”, which is something he’s been workshopping during the past several Vergecast episodes. It’s his attempt to explain why so many Silicon Valley folks are head over heels about AI, at the same time that most normal people hate it. The idea really resonates with me.
Yesterday, Claude Code disappeared from the $20/month subscription tier on Anthropic’s website. Well, for some people. Then it came back. As Simon Willison put it, it’s all very confusing.
Yesterday, Tim Cook announced his timeline for stepping down as Apple’s CEO . I felt like I should write something about this, but I wasn’t sure what. I fell back into thinking about Cook’s time by the numbers.