Apple Just Joined Tech's Great Race to Democratize AI

Federighi announced new APIs that help coders building apps for Apple devices do things like recognize faces or animals in photos, or parse the meaning of text. The reasoning goes that if you can make your phones, operating system, or cloud the best place to build smart new software that leverages AI, more users and revenue will follow. For example, Federighi boasted that Apple's new tools help developers run machine learning on data without it having to leave a person's device, giving performance and privacy benefits. A company that needs to run image recognition inside apps on both Apple and Android devices might prefer to use Google's cloud machine learning APIs instead, for example.