Three former Apple employees – two of them the ones who developed the Shortcuts app – are working on a new project: Bringing AI to the Mac.
The trio say their aim is to bring back some of the magic you used to feel when powering-up a personal computer back in the 80s – though they do also give a simple example of the kind of practical application they have in mind …
The team behind the Shortcuts app
Ari Weinstein and Conrad Kramer joined Apple after developing a powerful iOS automation app, Workflow. This was subsequently acquired by Apple, renamed Shortcuts, and is now a stock iPhone app. The pair joined the Cupertino company as part of the deal.
Apple today acquired popular iOS tool Workflow, which allows users to combine the functionalities of various apps together to automate normally complex processes […]
“We are thrilled to be joining Apple,” said Weinstein in a statement. “We’ve worked closely with Apple from the very beginning, from kickstarting our company as students attending WWDC to developing and launching Workflow and seeing its amazing success on the App Store. We can’t wait to take our work to the next level at Apple and contribute to products that touch people across the world.”
However, it seems Weinstein missed the startup world, as he left the company back in July. He said at the time that working for the company has been an honor and a lot of fun, but he wanted to “build something new.” We now have some idea what that something is going to be.
Bringing AI to Mac
The Verge reports.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT have, to date, been fairly impersonal, existing outside of the apps and data that we use every day. A new startup by three ex-Apple employees called Software Applications Incorporated hopes to change that.
The company’s CEO, Ari Weinstein, is a repeat founder, having sold his last startup, the iOS automation app Workflow, to Apple in 2017 alongside co-founder and CTO Conrad Kramer. This time, the two have been joined by Kim Beverett, a 10-year Apple vet who was onstage at this year’s WWDC and previously oversaw product management for various teams, including Safari, Messages, FaceTime, and user privacy.
Weinstein said that the first personal computers created a kind of magic, because they could do anything – even if you had to write the software yourself. Today’s Macs are powerful and easy to use, but don’t offer that magical sense of anything being possible, which is what the team wants to change.
The piece only gives one practical example.
Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.
A potential work pattern lesson for Apple
While the team says it mostly wanted the freedom that comes with creating their own startup, Kim Beverett might have a lesson for Apple. She said that the company’s inflexibility on working from home was another key reason for her departure.
Beverett, meanwhile, adds that Apple’s in-person work policy became unfeasible after moving farther away from Cupertino during the pandemic.
Apple’s relatively hardline stance on this proved unpopular with some of its staff, especially software engineers.
9to5Mac’s Take
Given what two of the team created last time, and adding a senior Apple product manager to the mix, I’m excited to see what they create.
I think they are spot-on when referencing the inflexibility of today’s Macs and PCs when it comes to handling tasks which ought, in principle, to be very simple. It’s surprising how often we found ourselves carrying out exactly the kind of mindless, repetitive tasks which computers were supposed to do for us. Things that take enough time to be tedious, but not enough time to automate ourselves.
I’d love to see more powerful, natural-language capabilities brought to the Mac. Another Apple acquisition ahead, perhaps …
Photo: Carl Heyerdahl/Unsplash
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