The Future of Software: Insights into AI-First Design Patterns from WWDC 2024
Apple’s latest developer tools and the new Siri and Apple Intelligence platform, unveiled at WWDC 2024, signal a shift in software architecture from apps to AI-first platforms built around facts and actions.
Operating systems will transition from app-first to AI-first platforms, and what we now know as apps will be deconstructed into embeddable controls and semantically indexable content.
The primary model of user interaction will become dynamically generated, context-aware dashboards of controls and content integrated from multiple domain-specific “apps.”
The architecture of the new Siri and “Apple Intelligence” system combines two fundamental ideas in generative AI: retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and generative actions.
These techniques address the fundamental limitations of raw generative AI systems: that they are not inherently factual and they cannot perform actions.
RAG attempts to solve the factuality problem by looking up relevant facts first and ensuring the generative AI has access to those facts while generating its response.
