Apple’s PROSE AI learns to write like you, but is that enough to catch up in the AI race?

At WWDC 2024, Apple promised the world a smarter, more helpful Siri powered by Apple Intelligence. It was poised to be a next-gen AI assistant that would not only understand you better but feel more natural and helpful in everyday use.

A year on, at WWDC 2025, those promises are still unfulfilled and that vision still feels largely theoretical. Siri hasn’t had its ChatGPT moment yet. The flashy promises of contextual awareness, proactive suggestions, and nuanced voice responses remain trapped somewhere between the keynote and closed beta.

ALSO READ: Everything announced at WWDC 2025

But now, with the publication of a research paper introducing PROSE (Preference Reasoning by Observing and Synthesising Examples), Apple might be signaling what its AI strategy is really about. Not just intelligent assistants, but personal ones.

From one-size-fits-all to the one-that-fits-you

Let’s be honest, most generative AI today feels like a digital stranger with a thesaurus. Whether you’re using ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, the tone most prompters get often feels polished yet hollow. This is where Apple’s PROSE aims to shift the narrative.

By learning from a user’s past writing style from emails, notes, maybe even messages, PROSE will create a writing profile that mirrors your tone, sentence structure, and vocabulary. It’s all about sounding like you. Whether that’s formal and precise or chatty and emoji-laced, the AI adapts through iterative refinement and consistency checks.

And the results, according to Apple’s testing using a new dataset called PLUME, speak for themselves. PROSE allegedly outperformed other personalisation models by a significant margin and even boosted the performance of foundation models like GPT-4o when paired together.

A telling shift in Apple’s AI focus

So, what does this tell us? First, it’s a subtle but powerful shift in AI priorities. Apple doesn’t just want a smart assistant. It wants your assistant. While companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta chase general-purpose AGI (artificial general intelligence), Apple is focused on user-level AI that’s tightly integrated into your personal ecosystem.

This makes sense when you consider Apple’s DNA. Privacy, personalisation, and ecosystem control have always been its pillars. With PROSE, Apple can lean into these values. Imagine a future where your iPhone drafts emails that don’t just “get the job done” but reflect your voice. Where the system doesn’t just autocomplete, it completes you.

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And unlike cloud-dependent models, PROSE is built on Apple’s on-device foundation models. So, it could offer all this without your data ever leaving your device. That’s a huge differentiator in an increasingly privacy-anxious world.

But is it too late?

Still, there’s an elephant in the room. For all the promise PROSE brings, Apple still lags behind in the generative AI race. ChatGPT has become a verb. Gemini is part of the Android fabric. Copilot is redefining how we work on Windows. Meanwhile, the enhanced Siri that was meant to usher in Apple’s AI era? Still MIA.

The longer Apple delays delivering tangible AI features, the harder it becomes to own the narrative. For many users, Apple Intelligence feels like vapourware – all promise, no product. And if PROSE is the secret sauce meant to make Apple’s AI feel personal, it needs to leap from research paper to product. Fast.

The public is ready for it. The idea of an AI that adapts to you, not the other way around, is powerful. But without integration demos or release timelines, PROSE risks becoming just another “what if.”

Learning to sound human, when AI still can’t think

There’s also a philosophical thread running through Apple’s latest papers. In The Illusion of Thinking, Apple researchers challenge how “intelligent” today’s large language models really are. In reasoning tests, even top-tier models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 fumbled, revealing that what passes as intelligence today is often performance, not understanding.

ALSO READ: OpenAI GPT-4o unveiled with powerful text to video, speech processing

If we’re not close to AI that thinks, perhaps the next best step is AI that feels human. Tools that can sound like you, empathise with you; even if they can’t truly comprehend your intent. In that sense, PROSE may be Apple’s pragmatic response – build AI that mirrors users, rather than outsmarts them.

The Human OS

PROSE could be Apple’s first big step toward what some are calling the “Human OS” – a world where your devices don’t just compute, but understand you. This isn’t the same AI race Google or OpenAI is running. And maybe that’s the point. Apple doesn’t need to win AGI. It just needs to win you – your phone, your watch, your workflow.

The AI that sounds like you, writes like you, and respects your privacy. That might just be Apple’s most compelling product yet. But time is ticking. Because in the world of AI, it’s not just the best idea that wins, it’s often the first one that ships.