The company’s CEO, Ari Weinstein, is a repeat founder, having sold his last startup, iOS automation app Workflow, to Apple in 2017 alongside co-founder and CTO Conrad Kramer. This time, the pair have been joined by Kim Beverett, a 10-year Apple veteran who was on stage at this year’s WWDC and previously led product management for various teams including Safari, Messages, FaceTime and user privacy.
In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tell me that their focus is on bringing generative AI to the desktop in a way that “pushes operating systems forward”. While they don’t have a product to show yet, they are prototyping with a number of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The ultimate goal, says Weinstein, is to recreate “the magic you felt when you used computers in the 80s and 90s”.
“When you turned on an Apple II or an Atari, you got this simple console where you, as the user, could type in basic code and program the computer to do whatever you wanted,” he explains. “Nowadays it’s kind of the opposite. Everybody spends time in very optimised operating systems with pieces of software that are designed to be extremely easy to use, but not flexible”.
He gives an example: “Sometimes you have 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 create a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and enable everyday people to use computers to actually solve their problems.”
The team’s love of early PC nostalgia is evident on the Software Applications website, which is literally Mac OS 8 running in a browser tab. Weinstein says they hope to hire up to 10 people next year, including a designer and some machine learning experts. They’ve already raised $6.5 million in funding from OpenAI’s Altman, Figma CEO Dylan Field and other big names in Silicon Valley.
In a world where venture capital money is drying up and mass layoffs are sweeping the tech world, it’s a feat to raise so much money before you even have a product, though the trio’s past success certainly helps. “I met Ari on the platform formerly known as Twitter when we were both in high school,” says Field. “He’s one of the most talented people I know, and I would back anything he does.”
Apple doesn’t buy startups very often, and when it does, they rarely continue as standalone products like Weinstein’s latest venture. Shortly after the purchase, Workflow was renamed Shortcuts, and is now pre-installed on iPhones and Macs. If you have an iPhone 15, you can use Shortcuts to create all sorts of use cases for the new Action Button on the side of the device, such as controlling your home’s smart lights or triggering an action in a third-party app.
Given that Apple seems to have been caught flat-footed in the generative AI race, the natural question is whether Weinstein, Kramer and Beverett felt they needed to leave the company to build what they’re now working on.
When I ask, Weinstein dismisses the notion: “We started this company because we’re so excited about what’s happening in generative AI right now, because we were excited to work together again, and because we love the open, creative environment of a startup.” Beverett, meanwhile, adds that Apple’s policy of working face-to-face became infeasible after he moved further away from Cupertino during the pandemic.
While a handful of startups, such as Rewind, are building personalised AI systems for the desktop, none I’ve come across seem to have as broad a vision as Software Applications, suggesting they have an open track for the time being. And with most consumer software companies building primarily for mobile these days, it’s refreshing to see a team focusing on the Mac instead.
“The average interaction on a mobile device is measured in seconds, and the average interaction on a desktop is measured in minutes or hours,” says Weinstein. “So saving people time on the desktop is really exciting for us.”
