Every time Wired's  Steven Levy visits the Apple Park campus, his mind flashes to a tour he took months before the construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”

Levy recently returned to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The tech world is at an inflection point. The mightiest companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. I'm here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI.

Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.

Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of first-movers and, with a strong grasp of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies relatable and even sexy. Think back to how the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their tunes.

Cook also contends that Apple had been preparing for the AI revolution all along. As far back as 2018, he poached Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. Then he pulled the plug on a long-running smart-car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and marshaled the company’s machine-learning talent to build AI into its software products.

In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)

The ultimate assessments, of course, will come from users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it is this: Should this first iteration of AI fall short, an unrepentant Cook will show up at a future pretaped keynote hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat. For more, read the full report from Wired.