Apple needs to differentiate itself, and they have chosen privacy as a way to do that, which I'm all for. The headlines around Microsoft's AI efforts have largely been a nightmare, with a ton of bad press. If the press around Apple's AI is all about how over the top they went with security and privacy, that will likely make people feel a little better about using it.

I'm not a big user of OpenAI's stuff, but if I was going to use any of it, I'd rather use it through Apple's anonymizing layer than going directly to OpenAI.

I actually thought one notable thing in the presentation was that they spent all this time talking about their new private cloud compute architecture.

And then showed that they have a prompt asking if you're ok sending the data to OpenAI. Presumably because despite OpenAI promising not to use your data (a promise apple relayed) OpenAI didn't buy into this new architecture.

Thank you for mentioning this. I thought I was going crazy, because I heard this too, but kept seeing comment after comment on other sites asking if a person could choose not to use OpenAI, or that it was happening magically in the background. The way I heard it, the user was in control.

I think this goes back to what Steve said in 2010.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-jlF98SzA

And yes, while the data might not be linked to the user and striped of sensitive data, I could see people not wanting something very personal things to go to OpenAI, even if there should be no link. For example, I wouldn’t want any of my pictures going to OpenAI unless I specifically say it is OK for a given image.

I was under the impression that the OpenAI integrations were more about content generation and correction than the Apple Intelligence-driven personal stuff.

I’m not sure but I thought I saw it mentioned that OpenAI is still allowed to train on the data received from Apple customers.

Actually the opposite. They’re explicitly not allowed to.

Different features.

OpenAI provides the chatbot interface we all know.

The PCC cloud serves all of the other integrated AI features like notification prioritization, summarization, semantic search, etc. At least when those can’t be run on device.

What if you can't turn it off and this extreme security is the justification for why?

If user data disclosure is forced, would user data be limited to PCC nodes located within the same legal jurisdiction, e.g. EU, UK, US, China, etc?

PCC is as government-proof as the iPhone itself so jurisdiction may not matter much.

Some jurisdictions require data to be processed within the jurisdiction.

what happens when your apple id is turned off?

It's for shareholders. Microsoft and Nvidia have a bigger market cap than Apple now, thanks to the AI investor boom. Apple need to show they can be all about AI, too. But Apple have the institutional culture to maintain privacy.

This is exactly what I was thinking during the entire keynote. It was blatantly the WWSC (worldwide shareholder conference) and hackernews commenters are eating it up.

Don't get me wrong, I've always appreciated apples on device ml/AI features, those have always been powerful, interesting and private but these announcements feel very rushed, it's literally a few weeks after Microsoft's announcements.

They've basically done almost exactly what Microsoft announced with a better UX and a pinky promise about privacy. How are they going to pay for all of that compute? Is this going to be adjusted into the price of the iPhones and MacBook? and then a subscription layer is going to be added to continue paying for it? I don't feel comfortable with the fact that my phone is basically extending it's hardware to the cloud. No matter how "private" it is it's just discomforting to know that apple will be doing inference on things seemingly randomly to "extend" compute capabilities.

Also what on earth is apple high on, integrating a third party API into the OS, how does that even make sense. Google was always a separate app, or a setting in safari, you didn't have Google integrated at an OS level heck you don't have that on Android. It feels very discomforting to know that today my phone could phone home to somewhere other than iCloud.

> How are they going to pay for all of that compute?

Hardware sales. Only the latest pro/max models will run these models, everyone else is going to have to upgrade.

Me

I don’t care if the government has access to the data. I just don’t want “bad actors” (scammers, foreign governments, ad-tech companies, insurance companies, etc) to have access to my private data. But i also want the power of LLM’s. Does that sound so far fetched?

I’m a realist. I already EXPECT the US govt has all my data. I don’t like the status quos, but it is what is is.

It’s for their competitors who have pushed a narrative that Apple was caught “flat-footed”. Well there is actually a line of LLM and cloud infrastructure at iPhone scale. This is not merely 2 years of work. They push the privacy because it’s expected of them.

Gemini could claim privacy but I think people would assume that if true, it would make it less effective.

The NSA partners directly with telecoms companies, especially AT&T. Its easier when companies like Meta and Facebook will play along, but that's not the only way they get access to a bunch of our data.

How do telecom companies unravel public key encryption in transit?