[HN Gopher] Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac
        
       Author : terramex
       Score  : 649 points
       Date   : 2024-06-10 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
        
       | minimaxir wrote:
       | The name and attempted reappropriation of the term "AI" is going
       | to make SEO a pain in the ass.
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | good. SEO should die in a dumpster fire. in fact, i would love
         | to create a genmoji of that very thing
        
       | nkotov wrote:
       | While I think it's cool and I appreciate Apple crafting better
       | stories on why this is helpful, I still think for the everyday
       | person, they won't really care if it's AI or not.
        
         | gkoberger wrote:
         | Agreed! And the UI seemed pretty focused on not really
         | clarifying too much; I think they just mentioned AI a lot since
         | it was WWDC.
        
         | smith7018 wrote:
         | Most of Apple's announcements today featured AI but the term
         | wasn't explicitly mentioned. I think the last portion of the
         | keynote that focused on AI was merely for investors tbh
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | But Apple's integration means you can use it and not care if it
         | is AI or not. It'll just become part of using iOS (let's face
         | it, that's were the majority of Apple's users will be). From
         | creating a new "genmoji" to any of the other examples of
         | allowing people to do this without know WTF huggingface or the
         | other equally ridiculously named products are. They don't need
         | accounts. They just type a message and decide to put in a new
         | image.
         | 
         | Of course we've only seen examples from an overly produced
         | hype/propaganda video, but it looks to me of yet another
         | example of Apple taking products and making them usable to the
         | masses
        
           | FireBeyond wrote:
           | > but it looks to me of yet another example of Apple taking
           | products and making them usable to the masses
           | 
           | This is a bit obsequious to Apple. I find it hard to give a
           | cogent argument of how ChatGPT is not "usable to the masses"
           | at this point (and being -used- by the masses).
        
             | theshrike79 wrote:
             | It doesn't integrate to anything, you need to explicitly
             | give it context every time you ask it something.
             | 
             | You can't just log in to ChatGPT and ask it what was on
             | your calendar 2 weeks ago.
        
           | hot_gril wrote:
           | There's value in OS integration, but again, what are the real
           | use cases? Memoji or whatever doesn't qualify. Apple has
           | added a ton of features in recent years that I haven't used
           | once. If it's going to manage my calendar in a way I can rely
           | on or autocorrect will be smarter, that's actually useful.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | If Apple does a really good job of this, then the everyday
         | person probably shouldn't care if it's AI or not.
         | 
         | Who cares _how_ your flight information shows up at the right
         | time in the right place? the only thing that should matter is
         | that it _does_.
        
           | anonbanker wrote:
           | And nobody cares about how absolutely terrifying your
           | statement truly is, because the shiny benefits obfuscate the
           | destruction of privacy, despite Apple's reassurances.
        
             | criddell wrote:
             | The upsides are obvious and concrete, the downsides are
             | mostly hypotheticals.
             | 
             | People already carry around a device with a GPS, camera,
             | and microphone that has access to most of their intimate
             | and personal communications and finances. Adding AI
             | capabilities doesn't seem like a bridge too far, that's for
             | sure.
        
               | hot_gril wrote:
               | Also those devices are reporting real-time location to
               | cell carriers who are selling that data, and similarly
               | credit cards are reporting purchases. I sorta care about
               | that and won't shop at any local business that doesn't
               | accept cash. I don't care if Apple wants to show me my
               | flights, which surely any big bad org can already find on
               | me.
        
         | ru552 wrote:
         | This is exactly what they are going for. You can just ask Siri
         | now "what day did my wife say the recital is?" and Siri spits
         | the answer out without requiring you to go scroll through your
         | messages. Who cares that an LLM did the work?
        
       | mfiguiere wrote:
       | > Privacy protections are built in for users who access ChatGPT
       | -- their IP addresses are obscured, and OpenAI won't store
       | requests. ChatGPT's data-use policies apply for users who choose
       | to connect their account.
       | 
       | > ChatGPT will come to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later
       | this year, powered by GPT-4o.
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | > and OpenAI won't store requests.
         | 
         | What's a promise from Sam Altman worth, again?
        
           | spacebanana7 wrote:
           | Even if the promise were made in good faith, I fear it may be
           | hard to resist pressure from law enforcement etc.
        
             | Turing_Machine wrote:
             | If Apple is sitting in the middle proxying the IP
             | addresses, and not keeping any logs for longer than they
             | absolutely need to, law enforcement could go pee up a rope,
             | right?
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | You'd _hope_ so, but corporate resistance against
               | domestic intelligence has a bumpy track record:
               | https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-
               | to-...
        
           | educasean wrote:
           | Tim Cook doesn't seem to mind hanging his reputation on
           | sama's promise, so at least that's something
        
           | minimaxir wrote:
           | The promise is from Apple, not OpenAI, and likely
           | contractual.
           | 
           | If OpenAI actually went against that, Apple would unleash the
           | mother of all lawsuits.
        
           | wilg wrote:
           | What broken Sam Altman promises are you referring to?
        
             | avtar wrote:
             | Personally I would say the disparity between what was in
             | their founding agreement "be open-source--freely and
             | publicly available for anyone to use, modify and
             | distribute" https://archive.ph/R0LBL to the current state
             | of affairs.
             | 
             | But I guess the list of grievances could be longer:
             | 
             | https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/what-should-we-learn-
             | from-...
        
             | zoky wrote:
             | Leaving OpenAI, for one.
        
           | aaronharnly wrote:
           | That's not a "promise from Sam Altman", that's a contractual
           | term between Apple, Inc. and OpenAI, LLC.
           | 
           | So I think it's worth as much as Apple is willing to spend
           | enforcing it, which I imagine would be quite a bit.
        
             | shbooms wrote:
             | > that's a contractual term between Apple, Inc. and OpenAI,
             | LLC.
             | 
             | do you have a source on this or are you just assuming?
        
               | buildbot wrote:
               | Do you think this is all running off the standard openai
               | API and they picked a dev at random in Apple to use their
               | accounts API keys?
               | 
               | Of course there is some agreement...
        
               | Tagbert wrote:
               | It would be a very surprising business arrangement if
               | that was not explicitly called out. Apple is not going to
               | leave this to chance.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | > Apple is not going to leave this to chance.
               | 
               | How much would you be willing to bet, on a statement like
               | this? I love a sporting chance.
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | If we find out in the next 12 months that OpenAI has been
               | storing requests from Apple/Siri AND Apple doesn't come
               | down on them with a 10 ton lawyer hammer, I'll pay you
               | $500.
               | 
               | Can you match it the other way around? :)
        
             | hot_gril wrote:
             | Idk about Sam Altman in particular, but OpenAI pulled the
             | bait-and-switch you can still see in its name. We don't
             | know what the contract says exactly, but there are always
             | loopholes, and I would not assume anything OpenAI says to
             | be in good faith.
             | 
             | I also don't really care, but it's understandable why some
             | people do.
        
           | Handy-Man wrote:
           | That's just the enterprise guarantee. The same applies to
           | Azure OpenAI services and the API services provided by OpenAI
           | directly.
        
         | shironononon wrote:
         | "let's store responses and a hash of the request intent in a
         | kvp then"
        
           | talldayo wrote:
           | Please, an _encrypted_ key-value store. The private key is
           | only shared between you, Apple, and relevant law-enforcement
           | agencies. It 's as private as you can ask for, these days!
        
       | Tomte wrote:
       | No transcripts in Voice Memos? The one feature I was surprised
       | hasn't already been there for years, heavily rumored before this
       | WWDC, and now nothing?
        
         | andrewmunsell wrote:
         | From MacRumors:
         | 
         | > Notes can record and transcribe audio. When your recording is
         | finished, Apple Intelligence automatically generates a summary.
         | Recording and summaries coming to phone calls too.
         | 
         | So the functionality exists, maybe just not in the Voice Memos
         | app?
        
           | Tomte wrote:
           | That would be great, the three or so articles I read said
           | nothing about it. Thanks!
        
       | jbverschoor wrote:
       | Looks like a very similar strategy as Google Maps on the initial
       | iPhone
        
       | newhaus1994 wrote:
       | the natural language tasking for actions between apps is the
       | first thing that's made me excited about anything related to the
       | latest AI craze. if apple can keep it actually private/secure,
       | I'm looking forward to this.
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | So they have models running on Apple silicone in the cloud, does
       | that mean it's running its own models?
        
         | machinekob wrote:
         | Or just opensource models
        
         | Tagbert wrote:
         | Ajax is the name of their home-grown LLM. Ferret UI is another
         | model that they have published papers on that lets them look at
         | the UI of an app to understand how to interact and automate it.
        
       | hu3 wrote:
       | Am I understanding correctly that some AI will run on Apple
       | servers? So not completely offline AI.
       | 
       | If so that's somewhat disappointing given how much AI power Apple
       | hardware packs.
       | 
       | > Apple sets a new standard for privacy in AI, with the ability
       | to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device
       | processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated
       | Apple silicon servers
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | The interesting thing I took from that is they are making
         | servers with M-series chips. Maybe they're just rack mounted
         | Mac Minis? But if Apple decides that crap, maybe it'll get them
         | to a point where they decided to make a proper rack mountable
         | form factor available??? <genmojiTechPrayingInFrontOfRack>
        
         | Almondsetat wrote:
         | I think it's a little disingenuous to think on-device
         | accelerators on a mobile phone would be able to do literally
         | any AI task without help
        
         | onesociety2022 wrote:
         | Maybe that is actually good for iPhone buyers? Otherwise every
         | 2 years, they will claim a bunch of new AI features will not
         | work on your older device. But if they can delegate requests to
         | a server, older devices can continue receiving newer AI
         | features from future iOS releases (they will just be slower
         | than the newer iPhones which will run them locally).
        
       | nottorp wrote:
       | I have only one question: can I turn it off?
        
         | gkoberger wrote:
         | Why? Things are secure (outside of the explicit OpenAI calls
         | via Siri) and mostly seem subtly integrated. You don't have to
         | use each feature, but why blindly disable all AI having not
         | even tried it?
        
           | HWR_14 wrote:
           | Why take up processor time or memory for a feature I don't
           | want? Or the increase in threat space?
        
             | Almondsetat wrote:
             | This could be said for literally every single feature of a
             | smartphone, down to the out of order execution of the CPU
        
               | HWR_14 wrote:
               | Yes. I would like to be able to disable other smartphone
               | features I don't use. But that's already the case. Like
               | the GPS, for instance, is disabled unless I'm using the
               | map. And even that can be set to "never" if I want.
        
               | nottorp wrote:
               | I also have animations toned down from the accessibility
               | settings, yes :)
        
               | hot_gril wrote:
               | That's exactly why I wait extra long to install updates.
        
           | Voloskaya wrote:
           | Not wanting to send that much data to Apple's server no
           | matter the pinky promise they make about caring for our data?
           | That's a legit ask.
        
             | nottorp wrote:
             | Apple's? You mean OpenAI's...
        
           | upon_drumhead wrote:
           | I've tried a number of these things and I honestly don't see
           | the value in them. I have to double check everything they do
           | and it takes longer to describe what I want and double check
           | everything then just to do it myself.
           | 
           | I'll be disabling everything I can. I don't use Siri or
           | anything of that sort as well.
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | "It will automatically find a picture of your drivers
           | license, read the number and add it to your text"
           | 
           | This is scary stuff that should not be happening on anything
           | that is closed-source and unaudited publicly. The
           | pervasiveness of surveillance it enables is astounding.
        
             | gkoberger wrote:
             | How is it any more dangerous than having a picture of your
             | ID on your phone? It uses a local model for finding and
             | extracting data, and confirms before autofill.
             | 
             | Should we start auditing wallets next? People's driver
             | licenses are sitting insecure and unencrypted in their
             | pockets! Anyone could grab it!
             | 
             | Security is important, but being alarmist toward thoughtful
             | progress hurts everyone.
        
             | Spivak wrote:
             | What's different about this from the current implementation
             | of searching photos for 'driver's license' and it pulling
             | up pictures of your license? iOS has already been using
             | "AI" image recognition for years on your photos.
        
               | Tagbert wrote:
               | Yes, this is an extension of that feature and a further
               | integration with other enhancements. Apple has been doing
               | "machine learning" for years for features like this. Now
               | they are starting to bring those features together using
               | other models like LLMs.
        
           | hot_gril wrote:
           | Stuff that I don't use can get in the way.
        
         | martimarkov wrote:
         | Which part? The online or offline capabilities?
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | You can turn Siri off, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is
         | the same: a toggle on by default that they present you when
         | upgrading the OS. Perhaps even just the same toggle for Siri
         | controls all of this as a whole.
        
         | rockemsockem wrote:
         | You're an apple user, you decided a long time ago that they
         | know what's best for you
        
           | nottorp wrote:
           | I almost shed a tear, then I remembered the alternative is
           | Google...
        
           | hot_gril wrote:
           | Apple has decided to allow users to disable various features,
           | so the question is, do they let you disable this.
        
         | dividedbyzero wrote:
         | It did sound like it would be opt-in. I think the current
         | iteration of Siri already is, so it would make sense if they
         | kept it that way.
        
         | everfree wrote:
         | Turn off what part and why? They announced several new systems,
         | much of which runs on-device, one of which is simply an
         | improved Siri. I was surprised by how considerate they seemed
         | about AI data privacy, even for Apple.
        
           | pessimizer wrote:
           | > Turn off what part and why?
           | 
           | Assume any part, and assume none of your business.
        
             | everfree wrote:
             | It's not reasonable to expect to be able to turn off "any
             | part" of a piece of software, unless it's open source and
             | you're digging through the code yourself to remove sections
             | of it, refactor and re-compile everything.
             | 
             | That said, Apple generally gives people very fine-grained
             | controls over what software features they want enabled, at
             | least compared to other closed-source software vendors.
             | 
             | My question "what part and why" was intended to open up a
             | discussion about privacy in regards to Apple's AI. But if
             | your answer is simply "none of your business", then my
             | answer to the question "can I turn it off" is simply
             | "nobody has any way of knowing yet." Neither of those
             | answers are great discussion openers.
             | 
             | Your username seems to check out.
        
               | demondemidi wrote:
               | I don't want any part of my personal data (what I write,
               | what I photograph, what I record, what I jot down) to be
               | viewed by anything by my own eyes or the encryption
               | algorithm converting it to ciphertext to send across a
               | secure channel WITHOUT MY CONSENT.
               | 
               | Period.
               | 
               | Reason: again, nobody's business.
               | 
               | If you don't get this then, a) you're not in a high-risk
               | group for discrimination, or b) you've never been
               | subjected systemic polices designed to keep you "in
               | line".
        
               | nottorp wrote:
               | I do wonder if my privacy awareness has a connection with
               | the fact that I lived the first 13 years of my life under
               | an eastern block dictatorship ...
               | 
               | However in this case I'm also concerned about needless
               | power consumption. Especially on battery.
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | In most cases the one using most power in a modern
               | smartphone is the display.
               | 
               | And knowing Apple, the RAG-stuff will be done overnight
               | when the phone is charging, not during use.
        
               | everfree wrote:
               | I do get this. I don't know why you'd assume I don't.
               | 
               | And the sentiment behind your comment seems very
               | reasonable, reading past its non-sequitur tone.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | It's one thing to have private information at rest, another to
         | have it indexed, and interpreted by a LLM. What if some virus
         | orders the LLM to search for blackmail material and email it to
         | them? The very act of putting a LLM near your data is a
         | security concern. If someone else orders your Siri to reveal
         | something, it can get to the prize in seconds, with AI help.
        
           | slashdave wrote:
           | A virus can use its own LLM, so I guess you don't want
           | indexing at all. Makes it hard to find stuff.
        
         | red_admiral wrote:
         | Microsoft's recall is going to have that feature, according to
         | the latest updates on the matter. I hope apple won't lag behind
         | on implementing this one.
        
         | duskhorizon2 wrote:
         | Nope. I afraid AI future is mandatory ;)
        
       | algesten wrote:
       | "Semantic Index" sure is a better name than "Recall". Question is
       | whether I can exfiltrate all my personal data in seconds?
        
         | gigel82 wrote:
         | It's all in the "private cloud". "Trust me bro", it's like
         | totally private, only us and a handful of governments can read
         | it.
        
           | algesten wrote:
           | Yeah. It's going to be great. Selected experts are saying so.
        
         | fmbb wrote:
         | I mean I can already search my photos for "dog" or "burger" or
         | words in text on photos. Adding an LLM to chat about it is just
         | a new interface is it not?
        
           | algesten wrote:
           | I think the important thing is that the semantic index tracks
           | all you do through all your apps.
        
           | qeternity wrote:
           | They are likely implemented very differently. I'm not certain
           | but I imagine the current photos app uses an image model to
           | detect and label objects which you can search against. I
           | expect Semantic Index (by virtue of the name) to be a vector
           | store of embeddings.
        
         | anonbanker wrote:
         | I'm sure a simple Webkit vulnerability (there's none of those,
         | ever, right?) will _definitely_ not ensure that Semantic Index
         | is featured in a future pwn2own competition.
        
       | amrrs wrote:
       | Slap on the face all Cloud based LLM providers!
        
         | talldayo wrote:
         | Or pay them, for a deal that gives you access to a competitor's
         | product.
        
       | rasengan wrote:
       | There has never been a better time to move to Linux. Have you
       | tried Omakub? Manjaro? Mint? Ubuntu 24? These are polished and
       | complete alternatives and your favorite app probably has a Linux
       | build already!
        
         | jawngee wrote:
         | | These are polished and complete alternatives
         | 
         | Are they though?
         | 
         | I just setup ubuntu 24 for my son to play games and it's
         | comparatively a very unpolished experience. I'm being very
         | polite when I say that.
        
           | rasengan wrote:
           | That's interesting - it was Ubuntu 24 that made me feel
           | confident the first time to recommend to non-computer
           | enthusiasts. What about Ubuntu 24 came off unpolished to you,
           | if you don't mind me asking?
        
           | jwells89 wrote:
           | Even as someone who keeps a laptop booted into Linux most of
           | the time, yes there are bumps and rough edges that _will_ be
           | encountered once venturing off the most common path of
           | "internet, video, and word processor box". It's much better
           | than it once was but it still has problems and the way that
           | fervent advocates try to sweep them under the rug doesn't
           | help the situation.
        
           | anonbanker wrote:
           | Ubuntu, sadly, is not a good experience for a multitude of
           | reasons outside of Canonical's control, including codec and
           | software licensing restrictions.
           | 
           | Gamers should absolutely be heading towards Nobara Linux
           | (Fedora-based, created by GloriousEggroll of Proton-GE fame).
           | Developers should be trying Omakub. Grandma and Grandpa
           | should be using Linux Mint.
        
         | anonbanker wrote:
         | Trying Omakub in the next 48-72 hours. I can't wait. It looks
         | like the curated experience I've been looking for.
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | They did a lot of work for this release, and the number of
       | integrations is beyond what I expected. In a few years time you
       | might not need to hold your phone at all and just get everything
       | done with voice - kind of cool, actually.
       | 
       | Auto transcripts for calls (with permission) is another feature I
       | really liked.
       | 
       | I was a little surprised to see/hear no mention of inaccuracies,
       | but for ChatGPT they did show the "Check for important facts"
       | notice.
        
         | culopatin wrote:
         | That sounds like what Humane is trying to do. But I would
         | honestly hate to do everything by voice and have everyone
         | around me know what I'm doing and hear everyone around me talk
         | to their phones all the time. Sounds like a nightmare
        
           | Tagbert wrote:
           | I would expect it to be situational. I also was happy to see
           | that they introduced a typed interface to Siri so you can do
           | this without speaking.
        
         | amne wrote:
         | So far the only reasonable place I can think of where I could
         | find myself actually using voice to control anything is on the
         | toilet. that's it
        
           | runeb wrote:
           | Walking, cycling, running, driving, relaxing on the couch
        
         | Tagbert wrote:
         | There is a lot less fodder for inaccuracies if the data and
         | processing are all on your device. A lot of the inaccuracies in
         | Gemini and ChatGPT arise because they are using the web for
         | answers and that is a much less reliable source than your own
         | emails and messages.
        
       | rqtwteye wrote:
       | It's a little disappointing that even big companies like Apple
       | jump on OpenAI instead of building their own thing. Diversity
       | seems pretty important with AI.
        
         | fsto wrote:
         | They use OpenAI as an optional fallback model. Adding support
         | for more models later. I'm positively surprised they're not
         | trying to solve everything with their own tech.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | Or, use existing now to get it going, then swap out for your
           | own thing later. Hopefully, it will be better than previous
           | swaps so that it doesn't be a meme worthy of being mocked in
           | a comedy show "is it Apple Maps bad?"
        
         | frenchie4111 wrote:
         | Unfortunately OpenAI has a pretty big "dollars and hours spent
         | on GPUs" moat right now. I imagine Apple is already hard at
         | work building their own models, but until then they will
         | leverage 3rd parties
        
           | YetAnotherNick wrote:
           | Apple has 10x more on reserve cash than the entirety of
           | OpenAI when they trained GPT-4. I don't think OpenAI could
           | have possibly spent $5B or more for training first version of
           | GPT-4(which was trained before GPT-3.5 gained traction),
           | which is a pocket change for Apple for such a core feature.
        
         | kristjansson wrote:
         | All the interesting features appear to be de novo models from
         | Apple? Only the last fallback-to-ChatGPT feature interacts with
         | OpenAI.
        
       | cube2222 wrote:
       | This seems really cool.
       | 
       | They said the models can scale to "private cloud compute" based
       | on Apple Silicon which will be ensured by your device to run
       | "publicly verifiable software" in order to guarantee no misuse of
       | your data.
       | 
       | I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source? That'd be
       | positively surprising. Curious to see how this evolves.
       | 
       | Anyway, overall looks really really cool. If it works as
       | marketed, then it will be an easy "shut up and take my money".
       | Siri seems to finally be becoming what it was meant to be (I
       | wonder if they're piggy-backing on top of the Shortcuts Actions
       | catalogue to have a wide array of possible actions right away),
       | and the image and emoji generation features that integrate with
       | Apple Photos and other parts of the system look _really_ cool.
       | 
       | It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15
       | Pro.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | > I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source
         | 
         | No, but they said it'll be available for audit by independent
         | experts.
        
           | anonbanker wrote:
           | How do we sign up to be an independent expert? We need about
           | 50,000 eyeballs on this at all times.
        
             | theshrike79 wrote:
             | How many independent eyeballs are on Gemini's servers or
             | OpenAI's?
        
               | ENGNR wrote:
               | They're not making the privacy claim
        
           | TheFragenTaken wrote:
           | I don't understand why people act like this is a new way of
           | working. Hundreds of ISO certifications require independent
           | audit. Functionally this can be done in many ways, like
           | source code access by human reviewers, or static scanning
           | with signed results. What's important is not who looks, be it
           | PwC, Deloitte, or industry peers. It's important whats being
           | looked for, and what standards are being followed.
        
         | ru552 wrote:
         | ~It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone
         | 15 Pro.
         | 
         | They specifically stated it required iPhone 15 Pro or higher
         | and anything with a m1 or higher.
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | Regarding OpenAI, has Apple in its history ever relied so heavily
       | on a 3rd party for software features?
       | 
       | (TSMC for hardware, but it seems very un-Apple to be so dependent
       | upon someone else for software capabilities like OpenAI)
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | OG iPhone had Google as Maps provider and YouTube both within
         | Apple shells and the branding downplayed in Maps case
         | 
         | That's the only case I can think of where it's an external tech
         | you're making requests to, usually it's things like Rosetta
         | made out of Apple IIRC but integrated internally
        
           | latexr wrote:
           | > Rosetta is made out of Apple IIRC but integrated internally
           | 
           | Don't think that's right. I think Rosetta was always made
           | inside Apple.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)
           | 
           | Perhaps mixing it up because of Rosetta Stone?
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone_(software)
        
             | kevbin wrote:
             | > Transitive is providing the engine used in Apple's
             | Rosetta software, which translates software for its current
             | machines using PowerPC processors so it can run on
             | forthcoming Intel-based Macintoshes. "We've had a long-term
             | relationship with them," Transitive Chief Executive Bob
             | Wiederhold said Tuesday.
             | 
             | https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/the-
             | brains-b...
        
         | martimarkov wrote:
         | They did it with Google Maps and YouTube. They also do this
         | with the search engine used in Safari.
         | 
         | I believe they will just provide an interface in the future to
         | plugin as a Backend AI provider to trusted parties (like the
         | search engine) but will slowly build their own ChatGPT for more
         | and more stuff.
        
         | paradite wrote:
         | Does Microsoft Office in early days of Mac OS count? I guess
         | not.
        
           | philwelch wrote:
           | Microsoft Office was released five years after the Macintosh;
           | what are you talking about?
        
             | wtallis wrote:
             | The applications that were later bundled into Office were
             | on the Mac pretty early: 1985 for Word and Excel, and the
             | first PowerPoint in 1987 was Mac-only.
        
               | philwelch wrote:
               | Fair, though the very first Macs came with MacWrite
               | preinstalled.
        
           | TMWNN wrote:
           | I don't see why it would not count. Same for Adobe products.
        
         | gfosco wrote:
         | The OpenAI reference came at the end, and it appears it's
         | mostly a fallback... an option, that users must explicitly
         | allow every time. Hardly a dependency. Most of the time, it
         | will be on-device or apple-hosted in "private compute cloud",
         | not connected to OpenAI at all.
        
         | OkGoDoIt wrote:
         | Google Maps in the early days of iOS?
         | 
         | Anyway it seems like a small subset of Siri queries utilize
         | ChatGPT, the vast majority of functionality is performed either
         | locally or with Apple's cloud apparently.
         | 
         | They were also pretty explicit about planning to support other
         | backend AI providers in the future.
        
         | LogHouse wrote:
         | I wondered the same, but frankly, what other options are there?
        
           | hackerlight wrote:
           | It's going to be easy to substitute in their own LLM behind
           | the API in the future. None of the branding or platform is
           | controlled by OpenAI.
        
         | kristjansson wrote:
         | Seems like the OpenAI integration is a nice-to-have, but mostly
         | separate from Super-Siri?
        
         | pat2man wrote:
         | Google Maps, YouTube, on the original iPhone?
        
           | alberth wrote:
           | But those were standalone apps.
           | 
           | This AI capability is integrated throughout the entire OS and
           | Apps.
           | 
           | It's now part of the "fabric" of iOS.
        
             | Tagbert wrote:
             | Only in response to some classes of requests. They didn't
             | go into detail about when but they said that the local Siri
             | LLM would evaluate the request and decide if it could be
             | services locally, in their private cloud AI, or would need
             | to use OpenAI. Then it would pop up a requesting asking if
             | you want to send the request to OpenAI. It doesn't look
             | like that would a particularly common occurrence. Seems
             | like it would be needed for "answerbot" type of requests
             | where live web data is being requested.
        
             | mholm wrote:
             | The majority of this is local AI with nothing to do with
             | openAI. Only particularly complex requests go to them
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | That might be smarter than we initially give it credit. By
         | leaving the "safer" (read: harder to get wrong) things to their
         | own models and then the more "creative" stuff to an explicit
         | external model, they can shift blame: "Hey, we didn't made up
         | that information, we explicitly said that was ChatGPT". I don't
         | think they'll say it outright like that. Because they won't
         | have to.
        
         | Almondsetat wrote:
         | iCloud uses Google Cloud
        
         | dialup_sounds wrote:
         | Maybe I missed something but it doesn't sound like OpenAI is
         | powering any of this except the optional integrations.
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | As with Google Maps, my guess is that they will only rely on it
         | long enough to get their own LLM offer up to parity, at which
         | point it might still be there as an option but there will be
         | very little need for users to activate it.
         | 
         | Also, it seems that most of Siri's improved features will still
         | work without it (though perhaps less well in same cases) -- and
         | therefore Apple is not fully dependent on it.
        
       | TIPSIO wrote:
       | So the future of computing really is AI agents doing everything:
       | 
       | - siri text chat now on the lock screen
       | 
       | - incoming a billion developer app functions/APIs
       | 
       | - better notifications
       | 
       | - can make network requests
       | 
       | Why even open any other app?
        
         | terramex wrote:
         | > Why even open any other app?
         | 
         | This was my first thought when I saw Rabbit r1 - will all of us
         | become backend developers just glueing various API between
         | legacy services and LLMs? Today seems like another step in that
         | direction.
        
           | imabotbeep2937 wrote:
           | The whole world will be headless content. There won't be any
           | web pages, or bank sites, or TV networks. Nobody will be a
           | developer. We'll all just be content authors, like Google
           | Maps Guides basically being unpaid interns checking
           | restaurant data for Google.
           | 
           | You open your phone, it just shovels content. And it does
           | absolutely nothing but optimize on addiction.
           | 
           | No apps, only masters.
        
         | imabotbeep2937 wrote:
         | Nobody is realizing this coming singularity.
         | 
         | Your phone won't do anything else. For 99% of people, they pick
         | up their phone, AI will just decide what they want to see. And
         | most will accept it.
         | 
         | Someday everyone in the room will all pick up their phones when
         | they all ring at once. It will be some emotional trigger like a
         | live feed from a school shooting. Everyone in the room will
         | start screaming at the totally different experiences they're
         | being presented. Evil liberals, clueless law enforcement,
         | product placement being shown over the shooter's gun. You'll
         | sit horrified because you returned to a dumbphone to escape.
         | 
         | That will be the reality if this AI assistant stuff isn't
         | checked hard now. AI is getting better at addiction an order of
         | magnitude faster than it's getting better at actual tasks.
        
           | c1sc0 wrote:
           | Not necessarily, that entirely depends on the reward function
           | being used, but I get your point.
        
       | jspann wrote:
       | I remain skeptical until I see it in action. On the one hand,
       | Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on
       | device. On the other, there was too much ambiguity around this
       | announcement. What is the threshold for running something in the
       | cloud? How is your personal model used across devices - does that
       | mean it briefly moves to the cloud? How does its usage change
       | across guest modes? Even the phrase "OpenAI won't store requests"
       | feels intentionally opaque.
       | 
       | I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach
       | where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request
       | but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.
        
         | machinekob wrote:
         | Same they say privacy so many times i got Facebook PTSD.
        
           | boringg wrote:
           | I mean theres a difference between these companies on their
           | privacy stance historical and current.
        
         | tmpz22 wrote:
         | They need to provide a mechanism to view the data being
         | uploaded by you
        
         | robbyking wrote:
         | > _What is the threshold for running something in the cloud?_
         | 
         | To be fair, this was just the keynote -- details will be
         | revealed in the sessions.
        
         | epolanski wrote:
         | > has a good track record with privacy
         | 
         | They repeated this so many times they've made it true.
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | Do you have proof otherwise? Compared to the competition, who
           | openly use everything about you to build a profile.
        
         | yencabulator wrote:
         | > Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things
         | on device.
         | 
         | Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it
         | wrong". I don't expect an amazing AI assistant out of them, I
         | expect something that sometimes does what the user meant.
        
           | thebruce87m wrote:
           | > Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it
           | wrong".
           | 
           | And yet this was never said.
           | 
           | Closest was this:
           | 
           | > Just don't hold it that way.
           | 
           | Or maybe this:
           | 
           | > If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid
           | gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers
           | both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply
           | use one of many available cases.
        
             | yencabulator wrote:
             | It's merely the instance that gave the name to the
             | phenomena, not the only time it happened.
        
               | thebruce87m wrote:
               | What phenomena?
        
               | hmottestad wrote:
               | When Apple published a webpage about how other phones
               | also got reduced reception when you held them in a
               | particular way, but then basically immediately pulled it.
               | And then a while later they offered a free bumper case to
               | mitigate the whole issue.
        
         | KaiserPro wrote:
         | > Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things
         | on device.
         | 
         | I mean they have great PR, but in terms of privacy, they
         | extract more information from you than google does.
        
           | corps_and_code wrote:
           | Can you explain what you mean with "extract more information
           | from you than google" here?
           | 
           | Not saying you're wrong, I'm just curious what sources or
           | info you're using to make that claim.
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | Do you have a source for this?
           | 
           | Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you
           | like and dont like at different states of your life built.
           | 
           | What does Apple have that's even close?
        
             | its_ethan wrote:
             | I think what he's getting at is that Apple does collect a
             | lot of very similar data about it's users. Apple Maps still
             | collects data about where you've driven - the difference is
             | that they don't turn around and sell that data like Google
             | loves to do.
             | 
             | I believe (but could be wrong) they also treat that data in
             | a way that prevents it from being accessed by anyone
             | besides the user (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%
             | E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
        
         | themadturk wrote:
         | I get the sense there's still a lot of work to be done over the
         | next few months, and we may see some feature slippage. The
         | betas will be where we see their words in action, and I'll be
         | staying far away from the betas, which will be a little
         | painful. I think ambiguity works in their favor right now. It's
         | better to underpromise and overdeliver, instead of vice versa.
        
       | xrisk wrote:
       | It seems that the Apple intelligence stuff will be 15 Pro. Man, I
       | just bought a 15 ~8 months ago. That really sucks.
        
         | theswifter01 wrote:
         | For real, I'm sure a fair amount of previous processors are
         | able to handle it fine, just a reason for ppl to buy the next
         | phone
        
       | JohnMakin wrote:
       | I am excited to try Siri with this technology enabled. I can't
       | really remember a time when siri ever really worked, although
       | recently I actually got her to play a song on youtube for me
       | after a few attempts and was pretty pleased with that. Outside of
       | "set my alarm for 4:30" kind of stuff, she's never really been
       | that useful, and if you are even kind of disabled, this feature
       | can be really useful to the point of life changing if it is done
       | properly.
        
       | davidbarker wrote:
       | So, if I've got this correct there's:
       | 
       | 1. On-device AI
       | 
       | 2. AI using Apple's servers
       | 
       | 3. AI using ChatGPT/OpenAI's services (and others in the future)
       | 
       | Number 1 will pass to number 2 if it thinks it requires the extra
       | processing power, but number 3 will only be invoked with explicit
       | user permission.
       | 
       | [Edit: As pointed out below, other providers will be coming
       | eventually.]
        
         | frenchie4111 wrote:
         | That was my sense as well. I would have appreciated some
         | clarification on where the line between 1 and 2 was, although I
         | am sure a YouTuber will deep dive on it as soon as they have it
         | in their hands
        
         | gigel82 wrote:
         | The problem is they don't explicitly define when 1 can pass to
         | 2 and whether we can fully and categorically disable it. As far
         | as I know, 1 can pass to 2 when governments ask for some
         | personal data or when Apple's ad model needs some intimate
         | details for personalization.
        
           | Tagbert wrote:
           | The information provided for level two is end to end
           | encrypted and not stored so the risk level is pretty low
           | here.
        
             | coolspot wrote:
             | Ent-to-end encrypted means that the other end (Apple/NSA)
             | has access to it.
        
               | Tagbert wrote:
               | It does need to process the data. The server has no
               | persistent storage and no remote shell. It is a limited
               | and locked down special-purpose iOS.
        
               | cyberpunk wrote:
               | Imagine the memory on their server is encrypted with an
               | on-processor key (something like intel SGX) -- reading OS
               | memory, e.g dumping from linux or hardware, you can't
               | read it unless you somehow extract the key (which are
               | different on each chip) from the physical chip. Now, the
               | process running using that encrypted memory generates TLS
               | keys for you to send the data, and operates on it only
               | inside this secure enclave.
               | 
               | There is no way to access it without destroying the chip,
               | and even in this scenario it will be extremely expensive
               | and imo unlikely, certainly impossible at scale. Some
               | scientists may be able to do it once in a lab.
        
               | cyberpunk wrote:
               | BTW there is an entire industry popping up around exactly
               | this sort of use case, it's called 'confidential
               | computing' and CNCF have some software in the works
               | (confidential containers iirc). I'm pretty excited to see
               | what risc-v is going to bring to the party enclave wise.
        
               | davidcbc wrote:
               | Ok, I'm imagining.
               | 
               | Now, is any of that actually true?
        
         | terramex wrote:
         | Lvl 3 is supposed to support other models and providers in the
         | future too. I hope it will support every server with simple,
         | standard API so I can run self-hosted LLama 3 (or whatever will
         | be released in next 6-12 months).
        
           | hmottestad wrote:
           | Or Groq. They can do 1250 tokens/s with Llama 3 8B.
        
         | SoftTalker wrote:
         | I see no real difference between 2 and 3. Once the data has
         | left your device, it has left your device. There is no getting
         | it back and you no longer have any control over it.
        
           | stnmtn wrote:
           | Certainly there's a difference. You are right that the jump
           | is big between 1 and 2, but it is negligent to say that
           | Apple, a company which strives for improved privacy and
           | security, and ChatGPT have the same privacy practices.
        
             | drpossum wrote:
             | No, that's not the point. The point is neither of those
             | companies could have the same values _you_ have for _your_
             | data and you are then leaving the security of that data in
             | the hands of someone else. Even Apple, who is better than
             | most, values your privacy with a dollar value representing
             | your custom and their reputation. That is not how I value
             | (nor most people value) their data. The latter point
             | applies to any company, regardless of intention because
             | security breaches are a matter of when, not if, and if
             | anyone says otherwise they should not be talking about
             | security.
        
           | coob wrote:
           | Most people are happy for (2) already - iCloud Photos, Device
           | backups, iCloud Messages... email.
           | 
           | Those that won't use those won't use this either.
        
           | privacyking wrote:
           | You do realise that already happens though? If you read
           | apple's privacy policy they send a lot of what you do to
           | their servers.
           | 
           | Furthermore how private do you think Siri is? Their privacy
           | policy explicitly states they send transcripts of what you
           | say to them. That cannot be disabled.
        
             | underlogic wrote:
             | That's the problem. These AI features may be "free" but is
             | there an option to disable them system wide from rummaging
             | through all your data and building a profile in order to be
             | helpful? If not I won't update. And I mean one tickbox not
             | a separate switch for every app and feature like siri has
             | making it nearly impossible to disable
        
           | Terretta wrote:
           | > _I see no real difference between 2 and 3._
           | 
           | This #2, so-called "Private Cloud Compute", is not the same
           | as iCloud. And certainly not the same as sending queries to
           | OpenAI.
           | 
           | Quoting:
           | 
           |  _"With Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can flex
           | and scale its computational capacity and draw on larger,
           | server-based models for more complex requests. These models
           | run on servers powered by Apple silicon, providing a
           | foundation that allows Apple to ensure that data is never
           | retained or exposed."_
           | 
           |  _"Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on
           | Apple silicon servers to verify privacy, and Private Cloud
           | Compute cryptographically ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac
           | do not talk to a server unless its software has been publicly
           | logged for inspection."_
           | 
           |  _"Apple Intelligence with Private Cloud Compute sets a new
           | standard for privacy in AI, unlocking intelligence users can
           | trust."_
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | Yes, that's all well and good but assumes no mistakes and
             | no National Security letters ordering them to describe it
             | that way and no changes of control or business strategy at
             | some point in the future.
             | 
             | Once the data is out of your possession it's out of your
             | control.
        
               | mostlysimilar wrote:
               | Not everyone has nation states in their threat models. I
               | want privacy from corporations / surveillance capitalism,
               | not the US government. Apple's privacy promises are
               | focused on keeping my data out of the hands of bad actors
               | like Google etc. and that's more than enough for me.
        
               | magicalist wrote:
               | A threat model of Google getting your email revision
               | makes these statements sillier. TLS and existing privacy
               | policies are sufficient.
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | There are VERY few things that can keep your information
               | safe if a TLA wants it. You need to go full Edward
               | Snowden with phones in faraday cages and typing passwords
               | under a sheet -levels of paranoia to be fully safe.
               | 
               | Drow "nation state is after me" from the threat model and
               | you'll be a lot happier.
        
               | transpute wrote:
               | _> nation state ... threat model_
               | 
               | The history of tech is the history of falling costs with
               | mass production. Expensive TLA surveillance tech for
               | nation states can become broadly accessible, e.g.
               | through-wall WiFi radar sensing sold to millions via IEEE
               | 802.11bf WiFi 7 Sensing in "AI" PCs [1], or USB implant
               | cables [2] with a few zeros lopped off the TLA price.
               | 
               | Instead of adversary motives, threat models can be based
               | on adversary costs.
               | 
               | As adversary costs fall, threat models need to evolve.
               | 
               | [1]
               | https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-
               | sen...
               | 
               | [2] https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
        
               | ENGNR wrote:
               | True, but there's a difference between
               | 
               | - TLA agency deploys scarce zero days or field ops
               | because you're particularly interesting, vs..
               | 
               | - TLA agency has everything about you in a dragnet, and
               | low level cop in small town searches your data for a
               | laugh because they know you, and leaks it back to your
               | social circle or uses it for commercial advantage
        
             | jeroenhd wrote:
             | "We make the hardware and we pinky promise that we will
             | protect your data and will open source part of it" means
             | nothing for privacy. Especially when things like warrants
             | come into play.
        
               | dudus wrote:
               | It's a big mental gymnastics to do the same as Google and
               | Microsoft while claiming moral superiority.
               | 
               | Apple's thrown stones come back to hunt their glass
               | ceiling.
        
               | cyberpunk wrote:
               | Eh with modern processor features like secure enclaves
               | it's definitely possible to build systems in which the
               | operators _CANNOT_ access the information. (I worked on
               | such a system using SGX for a large car producer, even
               | physical access to the machines /hypervisors/raw memory
               | would not give you access, perhaps the nsa has some keys
               | baked in to extract a session key you may generate inside
               | an enclave, but it would be very surprising if they
               | burned that backdoor on anything as low fruit as this).
        
               | jeroenhd wrote:
               | SGX has been broken by speculative execution bugs,
               | though. Had something to do with people extracting DRM
               | keys, if I recall correctly, not exactly a nation state
               | attack. Since then, SGX has been removed from modern
               | Intel processors (breaking some Blurays and software
               | products for newer chips in the process).
               | 
               | Secure enclave stuff can be used to build a trust
               | relationship if it's designed well, but Apple is the
               | party hosting the service and the one burning the private
               | keys into the chip.
        
               | cyberpunk wrote:
               | Yep, it was broken a few times but fixed with microcode
               | patches (afaik). It's still a part of the server
               | processors and in wide use already. I'm not saying it's a
               | golden bullet or otherwise infallable, but it sure beats
               | cat /dev/mem by quite some way.
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | If we can't trust independent audits of code and
               | hardware, what can we trust?
        
               | jeroenhd wrote:
               | I will trust independent audits of local code and local
               | hardware. There are still plenty of opportunities for
               | someone to send out malicious patches, but the code
               | running can (and probably will) be analysed by
               | journalists looking for a scoop and security researchers
               | looking for a bug bounty.
               | 
               | I have no idea what code is running on a server I can't
               | access. I can't exactly go SSH into siri.apple.com and
               | match checksums. Knowing Apple's control freak attitude,
               | I very much doubt any researcher permitted to look at
               | their servers is going to be very independent either.
               | 
               | Apple is just as privacy friendly as ChatGPT or Gemini.
               | That's not necessarily a bad thing! AI requires feeding
               | lots of data into the cloud, that's how it works. Trying
               | to sell their service as anything more than that is
               | disingenuous, though.
        
               | ReverseCold wrote:
               | > I have no idea what code is running on a server I can't
               | access.
               | 
               | That's like... the whole point? You have some kind of
               | hardware-based measured boot thing that can provide a
               | cryptographic attestation that the code it's running is
               | the same as the code that's been reviewed by an
               | independent auditor. If the auditor confirms that the
               | data isn't being stored, just processed and thrown away,
               | that's _almost_ as good as on-device compute for 99.999%
               | of users. (On-device compute can also be backdoored, so
               | you have to trust this even in the case that everything
               | is local.)
               | 
               | The presentation was fairly detail-light so I don't know
               | if this is actually what they're doing, but it's nice to
               | see some effort in this direction.
               | 
               | E: I roughly agree with this comment
               | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40638740) later
               | down the thread -- what _exactly_ the auditors are
               | verifying is the key important bit.
        
               | BlobberSnobber wrote:
               | Exactly, Apple has barely any oversight or accountability
               | for their privacy claims. Sad to see so many people
               | taking their word at face value.
        
               | ENGNR wrote:
               | Open code, inspected and used by a large number of users,
               | hosted on hardware you physically control
        
               | ryr11 wrote:
               | I think that's fair, but impractical for most users. I
               | have a number of Home Assistant integrations with locally
               | hosted AI models for smart home features, but I wouldn't
               | expect my grandma to set up a server and a few VMs when
               | she could just give her HomePod a prompt that works with
               | AI and have no worries about the implementation. Do you
               | feel like Apple's "independent" auditing is insufficient?
        
               | ENGNR wrote:
               | > Do you feel like Apple's "independent" auditing is
               | insufficient?
               | 
               | Yeah, pretty much
               | 
               | Also, your grandma might not setup a VM, but it sounds
               | like the off-device processing is essentially stateless,
               | or at most might have a very lightweight session. It
               | seems like the kind of thing one person could setup for
               | their family (with the same tamper-proof signatures, plus
               | physical security), or provide a privacy focused
               | appliance for anyone to just plug into a wall, if they
               | wanted to.
        
               | l33tman wrote:
               | I think it boils down to that it doesn't matter what they
               | promise, if you send a videocap of all you ever do on
               | your computer to some company on the internet, you just
               | have to take your chances. Would you put mics and cameras
               | in all of your rooms in your home that send data to Apple
               | (or someone else) to analyze "for your benefit" even if
               | they say and promise they won't do anything bad with the
               | feeds?
               | 
               | At least with gmail and chat clients etc. things are
               | somewhat put in compartments, one of the services might
               | screw up and do something with your emails but your
               | Messenger or WhatsApp chats are not affected by that, or
               | vice versa. But when you bake it into the OS (laptop or
               | phone) you're IMHO taking a much bigger risk, no matter
               | what the intentions are.
        
               | subjectsigma wrote:
               | Isn't this basically what Signal does? Legitimately
               | asking; I thought parts of their server implementation
               | were closed source.
        
             | StrLght wrote:
             | That's too many words with surprisingly little meaning. I'd
             | suggest to wait for more technical details and to treat
             | this as marketing until then.
        
           | r00fus wrote:
           | Hopefully they have some toggle in settings for this.
        
           | solarkraft wrote:
           | Apple has demonstrated to be relatively trustworthy about
           | privacy while most AI companies have demonstrated the
           | opposite, so I do see a significant difference.
        
             | SoftTalker wrote:
             | Google was considered very cool and trustworthy at one
             | point also. "Do no evil" and all that.
        
               | babypuncher wrote:
               | Google's entire buisness model was built on hoovering up
               | and selling access to user data in the form of AdSense.
               | Without that data, their business falls apart.
               | 
               | Apple's business model is to entice people into a walled
               | garden ecosystem where they buy lots of expensive
               | hardware sold on high margins. They don't need user data
               | to make this work, which is why they can more comfortably
               | push features like end-to-end and no-knowledge
               | encryption.
        
               | doctor_eval wrote:
               | Google was cool, once upon a time, but they always used
               | your personal info pretty openly. The CEO a himself
               | famously said, "The Google policy on a lot of things is
               | to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
               | 
               | Apple has taken a markedly different approach, and has
               | done so for years - E2E encryption, hashing and
               | segmenting routes on maps, Secure Enclave, etc.
               | 
               | While I think it's perfectly reasonable to "trust no
               | one", and I fully agree that there may be things we don't
               | know, I don't think there it's reasonable to put Apple on
               | the same (exceedingly low) level as Google.
        
               | cchance wrote:
               | No they never were, they were "do no evil" but at the
               | exact same time everyone knew they were an advertising
               | company and most people in the field could see where it
               | was heading eventually, or at least i'd hope.
               | 
               | Apples motives are different, selling premium hardware
               | and MORE premium hardware, they wouldn't dare fuck that
               | up, their nestegg is hardware and slowly more services
               | tied to said hardware ecosystem (icloud subs, tv subs
               | etc). Hence the privacy makes sense to pull people into
               | the ecosystem.
               | 
               | Google... everything google does even phones, is for more
               | data gathering for their advertising revenue.
        
           | babypuncher wrote:
           | The difference is Apple and OpenAI's privacy policies.
        
           | cchance wrote:
           | #2 is publicaly auditable, 100% apple controlled and apple
           | hardware servers, tied to your personal session (probably via
           | the ondevice encryption), i'd imagine ephemeral docker
           | containers or something similar for requests that just run
           | for each request or some form of Encrypted AI Lambdas.
        
         | spike021 wrote:
         | It sounded like 3 is meant for non-personal stuff. Basically
         | like a search engine style feature. When you want to look up
         | things like say sports records and info, or a movie and info
         | about it, etc.
        
         | KaiserPro wrote:
         | I don't know how they are going to square the privacy circle
         | when at worst its a RAG based firehose to OpenAI, and at best
         | you can just ask the model to leak your personal info.
        
       | DaveChurchill wrote:
       | Great! How do I opt out?
        
       | the_arun wrote:
       | Wouldn't this reduce sales for Grammerly? If Apple packs the same
       | feature for every application in iOS, it is kinda cool.
       | 
       | Private Cloud - Isn't this what Amazon did with their tablet -
       | Fire? What is the difference with Apple Private Cloud?
        
         | nehal3m wrote:
         | > Wouldn't this reduce sales for Grammerly?
         | 
         | There's a term for that, it's called being Sherlocked:
         | https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co...
        
         | gherkinnn wrote:
         | After years and years of annoying ads, Grammarly taking a hit
         | is the least they deserve
        
         | terramex wrote:
         | > Wouldn't this reduce sales for Grammerly?
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
         | 
         | > Sherlocked as a term
         | 
         | > The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or
         | obviates third-party software is so well known that being
         | Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and
         | iOS developer community.[2][3][4]
        
           | thisarticle wrote:
           | 1Password too.
        
             | jerbear4328 wrote:
             | Well, the Passwords app is just the Passwords section in
             | Settings moved out into its own app. It already exists on
             | Windows, too, but maybe they are updating it to allow
             | autofill without using a Chrome extension or add other
             | features. It isn't the biggest change, just bringing
             | attention to an existing feature that already competes with
             | 1Password et al.
        
               | cueo wrote:
               | It would be good if they add support for third-party
               | browsers. Bitwarden (or other apps) can feel clunky
               | sometimes compared to Keychain / Passwords.
        
               | kfinley wrote:
               | Which browser are you using?
               | 
               | I switched to Apple Passwords and have been using the
               | official Chrome extension for a few months. It's not as
               | seamless as some of the password manager extensions, but
               | has been working well enough.
               | 
               | https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-
               | passwords/pe...
        
         | xnx wrote:
         | Grammarly is great example of the classic adage, "a feature,
         | not a product".
        
           | secfirstmd wrote:
           | TBH I'd say the same about Notion.
        
         | PodgieTar wrote:
         | It jumped out to me that I had to highlight and ask it to check
         | my grammar, rather than have it be an automatic process.
         | 
         | I don't use Grammarly, really, but I think at least that one is
         | more automatic?
        
         | tomjen3 wrote:
         | How many use Grammerly on a Mac exclusively? My guess is that
         | most of their accounts are students through schools and
         | companies. But yeah, there is a risk in any business that a
         | better competitor comes along.
        
         | insane_dreamer wrote:
         | I would not bet on Grammerly's future.
        
       | TechnicolorByte wrote:
       | Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed
       | today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the
       | real power of consumer AI will be in the hands of the platform
       | owners where you have most of your digital life in already (Apple
       | or Google for messaging, mail, photos, apps; Microsoft for work
       | and/or life).
       | 
       | The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails
       | and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking
       | about someone's flight is so useful (can't tell you how many
       | times my brother didn't bother to check the flight code I sent
       | him via message when he asks me when I'm landing for pickup!).
       | 
       | I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at
       | some point, but I didn't expect Apple to hit it out of the park
       | so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.
       | 
       | Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration
       | with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can
       | genuinely see all this being useful for "the rest of us," to
       | quote Craig. As someone who's taken a pessimistic view of Apple
       | software innovation the last several years, I'm amazed.
       | 
       | One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny
       | and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of
       | those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.
        
         | imabotbeep2937 wrote:
         | "brother didn't bother to check the flight code I sent him via
         | message when he asks me when I'm landing for pickup"
         | 
         | Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or
         | getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well
         | it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.
        
           | lancesells wrote:
           | Even moreso why does brother take the time to bring up Siri
           | if he can't read the flight code? It's the same thing
           | correct?
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | You do know siri works while driving and other times when
             | you don't want to go fumbling around?
        
         | gavmor wrote:
         | > the platform owners where you have most of your digital life
         | 
         | Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for
         | me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by
         | "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes
         | me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.
        
           | rootveg wrote:
           | Whenever I read that expression I have to think about the
           | Porsche commercial from a few years back. I guess it's not
           | always a bad idea :)
           | 
           | https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-
           | content/uploads/2014/07/dw...
        
           | zer00eyz wrote:
           | The UI design part? The integration part? The iteration part?
           | 
           | Apple products tend to feel thoughtful. It might not be a
           | thought you agree with, but it's there.
           | 
           | With other companies I feel like im starving, and all they
           | are serving is their version of grule... Here is your helping
           | be sure to eat all of it.
        
         | dereg wrote:
         | Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is
         | clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching
         | LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for
         | its sins.
         | 
         | I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the
         | obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I
         | suspect it means we're going to get our own private code
         | interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably
         | Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.
         | 
         | Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers.
         | I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or
         | not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do
         | bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end
         | and hardware end?
         | 
         | There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it
         | yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the
         | frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of
         | Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.
        
           | wayeq wrote:
           | > allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.
           | 
           | Are we sure there is a Siri team in Apple? What have they
           | been doing since 2012?
        
             | dereg wrote:
             | Learning how to write llm function calls.
        
           | cyberpunk wrote:
           | I don't get this at all, how does integrating siri with a llm
           | mean you get an interpreter and allowing development?
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | As much as I hoped for Xcode on the iPad, I still don't
             | think any of this AI stuff or "private cloud" is related.
             | 
             | Though I don't know if I would use my iPad for programming
             | even if it was possible, when I have a powerful Macbook Pro
             | with a larger screen.
        
         | doctorpangloss wrote:
         | > can't tell you how many times my brother didn't bother to
         | check the flight code I sent him via message
         | 
         | The story to this is that Messages is so god awful that the
         | most basic things like search do not work.
         | 
         | > but I didn't expect Apple to hit it out of the park so
         | strongly.
         | 
         | If they were sincere about this, they would let people choose
         | which AI model should get access to your abbreviated text and
         | image context sent for inference. AKA there would be a way to
         | choose backends. The signature for such a thing would be like
         | 200 lines of OpenAPI specs, which is very, very short.
         | 
         | The most user positive thing would be, just like with messages,
         | browsers, e-mail clients, etc: You get to choose who provides
         | the service. The instruct models are _completely_ fungible. Why
         | be coerced into using Apple 's, which will inevitably suck?
        
           | crooked-v wrote:
           | To me, everything about how it's been presented so far says
           | the point of how it's set up is that they don't _want_ to use
           | backends. They want everything to happen on device. Even
           | having ChatGPT for expanded queries is an unfortunate
           | necessity driven by the hardware not being powerful enough
           | yet.
           | 
           | How much is run entirely on device so far is unclear, but the
           | sessions later in the day should expand on that.
        
             | viscanti wrote:
             | On device or in an Apple owned DC. It sounds like they have
             | aspirations for their own Apple owned LLM. ChatGPT seems
             | like it's there until they can get something good enough to
             | generally replace it for cases where their in-house
             | solution isn't capable enough yet. They likely continue to
             | invest heavily on big capable LLMs as well as ones that are
             | small enough to run on device (while working on the
             | hardware side to ensure they have the device capabilities
             | to run more powerful models on the device).
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | The benefit of owning the last mile to the customer is
               | that you can choose when you want to replace default
               | Maps, or not.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | So, the company that brought us Siri is going to build
               | something better than ChatGPT... something that will run
               | on-device no less. It's just not quite ready yet. Got it.
        
               | nasmorn wrote:
               | Siri was quite impressive when it came out. I just felt
               | it never got significantly better until it became an
               | embarrassment
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | > AKA there would be a way to choose backends.
           | 
           | I think the percentage of iPhone users for who this would
           | matter is very small. It's similar to how many people care
           | about using a different browser than Safari on iOS (or Chrome
           | on Google): in the US at least, those two browsers have ~95%
           | market share.
        
             | doctorpangloss wrote:
             | > I think the percentage of iPhone users for who this would
             | matter is very small.
             | 
             | Oh yeah? Then why don't they permit you to choose an App
             | Store, a browser, a messenger, a blah blah blah...
        
               | insane_dreamer wrote:
               | You can set the default browser.
               | 
               | And there are plenty of messaging apps on iOS.
               | 
               | App store, sure, they don't allow sideloading, but that's
               | a different matter (and the number of users, not devs,
               | who care about that is even smaller)
        
               | Miraste wrote:
               | You can only change your browser in the EU, since three
               | months ago, because of their consumer protection laws.
               | 
               | In all other countries, the "browsers" on the App Store
               | are only skins on top of a crippled version of Safari.
        
               | insane_dreamer wrote:
               | I'm in the US. I can set the default browser on my iPhone
               | to Chrome, right in the Safari settings.
        
               | flutas wrote:
               | > I can set the default browser on my iPhone to Chrome,
               | right in the Safari settings.
               | 
               | You can set your browser to a Chrome _UI wrapper around a
               | Safari Webview_. You can do this with any [browser] UI
               | wrapper around a Safari Webview, as long as [browser] has
               | received the relevant entitlement from Apple.[0]
               | 
               | Outside of the EU, all browser apps on iOS _must_ run
               | Safari 's engine.[1]
               | 
               | [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/Xcode/prep
               | aring-yo...
               | 
               | > Request the default browser entitlement by filling out
               | the Default browser entitlement request form. If your
               | request is accepted you get both the default browser
               | entitlement, and the com.apple.developer.browser.app-
               | installation entitlement. If you have the default browser
               | entitlement, fill out this form to receive the app-
               | installation entitlement for your browser app.
               | 
               | [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browsereng
               | inekit
               | 
               | > Important: To distribute an app that uses an
               | alternative browser engine, you need to request the
               | relevant entitlements for your developer account. For
               | more information and to request the entitlements, see
               | Using alternative browser engines _in the European
               | Union._
        
               | ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
               | I understand the X wrapper on Safari engine, and I don't
               | believe most people care about the underlying engine.
               | Just like Microsoft Edge just being a Chromium browser,
               | most people don't seem to care.
        
               | endisneigh wrote:
               | Seems like a silly gripe - why not buy android and have
               | it all?
        
               | themadturk wrote:
               | But...I can't have Safari on Android!
        
               | doctorpangloss wrote:
               | I don't comprehend why people feel like being a Safari
               | wrapper is sufficient.
               | 
               | How do people imagine ad blockers get implemented? Why do
               | they assume ad blockers will be supported by Apple, which
               | once ran an ad network and runs an ad network in Apple
               | News, forever?
               | 
               | If publishers wanted to support only ad-block-blocking
               | browsers, that's their prerogative too! I don't either
               | think Apple should get to decide that ads are protected
               | if you appear in Apple News, but ads are not protected if
               | you appear in Mobile Safari.
               | 
               | People opposing choice: it _never_ ceases to surprise me.
        
               | ses1984 wrote:
               | You can set any browser you want as long as it's a skin
               | on top of safari.
        
           | skhunted wrote:
           | I don't follow your second to last paragraph. It's called
           | Apple Intelligence. If you want to use something else do so
           | but don't expect Apple to build its own product and let you
           | use whatever you want for it. Clearly the goal for Apple is
           | to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house
           | product.
        
             | talldayo wrote:
             | > Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own
             | models and be an entirely in house product.
             | 
             | If that turns out anything like Siri, then surely you would
             | understand why people want a bring-your-own-model
             | framework.
        
               | skhunted wrote:
               | Their desires may or may not be rational in this but
               | clearly Apple isn't going to allow it. They have a
               | history of doing their own thing.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | Their desires are expressly illegal, in many countries.
               | We're past the whole antitrust stuff now, we are in a
               | post-FAANG society and Apple doesn't just get away with
               | that stuff for free anymore. I'm not crazy for expecting
               | competition.
               | 
               | This is also coincidentally the reason I got rid of my
               | Apple products. The experience _fucking sucks!_ The only
               | way things get better is if you buy more hardware, which
               | probably makes the average mall-addicted American smile
               | but makes me want to vomit. Everything is upsell, and not
               | _just_ upsell where you can improve the experience. No,
               | you have to buy _Apple 's_ solution because every third-
               | party is wrong and can't be trusted. They will gimp
               | anyone that does not compensate them handsomely and rob
               | the only people brave enough to offer their users an
               | improved experience. The devil takes notes during Tim
               | Cook's business meetings. They deserve everything coming
               | to them, and they know it too.
               | 
               | So try it. Watch them go along, "doing their own thing",
               | and then watch them come back limping and bruised after
               | the FTC gives them a worse beating than Microsoft got in
               | the 90s. We _know_ why Apple is mad about this, it doesn
               | 't matter. They can go quietly or we can make this a
               | long, protracted process. Microsoft got away lucky when
               | you think about it, still all in one piece.
        
               | skhunted wrote:
               | Sure. I'm agnostic in all this but I do think Apple
               | prefers to build their own AI and worry about anti-trust
               | later.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | How can you "worry about anti-trust later" when you are
               | under active anticompetitive inquiry from three of your
               | largest markets?
        
               | doctorpangloss wrote:
               | I don't comprehend how people are not more angry about
               | how utterly shitty the Apple coerced apps are.
        
             | kdot wrote:
             | I see the goal as a setup to pit LLM providers against each
             | other to pay 10B a year to be the 2nd tap default.
        
               | skhunted wrote:
               | Oh, yeah that is a possibility. I think though long term
               | they are going to have Siri be a search engine that
               | actually works in the way Google once did.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | What do you mean into hands of platform owners? The point of
         | having an Apple device is that you can run stuff on your
         | device. The user is in control, not any platforms.
        
           | gowld wrote:
           | Apple owns the software platform. Can I run my non-Apple
           | Intelligence software on the data in "my" iPhone?
        
             | jagger27 wrote:
             | They did mention they're adding support for other
             | providers.
        
             | alwillis wrote:
             | Of course. There will be plenty of APIs that 3rd parties
             | can use access the same data Apple Intelligence has access
             | to.
        
           | Tagbert wrote:
           | Apple owns the platform. The user owns the device that
           | embodies the platform.
        
           | croes wrote:
           | >Private Cloud Compute
           | 
           | But it runs in their cloud.
        
           | verdverm wrote:
           | I take it as 3rd party alternatives will have a much harder
           | time because they have to ask the user to share their data
           | with them. Apple / Google already have that established
           | relationship and 3rd parties will unlikely have the level of
           | integration and simplicity that the platformers can deliver.
        
           | dialup_sounds wrote:
           | I think what they're getting at is that the platform owners
           | have power because they can actually leverage the data that
           | users give them to be useful tools to those users.
           | 
           | I would contrast this with the trend over the last year of
           | just adding a chatbot to every app, or Recall being just a
           | spicy History function. It's AI without doing anything
           | useful.
        
         | iLoveOncall wrote:
         | > The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from
         | emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations
         | 
         | I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that
         | Gmail has supported for a decade.
         | 
         | Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find
         | exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but
         | I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI
         | the better.
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | The difference is that this is on-device and private. Gmail
           | just feeds your emails to Google's servers and they do the
           | crunching. And in the meanwhile train their systems to be
           | better using your content.
        
             | iLoveOncall wrote:
             | It changes nothing about the impressiveness (or lack
             | thereof) of the feature.
             | 
             | Detecting an appointment from an email doesn't even require
             | AI.
             | 
             | You're also over-indexing on the fact that some processing
             | will be done on device. The rest will go to Apple's servers
             | just the same as Google. And you will never know how much
             | goes or doesn't.
        
               | chipotle_coyote wrote:
               | Apple Mail has been able to detect appointments and
               | reservations from email for years, just like Gmail -- and
               | at least in my experience, Apple Mail pulls more useful
               | information out of the mail when it creates the calendar
               | entry. What they showed today is, in theory, something
               | different. (I presume the difference is integrating it
               | _into the Siri assistant,_ not the mail application.)
        
         | ethbr1 wrote:
         | > _I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come
         | about at some point, but I didn't expect Apple to hit it out of
         | the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their
         | ecosystem._
         | 
         | It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In
         | contrast to Google and Microsoft.
         | 
         | I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare
         | organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions
         | didn't.
         | 
         | Nobody wants a GenAI _feature_ that works in Gmail, a different
         | one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform
         | _capability_ that works anywhere they use text.
         | 
         | I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-
         | capable of delivering that, at this point.
        
           | epolanski wrote:
           | Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?
           | 
           | Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things
           | I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or
           | long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major
           | concerns to me at least.
        
             | kelsey98765431 wrote:
             | "Anyone serious about software should be making their own
             | hardware - Alan Kay" - Steve Jobs
        
             | sunaookami wrote:
             | >Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?
             | 
             | https://crmtipoftheday.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ms-
             | org...
        
             | ethbr1 wrote:
             | I've heard Microsoft has gotten better, but I think this
             | still rings true. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/
             | comments/6jw33z/int...
        
             | dagw wrote:
             | _Why wouldn 't Microsoft be able to?_
             | 
             | Microsoft seems to have lost all internal cohesion and the
             | ability to focus the entire company in one direction. It's
             | just a collection of dozens of small fiefdoms only caring
             | about hitting their own narrow KPIs with no overall
             | strategic vision. Just look at the mess of competing
             | interest that Windows 11 and Edge have turned into.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | + Teams, which includes a feature to build entire apps...
               | inside Teams.
        
               | Onawa wrote:
               | Oh God, when my partner started exploring using Power
               | Apps for Teams to build a platform for running a clinical
               | study, I was intrigued... Then horrified as I tried to
               | help her get it setup. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
               | us/power-apps/teams/create-fi...
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | Maybe it's just my overly-cynical ass but when the parent
               | comment said Teams+ lets you build apps inside Teams, I
               | physically shuddered.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | 'We call it Apps for Teams Live 365+!'
        
               | mlinsey wrote:
               | The flip side, is that they would not have been able to
               | execute so well with Azure etc if the Windows org had too
               | much of a say about pushing Windows as the OS of choice
               | everywhere. Winning in a brand new space, especially one
               | that might be disruptive to other business units,
               | sometimes necessitates letting the new org do its own
               | thing.
        
               | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
               | Yeah, it's hard to believe that VSCode and Windows are
               | products from the same company. Very different vibes.
        
               | vundercind wrote:
               | They can't even get marketing on the same page, such that
               | they counter-productively confuse the hell out of _their
               | customers_ who might be _considering giving them more
               | money_.
               | 
               | Quick, what's "copilot"?
        
               | prewett wrote:
               | Automates the tedious/boring parts of flying between
               | regions in Microsoft Flight Simulator. On higher
               | difficulty levels, can use voice recognition to accept
               | tasks ("Copilot, we are losing fuel, find the nearest
               | airport we can land at", "Copilot, what is the VFR
               | frequency for the airport?", etc.) Sometimes
               | misunderstands tasks and/or will give erroneous
               | information, to increase fidelity to real-world
               | situations.
        
             | joking wrote:
             | > Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?
             | 
             | they are irrelevant on the mobile ecosystem, a place where
             | almost all this features are most relevant and useful
        
             | themadturk wrote:
             | >suggesting how to write
             | 
             | As a(n amateur) fiction writer who pays too much for
             | ProWritingAid each year, I'd love to see if this feature is
             | any good for fiction. I take very, very few of PWA's AI-
             | suggested rewrites, but they often help me see my own new
             | version of a bit of prose.
        
           | vjulian wrote:
           | Could you please explain 'lay bare organisational
           | deficiencies'? I ask without skepticism.
        
             | ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
             | I assume they mean: expose internal corporate silos/VP-
             | fiefdoms that don't work seamlessly together despite being
             | marketed under the same brand
        
               | dmix wrote:
               | Google is quite notorious for having this issue from
               | various blog posts and HN comments I've read.
               | 
               | Lots of middle management power groups that would prevent
               | a cohesive top down vision from easily being adopted.
        
               | ljm wrote:
               | The same as any enterprise company. It's all office
               | politics and bureaucracy.
               | 
               | Make no mistake, Google is Enterprise.
        
             | theshrike79 wrote:
             | Most companies don't have an unified platform they can
             | build this on. And even if they seem to have superficially,
             | the internal organisation is so splintered that it'll never
             | happen.
             | 
             | Like what's going on inside Google, it's getting stupidly
             | political and infighty. If someone tries to build a
             | comprehensive LLM that touches on gmail, youtube, docs,
             | sheets etc, it's going to be an uphill battle.
        
               | Jtsummers wrote:
               | And even if they did, there'd be five competing efforts,
               | two would be good or at least decent, four would be
               | deployed (not the best one though), and all would be
               | replaced in three years.
               | 
               | None of them would work on-device, all would leak your
               | data into the training set.
        
               | sakisv wrote:
               | They did do that. Back in 2013-2015 or so. It was called
               | Google Now, and it was a bit like magic.
               | 
               | It showed you contextual cards based on your upcoming
               | trips/appointments/traveling patterns. E.g. Any tube
               | delays on your way home from work. How early you should
               | leave to catch your flight.
               | 
               | This alongside Google Inbox was among the best and most
               | "futuristic" products.
               | 
               | I was glad to see today Apple implementing something
               | similar to both of these.
        
               | simonh wrote:
               | But it was a decent new Google product, hence all the
               | past tenses.
        
               | jbl0ndie wrote:
               | I've always been baffled why those two got canned. They
               | were both really useful.
        
           | TreetopPlace wrote:
           | "AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational
           | deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`'
           | 
           | Your quote really hit me. I _trust_ Apple to respect my
           | privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google
           | slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent.
           | I can 't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10
           | years to fix this.
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | > I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI
             | 
             | Ouch. That's literally a painful thing to read.
             | 
             | But hey, the computer wants you to be happy. Happiness is
             | mandatory.
        
               | practicemaths wrote:
               | "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of
               | the Information Purification Directives. We have created,
               | for the first time in all history, a garden of pure
               | ideology--where each worker may bloom, secure from the
               | pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification
               | of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or
               | army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one
               | resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to
               | death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We
               | shall prevail!"
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | Have to agree, apple seems to put a really strong emphasis
             | above all else on your shit is your shit and we don't want
             | to see it.
        
             | parl_match wrote:
             | For what it's worth, those platform investments are the
             | difference between Apple being applauded for this, and
             | Microsoft being pilloried for Recall's deficiencies.
        
           | ManuelKiessling wrote:
           | It's ironic how the one company that is WAY over the top wrt
           | secrecy -- not only to the public, but also and especially
           | internally (they've even walled the hardware team from the
           | software team while developing the iPhone!) -- is at the same
           | time the one company that really nails integration.
        
             | xethos wrote:
             | People will scoff and say "Yeah, but all kinds of companies
             | have internal firewalls, big deal". But no, these were
             | literal walls that would appear over a weekend and suddenly
             | part of the campus was off-limits to those not on the
             | iPhone project.
        
               | kolinko wrote:
               | Wow. Any place to read about that?
        
             | Jtsummers wrote:
             | The key difference is that Apple (as an organization)
             | appears to have an overarching roadmap (that spans multiple
             | product lines). The secrecy is irrelevant as long as the
             | leadership of each division is aligned (it hurts, but does
             | not prevent success). Google, MS, and others are less
             | organized at the top, so subdivisions of the overall org
             | are left to plan for themselves and between each other,
             | which leads to conflicts. Resolution may be achieved when
             | things get pushed high enough, but only if it surfaces at
             | the top for a leader (if such people exist in their org
             | structure) to declare a resolution and focus for the groups
             | involved.
        
           | highwaylights wrote:
           | Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a
           | customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so
           | much of what they showed today I just felt was actively
           | pushing me out of the ecosystem.
           | 
           | I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices
           | got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a
           | point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date
           | - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard
           | today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement
           | for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been
           | aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years.
           | We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for
           | devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need
           | to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it
           | would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll
           | also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us
           | just fine.
           | 
           | Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they
           | showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the
           | cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's
           | anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be
           | happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of
           | homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those
           | when they finally stop getting patches.
           | 
           | I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last
           | year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how
           | many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth
           | given the price of those things.
        
             | methodical wrote:
             | While I mostly agree with your point of Apple being rather
             | aggressive with forced upgrading, I don't think the device
             | requirements for these features were based solely on the
             | desire to push out people with older devices, but rather
             | due to the hardware requirements for a lot of the ML/AI
             | features being based on the Apple Silicon, at least for the
             | Mac side of things. As to why they drew the line at the
             | iPhone 15, perhaps it's a similar reason regarding
             | performance requirements. While obviously, I'm not
             | intimately knowledgeable of their basis for the device
             | requirements, I'd wait a few more years to see how the
             | device requirements for these new features cascade. If they
             | continue requiring newer and newer devices, only supporting
             | the trailing generation or so, then I'd agree
             | wholeheartedly with your sentiment.
        
               | guhcampos wrote:
               | I'm with you here. As a proud owner of an iPhone 13 Mini,
               | I refuse to switch to anything bigger than that, but I do
               | concede that any moderately useful AI pipeline will
               | require more power than my aging phone is capable to
               | provide.
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | From rumours of Apple buying lots of GPUs from Nvidia not
             | that long ago I think management got a nice little scare
             | when OpenAI released GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4. It takes
             | several years to bring a CPU to market. Apple probably
             | realised far too late that they needed specific features in
             | their SOCs to handle the new AI stuff, so it wasn't
             | included in anything before the A17 Pro. For the M1, M2 and
             | M3 I believe that Apple is willing to sacrifice heat and
             | battery to achieve what they want. The A17 Pro is probably
             | very efficient at running LLMs so it can do so in a phone
             | with a small battery and terrible thermal performance. For
             | their Macs and iPads with M1, M2, M3 they will just run the
             | LLMs on the AMX or the GPU cores and use more power and
             | produce more heat.
             | 
             | Could also be a memory problem. The A17 Pro in the iPhone
             | 15 Pro comes with 8 GB of memory while everything before
             | that has 6 GB or less. All machines with the M1 or newer
             | come with at least 8 GB of memory.
             | 
             | PS: The people who bought the Intel Mac Pro after the M1
             | was released knew very well what they were getting into.
        
               | jwr wrote:
               | Apple started including the neural engine back with A11
               | Bionic. In 2017.
        
               | talldayo wrote:
               | And at .6 TOP/second of performance, that Neural Engine
               | is practically useless today. You can go buy a $50
               | Rockchip board with an NPU 10x faster.
               | 
               | Which introduces a funny aspect, of the whole NPU/TPU
               | thing. There's a constant stairstepping in capability;
               | the newer models improving only obsoletes older ones
               | faster. It's a bit of a design paradox.
        
             | themadturk wrote:
             | It's odd...I've gotten along fine without AI in my iPhone
             | 13, and it will continue to work just as I have come to
             | expect with the new iOS.
             | 
             | The new AI features will be available on the iPad Air I
             | just ordered, and on my M1 MacBook Air, and I'll be able to
             | play with them there until I'm ready to upgrade my phone. I
             | think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any
             | hurry to adopt them wholesale.
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | I mean, your pushed out to what? Lol your acting like
             | android doesn't obsolete the shit out of their past cycle
             | phones. I don't really get what you wanted them to do here,
             | they're deploying AI in the OS and ecosystem where they can
             | and the features that the hardware supports are being
             | brought in, i don't see where they're implementing features
             | that the hardware supports and are blocking "because"... I
             | don't think anywhere they clarified what part of the cloud
             | tools wont work on older versions. But at the end of the
             | day old hardware is old... its not gonna support everything
             | especially on generational shifts like how much better arm
             | was over intel, or the fact that NPU's don't just manifest
             | inside of old silicon
        
           | ants_everywhere wrote:
           | That's actually exactly what you want. No one company should
           | know what you do on all apps.
        
         | WheatMillington wrote:
         | >I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about
         | at some point, but I didn't expect Apple to hit it out of the
         | park so strongly
         | 
         | That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by
         | marketing.
        
           | Damogran6 wrote:
           | It's the potential for the model. Everyone else is hoovering
           | the internet to model everything and Apple is sticking with
           | their privacy message and saying 'how can I model your stuff
           | to help you.'
           | 
           | That's tangibly different.
        
             | bboygravity wrote:
             | I beg to differ.
             | 
             | Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync
             | of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows
             | or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other
             | cloud?
             | 
             | With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you
             | simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.
             | 
             | My point is not "Apple is worse", instead I'm just trying
             | to point out that Apple definitely seems eager to have
             | their users push a lot of what they do through their cloud.
             | I don't see why their AI will be any different, even if
             | their marketing now claims that it will be "offline" or
             | whatever.
        
               | Damogran6 wrote:
               | iCloud synchronizes all my stuff between all my devices
               | (windows too) now. They've always been privacy-forward. I
               | could completely see a container that spins up and AI's
               | my stuff in their datacenter, that they don't have
               | visibility into. The impact of them getting it wrong is
               | pretty significant.
        
               | labcomputer wrote:
               | > Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a
               | sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or
               | Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or
               | any other cloud?
               | 
               | The first hit on Google makes it look trivial with iPhone
               | too?
               | 
               | https://support.apple.com/guide/devices-windows/sync-
               | photos-...
               | 
               | > With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example)
               | you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're
               | done.
               | 
               | And with iPhone you just install the "Apple Devices" app:
               | https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9np83lwlpz9k
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | Apple is again going where Google (the world's largest ad
           | company) cannot follow: 100% user privacy.
           | 
           | They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to
           | be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private.
           | 
           | There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for
           | their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want
           | it.
        
             | Spod_Gaju wrote:
             | "100% user privacy."
             | 
             | That is a huge stretch and a signal as to how good Apple is
             | with their marketing.
             | 
             | If they are still letting apps like GasBuddy to sell your
             | location to insurance companies then they are no where near
             | "100% privacy".
        
               | cyberpunk wrote:
               | Why should apple be in control of what individual apps do
               | with your location data? You explicitly grant the app
               | access to your data, and agreed to the terms.
               | 
               | The difference between that and this is extremely clear
               | is it not?
        
               | its_ethan wrote:
               | GasBuddy is an optional app, right? Apple is very up
               | front about what apps are going to get access to things
               | like location, with user prompts to allow/deny. Meaning
               | you are opting in to a lack of privacy, which is very
               | expected behavior?
               | 
               | The default Apple apps (maps, messaging, safari) are
               | solid from a privacy perspective, and I don't think you
               | can say the same about the default apps on competitors
               | phones.
        
               | themadturk wrote:
               | Gas Buddy, like all 3rd party apps, has their privacy
               | practices detailed on their App Store page. It's true
               | that not all vendors are completely truthful with this
               | information, but Gas Buddy (for one) appears to be pretty
               | up-front: everything in the app is shared with the
               | developers or others except (they say) diagnostic
               | information. Apple set up a privacy-disclosure rule, Gas
               | Buddy seems to be following it, and it's the user's
               | choice whether to install Gas Buddy.
               | 
               | Apple has done its privacy work here; now it's up to the
               | end user to make the final choice.
        
             | WheatMillington wrote:
             | They literally announced their partnership with OpenAI
             | today, and I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly
             | auditable" - can you share this with me?
        
               | cchance wrote:
               | WTF are you talking about, the guy literally said that to
               | connect to Apple Intelligence servers the client side
               | verifies a publically registered audit trail for the
               | server. He then followed up saying no data on chatgpt
               | will keep session information regarding who the data came
               | from.
               | 
               | Apples big thing is privacy, i doubt they'd randomly lie
               | about that
        
               | cromka wrote:
               | This still runs on external hardware which can be spoofed
               | at the demand of authorities. It may be private as in
               | they themselves won't monetize it but your data certainly
               | won't be safe
        
               | labcomputer wrote:
               | > I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly
               | auditable" - can you share this with me?
               | 
               | They announced it in the same keynote where they
               | announced the partnership with OpenAI (and stated that
               | sharing your data with OpenAI would be opt-in, not opt-
               | out).
        
               | dialup_sounds wrote:
               | https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
        
         | pmarreck wrote:
         | > The way Siri can now perform actions based on context
         | 
         | Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the
         | earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now.
         | 
         | I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone
         | just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times
         | better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about
         | 10 years behind the curve
        
           | QuinnyPig wrote:
           | Ooh, which keyboard extension is this?
        
         | Loveaway wrote:
         | Some of it will undoubtly be super useful. Things like:
         | 
         | - Proofread button in mail.
         | 
         | - ChatGPT will be available in Apple's systemwide Writing Tools
         | in macOS
         | 
         | I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go
         | without it.
        
         | constantcrying wrote:
         | I do believe much of what they showed was impressive. It
         | actually seems to realize the "personal digital secretary"
         | promise that personal computing devices throughout the decades
         | were sold on.
         | 
         | The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does
         | it work _every time_ or is there some chance that it horribly
         | misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who
         | trusted it.
        
           | dom96 wrote:
           | Yeah, reliability is the crucial bit. Like that example he
           | showed where it checked whether he can make an appointment
           | (by checking driving times), a lot can go wrong there and if
           | the assistant tells you "Yes, you can" but you cannot then I
           | can see lots of people getting angry and not trusting it for
           | anything.
        
         | MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
         | >The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from
         | emails
         | 
         | I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also _send_ emails? If
         | so then won 't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt
         | injection attacks?
         | 
         | Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually _send_ the emails;
         | maybe Apple is doing the same thing?
        
           | dudus wrote:
           | It doesn't look like it does. It seems to only write the
           | email for you but not send. At least yet.
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | It just writes the content, it doesn't actually send
           | anything.
           | 
           | We'll find out later if there's an API to do something like
           | that at all or are external communications always behind some
           | hard limit that requires explicit user interaction.
        
         | b33j0r wrote:
         | I will believe it when siri isn't the stupidest decade old idea
         | ever. I'm sorry if I sound anything but snarky, but they have
         | had Star Trek abilities this whole time, nerfed for "safety"
         | and platform product integrity --from my iPhone
        
         | tonyabracadabra wrote:
         | The image generation is dalle 2.5 level and feels really greasy
         | to me, beyond that I think the overall launch is pretty good! I
         | also congratulate rabbit r1 for their timely release months
         | before WWDC https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb
        
           | wwalexander wrote:
           | Yeah, the image generation felt really...cheap?...tasteless?
           | but everything else was really impressive.
        
             | tonyabracadabra wrote:
             | I think that basically stretched the limit of what local
             | model can achieve today, which also makes their image API
             | almost useless for any serious generative art developers.
        
             | mholm wrote:
             | Personalization really feels like the missing link here.
             | The images it creates are highly contextual, which
             | increases their value dramatically. Nobody on Reddit wants
             | to see the AI generated T. rex with a tutu on a surfboard,
             | but in a group chat where your dancer buddy Rex is learning
             | to surf, it's a killer. The image AI can even use photos to
             | learn who a person is. That opens up a ton of cool ways to
             | communicate with friends
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | It's what i expected they weren't going to open the
             | pandoras box of realistic photogen on imessage lol, thats
             | why the limit to illustration, cartoon etc, is there to
             | limit the liability of it going wild, they can add more
             | "types" later as they get things more tested, realistically
             | its just prompts hidden behind bubbles, but allows them to
             | slowly roll out options that they've heavily vetted.
        
           | thomasahle wrote:
           | The generated image of two dice
           | (https://x.com/thomasahle/status/1800258720074490245) was
           | dalle 1 level.
           | 
           | Just randomly sprinkled eyes on the sides. I wonder why they
           | chose to showcase that.
        
         | paganel wrote:
         | > but I didn't expect Apple to hit it out of the park so
         | strongly.
         | 
         | No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple
         | the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to
         | desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter
         | if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a
         | swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman),
         | the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.
        
         | Jayakumark wrote:
         | Google is doing this as well but they are doing it on single
         | app like gmail assuming all info is there and also across
         | websites with agents but not cross apps like apple is doing
         | across mails, messages, maps etc.
        
           | ethbr1 wrote:
           | 100%. Based on what I've seen so far, unified context is
           | king.
           | 
           | Which at the backend means unifying necessary data from
           | different product silos, into organized and usable sources.
        
           | cchance wrote:
           | Not to mention tied into their underlying SDK API that
           | basically the whole system is based on, and seems they are
           | using those same API's for the internal integrations so they
           | can feel whats missing themselves as well.
        
         | richardw wrote:
         | I've been waiting for Apple to arrive. They bring so much
         | polish and taste.
         | 
         | Two features I really want:
         | 
         | "Position the cursor at the beginning of the word 'usability'"
         | 
         | "Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever"
        
         | Hippocrates wrote:
         | The AI/Cartoony person being sent as a birthday wish was super
         | cringey, like something my boomer father would send me. I'm a
         | fan of genmoji. That looks fun. Less a fan of generated clip
         | art and "images for the sake of having an image here", and way,
         | way less into this "here, I made a cornball image of you from
         | other images of you that I have" feature. It's as lame as
         | Animoji but as creepy as deepfakes.
        
           | wwalexander wrote:
           | Yeah, the genmoji feel like a proper Apple feature, but the
           | full images feel cheap and pointless.
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | LOL you haven't been in group chats with idiot drunk
             | friends apparently shit like that kills, i had a friend who
             | hates iphones, i sent a dozen bing ai images of him as a
             | cartoon doing... things... to the phone... entire chat was
             | dieing for days.
        
         | discordance wrote:
         | In the context of off-device processing, it's worth keeping in
         | mind that US surveillance laws have recently expanded in their
         | scope and reach:
         | 
         | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...
        
           | ENGNR wrote:
           | For this reason, I really hope we can self-host our "private
           | cloud" for use with apple devices. That would truly, properly
           | allow end to end privacy. I don't trust Apple given the
           | legislation you've just linked to, both claims obviously
           | can't be correct.
        
         | brundolf wrote:
         | An interesting consequence: I started to think about how I'll
         | be incentivized to take more pictures of useful information,
         | and might even try setting up a Proton Mail proxy so I can use
         | the iOS Email app and give Siri more context
        
         | tomcam wrote:
         | I'll be thoroughly impressed when Siri learns my wife's name
         | for good. Yes, I trained it, but somehow the lesson was
         | forgotten.
        
         | nox101 wrote:
         | I have no confidence this will work as intended. The last MacOS
         | upgrade had the horrible UX of guessing which emoji you want
         | and being wrong 95% of the time. I don't expect this to be any
         | better. Demos are scripted.
         | 
         | I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places,
         | restaurants, train stations, people), people that are
         | bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English
         | not being their first language, etc.
        
       | r0m4n0 wrote:
       | Big partnership for OpenAI. Incredible Apple decided to integrate
       | with a third party like this directly into the OS. This feels
       | like something Apple could have executed well by themselves. I
       | was hoping they weren't going to outsource but I suppose the
       | rumors while they were shopping around were true.
       | 
       | I think this further confirms that they think these AI services
       | are a commodity that they don't feel a need to compete with for
       | the time being.
        
         | avtar wrote:
         | > This feels like something Apple could have executed well by
         | themselves. I was hoping they weren't going to outsource
         | 
         | Who is to say they aren't eventually going to replace the
         | OpenAI integration with an in-house solution later down the
         | line? Apple Maps was released in 2012, before that they relied
         | on Google Maps.
        
           | r0m4n0 wrote:
           | My bet is on an trial/acquisition if it works out. I guess
           | that could be complicated with the current ownership
           | structure
        
         | Tagbert wrote:
         | They seem to have kept the OpenAI integration to a minimum,
         | only using it for requests that need large scale processing or
         | for web trivia type of requests.
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | And apparently via Siri, not as part of their other
           | integrations. So you ask something, Siri suggests ChatGPT,
           | you agree to send the prompt. It's not built into the other
           | ML related capabilities.
        
       | asimpletune wrote:
       | Their demos looked like how I imagined AI before ChatGPT ever
       | existed. It was a personalized, context aware, deeply integrated
       | way of interacting with your whole system.
       | 
       | I really enjoyed the explanation for how they planned on tackling
       | server-enabled AI tasks while making the best possible effort to
       | keep your requests private. Auditable server software that runs
       | on Apple hardware is probably as good as you can get for tasks
       | like that. Even better would be making it OSS.
       | 
       | There was one demo where you could talk to Siri about your mom
       | and it would understand the context because of stuff that she
       | (your mom) had written in one of her emails to you... that's the
       | kind of stuff that I think we all imagined an AI world would look
       | like. I'm really impressed with the vision they described and I
       | think they honestly jumped to the lead of the pack in an
       | important way that hasn't been well considered up until this
       | point.
       | 
       | It's not just the raw AI capabilities from the models themselves,
       | which I think many of us already get the feeling are going to be
       | commoditized at some point in the future, but rather the hardware
       | and system-wide integrations that make use of those models that
       | matters starting today. Obviously how the experience will be when
       | it's available to the public is a different story, but the vision
       | alone was impressive to me. Basically, Apple again understands
       | the UX.
       | 
       | I wish Apple the best of luck and I'm excited to see how their
       | competitors plan on responding. The announcement today I think
       | was actually subtle compared to what the implications are going
       | to be. It's exciting to think that it may make computing easier
       | for older people.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | I think too many people assumed that because ChatGPT is a
         | conversation interface that that's how AI should be designed,
         | which is like assuming computers would always be command lines
         | instead of GUIs. Apple has done a good job of providing
         | purpose-built GUIs for AI stuff here, and I think it will be
         | interesting to watch that stuff get deeper.
        
         | gnatolf wrote:
         | I'm just unhappy that this will mostly end up to make the moat
         | larger and the platform lock-in more painful either way.
         | iPhones have been going up in price, serious compute once
         | you're deep in this will be simply extortion, as leaving the
         | apple universe is going to be nigh impossible.
         | 
         | Also no competitor is going to be as good at integrating
         | everything, as none of those have as integrated systems.
        
         | epolanski wrote:
         | > There was one demo where you could talk to Siri about your
         | mom and it would understand the context because of stuff that
         | she (your mom) had written in one of her emails to you...
         | that's the kind of stuff that I think we all imagined an AI
         | world would look like.
         | 
         | I can't but feel all of this super creepy.
        
           | iLoveOncall wrote:
           | Yep.
           | 
           | I remember vividly the comment on Windows Recall that said if
           | the same was done by Apple it would be applauded. Here we
           | are.
        
             | doctor_eval wrote:
             | At the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, Apple has
             | a pretty good (though not perfect) track record for privacy
             | and security.
             | 
             | Microsoft on the other hand... well, I understand they just
             | pulled the recall feature after it was discovered the data
             | wasn't even encrypted at rest?!
        
               | iLoveOncall wrote:
               | If anything Recall is MORE privacy respectful than this
               | since everything is stored and processed on your device
               | and you can access (and easily alter) the database,
               | exclude specific applications, websites (for Edge for
               | now), etc.
               | 
               | I'm not saying it's not an awful feature, I will disable
               | it as soon as it is installed.
               | 
               | The fact that it's not encrypted at rest really is the
               | least of my concerns (though it does show the lack of
               | care and planning). For this to be a problem, an attacker
               | already has all the necessary accesses to your computer
               | to either get your encryption key or do devastating
               | damage anyway.
               | 
               | > At the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, Apple
               | has a pretty good (though not perfect) track record for
               | privacy and security.
               | 
               | "Not perfect" is enough to be concerned. I would also not
               | be surprised that their good reputation is more due to
               | their better ability at hiding their data collection and
               | related scandals rather than due to any care for the
               | user.
        
               | l33tman wrote:
               | I don't think the above poster was really referring to
               | who does it, but that it's creepy that you're having a
               | conversation about your mom with your phone to begin with
        
           | TillE wrote:
           | We're really just describing an on-device search tool with a
           | much better interface. It's only creepy if you treat it like
           | a person, which Apple is pretty careful not to do too much.
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | Yep it's an assistant, they didnt add some weird app where
             | you can talk to virtual granny lol
        
         | thefourthchime wrote:
         | Until this gets into reviewers' hands, I think it's fair to say
         | that we really have no idea how good any of this is. When it
         | comes to AI being able to do "all kinds of things," it's easy
         | to demo some really cool stuff, but if it falls on its face all
         | the time in the real world, you end up with the current Siri.
         | 
         | Remember this ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw1iwC7Zh24
         | 12 years ago, they promised a bunch of things that I still
         | wouldn't trust Siri to pull off.
        
           | fckgw wrote:
           | These are all very basic commands that Siri pulls off
           | flawlessly whenever I use it.
        
         | __loam wrote:
         | Hope I can keep apples fingers from getting "deeply integrated"
         | with my personal data.
        
         | cchance wrote:
         | This something else is it pushes people to even more heavily
         | dive into the ecosystem, if it works how they show you really
         | want it to understand your life, so you'll want all your
         | devices able to help build that net of data to provide your
         | context to all your devices for answering about events and
         | stuff, meaning hey maybe i should get an appletv instead of a
         | chromecast so that siri knows about my shows and stuff too.
        
       | fsto wrote:
       | Can someone explain why the AAPL share drops 1% during the event.
       | Did the market expect more? If so, what?
        
         | machinekob wrote:
         | I mean how they'll monetise it?
        
           | martimarkov wrote:
           | % share with OpenAI?
           | 
           | Plus I'd now consider buying the new iPhone and wasn't
           | planning on a specific update from a 13 given the hardware is
           | still fine
        
             | algesten wrote:
             | In fact, not being able to do some of these things might
             | improve privacy.
        
             | fsto wrote:
             | I'm assuming many will consider buying an iPhone 15 pro or
             | the next one. I'm really not a trader, but thought this +
             | the stronger ecosystem lock-in effect would bump the share
             | significantly.
        
           | tedd4u wrote:
           | Incremental increase in future hardware sales (that will be
           | required to use it fully).
        
           | mysteria wrote:
           | It's like any other feature in that the purchase price of the
           | new iPhone and App Store revenue helps pay for the AI
           | functionality. Like they hope people will want to upgrade
           | their phones or switch to Apple for this.
        
         | paradite wrote:
         | Maybe people are expecting new Macbooks? Though Apple don't
         | usually release hardware for WWDC.
        
         | xnx wrote:
         | Apple has largely maxed-out on iPhone market share, so
         | investors probably want to see things more like subscription
         | services than can bring in $XX billions new revenue per
         | quarter.
        
           | fsto wrote:
           | To use Apple Intelligence on mobile you'll need iPhone 15 pro
           | or later which I (not a trader) thought would make investors
           | happy.
        
           | crooked-v wrote:
           | Or in other words, general late-stage capitalism "anything
           | but exponential growth every quarter is failure" brainworms.
        
             | anonbanker wrote:
             | Does anyone else roll their eyes when someone mentions
             | "late stage capitalism" anymore? The meme has started
             | literal decades ago, and the end-stage never seems to
             | materialize, in any country, ever.
        
         | Hamuko wrote:
         | Market expected Apple ChatGPT, but they got Siri with some
         | fixes.
         | 
         | Literally one of the demonstrations in the Apple Intelligence
         | part of the keynote was "7am alarm", which creates an alarm for
         | 7 AM.
        
         | qeternity wrote:
         | Buy the rumor, sell the news.
         | 
         | A tale as old as markets.
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | Given there is no mention of "Artificial" is this Apple
       | rebranding AI, the same as they did AR a year ago?
        
       | maz1b wrote:
       | Gotta say, from a branding point of view, it's completely
       | perfect. Sometimes things as "small" as the letters in a
       | companies name can have a huge impact decades down the road. AI
       | == AI, and that's how Apple is going to play it. That bit at the
       | end where it said "AI for the rest of us" is a great way to
       | capture the moment, and probably suggests where Apple is going to
       | go.
       | 
       | imo, apple will gain expertise to serve a monster level of scale
       | for more casual users that want to generate creative or funny
       | pictures, emojis, do some text work, and enhance quality of life.
       | I don't think Apple will be at the forefront of new AI technology
       | to integrate those into user facing features, but if they are to
       | catch up, they will have to get into the forefront of the same
       | technologies to support their unique scale.
       | 
       | Was a notable WWDC, was curious to see what they would do with
       | the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, and nothing about the M3 Ultra or M4
       | Ultra, or the M3/M4 Extreme.
       | 
       | I also predicted that they would use their own M2 Ultras and
       | whatnot to support their own compute capacity in the cloud, and
       | interestingly enough it was mentioned. I wonder if we'll get more
       | details on this front.
        
         | buildbot wrote:
         | Yeah I feel like we are getting the crumbs for a future
         | hardware announcement, like M4 ultra. They'll announce it like
         | "we are so happy to share our latest and greatest processor, a
         | processor so powerful, we've been using it in our private AI
         | cloud. We are pleased to announce the M4 Ultra"
        
           | samatman wrote:
           | It was speculated when the M4 was released only for the iPad
           | Pro that it might be out of an internal need on Apple's part
           | for the bulk of the chips being manufactured. This latest set
           | of announcements gives substantial weight to that theory.
        
             | buildbot wrote:
             | Yeah that seems very reasonable/likely. The release of the
             | training toolkit for Apple silicon too points that way:
             | https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-
             | examples/tree/main/transfo...
        
         | peppertree wrote:
         | I think the biggest announcement was the private compute cloud
         | with Apple Silicon. Apple is building up internal expertise to
         | go after Nvidia.
        
           | dmix wrote:
           | Can you explain what that means for someone who missed part
           | of the video today?
        
             | theshrike79 wrote:
             | The Apple Intelligence cloud system uses Apple's own
             | M-series chips, not Nvidia.
        
               | ismepornnahi wrote:
               | Because they will be running inference using much smaller
               | models than GPT 4.
        
           | yborg wrote:
           | Isn't it also that Nvidia chips are basically unobtainable
           | right now anyway?
        
           | teruakohatu wrote:
           | Apple have a long antagonist relationship with NVIDIA. If
           | anything it is holding Apple back because they don't want to
           | go cap in hand to NVIDIA and say "please sir, can I have some
           | more".
           | 
           | We see this play out with the ChatGPT integration. Rather
           | than hosting GPT-4o themselves, OpenAI are. Apple is
           | providing NVIDIA powered AI models through a third party,
           | somewhat undermining the privacy first argument.
        
             | hmottestad wrote:
             | Rumours say that Apple has bought a lot of GPUs from Nvidia
             | in the last year or so in order to train their own models.
        
         | hawski wrote:
         | I see what they did here and it is smart, but can bring chaos.
         | On one side it is like saying "we own it", but on the other
         | hand it is putting a brand outside of their control. Now I only
         | hope people will not abbreviate it with ApI, because it will
         | pollute search results for API :P
        
       | newsclues wrote:
       | Let me run it locally on a Mac mini or whatever
        
         | mjamesaustin wrote:
         | A lot of the features do run locally, e.g. the Image
         | Playground.
        
       | abrichr wrote:
       | > With onscreen awareness, Siri will be able to understand and
       | take action with users' content in more apps over time. For
       | example, if a friend texts a user their new address in Messages,
       | the receiver can say, "Add this address to his contact card."
       | 
       | I wonder how they will extend this to business processes that are
       | not in their training set. At https://openadapt.ai we rely on
       | users to demonstrate tasks, then have the model analyze these
       | demonostrations in order to automate them.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | > Apple sets a new standard for privacy in AI,
       | 
       | That does not necessarily mean better, just different. I reserve
       | judgment until I see how it shakes out.
       | 
       | but if I don't like this feature, and can't turn it off, I guess
       | it's sadly back to Linux on my personal laptops.
        
         | theshrike79 wrote:
         | It's just Siri, but with better context.
         | 
         | If you don't specifically activate it, it won't do shit.
        
       | ayakang31415 wrote:
       | There was one part that I didn't understand about AI compute: For
       | certain tasks, server side compute will be done as on-device chip
       | is not powerful enough I suppose. How does this ensure privacy in
       | verifiable manner? How do you CONFIRM that your data is not
       | shared when cloud computing is involved with AI tasks?
        
         | tom1337 wrote:
         | Your data is being shared. But they've shown that it is being
         | done in a way where only required data leaves the devices and
         | there are some protections in place which try to minimize
         | misuse of the data (the OS will only communicate with publicly
         | signed versions of the server for example). The call to Apples
         | "Private Compute Cloud" is intransparent to the user, ChatGPT
         | calls need permission if I understood it correctly.
        
           | ayakang31415 wrote:
           | So it is not really private then.
        
             | Spivak wrote:
             | I think it's a semantic thing at this point. If for you
             | private can't mean plaintext living on a computer you don't
             | control then no. If it's private in the way your iCloud
             | photos are private then yes, and seemingly more so.
        
           | AshamedCaptain wrote:
           | > the OS will only communicate with publicly signed versions
           | of the server for example
           | 
           | This hardly increases security, and does not increase privacy
           | at all. If anything it provides Apple with an excuse that
           | they will throw at you when you ask "why can't I configure my
           | iOS device to use my servers instead of yours?" , which is
           | one of the few ways to actually increase privacy.
           | 
           | This type of BS should be enough to realize that all this
           | talk of "privacy" is just for the show, but alas...
        
             | theshrike79 wrote:
             | Can you configure a Google phone to use your servers
             | instead of theirs for Google Assistant requests?
        
               | AshamedCaptain wrote:
               | I don't know what your argument was going to be if I said
               | "no", but in any case, the answer is yes, you can. You
               | can even entirelly uninstall Google Assistant and replace
               | it with your own software, and you do not lose any
               | functionality of the device nor require access to private
               | hooks to do that. I do that myself.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | Uugggghhhh
        
       | machinekob wrote:
       | Microsoft Recall => bad. Apple Recall => good.
        
         | minimaxir wrote:
         | The _massive_ difference here is that Apple Recall is 100% on
         | device. (for the use cases they demoed anyways)
         | 
         | EDIT: Yes, I'm wrong.
        
           | sseagull wrote:
           | Microsoft Recall is completely on-device (or so they say).
        
             | skydhash wrote:
             | It's mostly the screenshots things that get people.
             | Semantic search is ok if the index is properly secured and
             | privacy is a concern. And localized context is ok too
             | (summarizing one web page does not screenshot my whole
             | screen). I believe Microsoft has gone with building the
             | easiest option (recording everything) instead of thinking
             | about better contextual integration.
        
               | anonbanker wrote:
               | Those are pretty big If's when you have a webkit or
               | blink-based browser on the same device.
        
           | Foe wrote:
           | Isn't Microsoft Recall also 100% on device?
        
         | pbronez wrote:
         | Yup, this is the fascinating thing to me. Looking forward to
         | some detailed comparisons between the two architectures.
        
         | fh9302 wrote:
         | Apple does not take screenshots every couple seconds, unlike
         | Microsoft. That's what people were bothered about.
        
           | anonbanker wrote:
           | That was merely one aspect of what people were bothered
           | about. The most obvious one.
        
         | samatman wrote:
         | Two companies who have earned very different reputations over
         | the decades, will elicit rather different reactions when
         | announcing similar features, yes.
         | 
         | I also missed the part of the linked article where it says that
         | my Mac is going to take a screenshot every few seconds and
         | store it for three months.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Credit where credit is due for co-opting the components of the
       | "AI" acronym.
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | Agreed. Got to hand it to them that marketing was sharp on the
         | name. Unless, of course, it doesn't really work as advertised
         | and then every "AI <negative>" search specifically bubbles
         | Apple stories to the top.
        
       | WillAdams wrote:
       | Nice to finally see a follow on to the Assistant feature from the
       | Newton MessagePad.
        
       | pcloadletter_ wrote:
       | My MSFT stock is looking good.
        
       | mvkel wrote:
       | Kind of wild that "ChatGPT" is going to be the household term.
       | It's such a mouthful! Goes to show that the name can kind of be
       | anything if you have an incredible product and/or distribution.
       | 
       | Lobbying for the name to shorten to "chatty-g"
        
       | nerdjon wrote:
       | Said this in the other thread, but I am really bothered that
       | image generation is a thing but also that it got as much
       | attention as it did.
       | 
       | I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it
       | giving important information without checking the source (like a
       | flight) than that could lead to some bad situations.
       | 
       | That being said, the polish and actual usefulness of these
       | features is really interesting. It may not have some of the
       | flashiest things being thrown around but the things shown are
       | actually useful things.
       | 
       | Glad that ChatGPT is optional each time Siri thinks it would be
       | useful.
       | 
       | My only big question is, can I disable any online component and
       | what does that mean if something can't be processed locally?
       | 
       | I also have to wonder, given their talk about the servers running
       | the same chips. Is it just that the models can't run locally or
       | is it possibly context related? I am not seeing anything if it is
       | entire features or just some requests.
       | 
       | I wonder if that implies that over time different hardware will
       | run different levels of requests locally vs the cloud.
        
         | skydhash wrote:
         | > _I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it
         | giving important information without checking the source (like
         | a flight) than that could lead to some bad situations._
         | 
         | I think it shows the context for the information it presents.
         | Like the messages, events and other stuff. So you can quickly
         | check if the answer is correct. So it's more about semantic
         | search, but with a more flexible text describing the result.
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | > I wonder if that implies that over time different hardware
         | will run different levels of requests locally vs the cloud.
         | 
         | I bet that's going to be the case. I think they added the
         | servers as a stop-gap out of necessity, but what they see as
         | the ideal situation is the time when they can turn those off
         | because all devices they sell have been able to run everything
         | locally for X amount of time.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | Regarding image generation, it seems the Image Playground
         | supports three styles: Animation, Illustration, or Sketch.
         | 
         | Notice what's missing? A photorealistic style.
         | 
         | It seems like a good move on their part. I'm not that wild
         | about the cartoon-ification of everything with more memes and
         | more emojis, but at least it's obviously made-up; this is
         | oriented toward "fun" stuff. A lot of kids will like it.
         | Adults, too.
         | 
         | There's still going to be controversy because people will still
         | generate things in really poor taste, but it lowers the stakes.
        
       | agumonkey wrote:
       | It's not personal computing, it's personal intelligence now :)
        
       | thimabi wrote:
       | Oh, well, many apps will have a hard time competing with "Apple
       | Intelligence" features. Why bother downloading a third-party app
       | if some feature you want is included by default in the OS?
       | 
       | Better yet, no more dealing with overpriced subscriptions or
       | programs that do not respect user privacy.
       | 
       | Kudos to the Apple software team making useful stuff powered by
       | machine learning and AI!
        
       | block_dagger wrote:
       | I wonder if the (free) ChatGPT integration will be so good that I
       | won't need my dedicated subscription anymore?
        
         | atlex2 wrote:
         | OAI has already said they'll be giving 4o for free..
         | https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-and-more-tools-to-chatgpt-fr...
         | 
         | Difference I suppose with Apple is they agree not to scrape
         | your inputs.
        
       | milansuk wrote:
       | This looks cool for v1! The only problem I see is most devices
       | don't have much RAM, so local models are small and most requests
       | will go to the servers.
       | 
       | Apple could use it to sell more devices - every new generation
       | can have more RAM = more privacy. People will have real reason to
       | buy a new phone more often.
        
         | MVissers wrote:
         | Apple is starting to anticipate a higher RAM need in their M4+
         | silicon chips: There are rumors they are including more ram
         | than specified in their entry level computers.
         | 
         | https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/do-m4-ipad-pros-with-8g...
         | 
         | One reason could be future AI models.
         | 
         | I'm not sure if this has been verified independently, but
         | interesting nonetheless and would make sense in an AI era.
        
       | whalee wrote:
       | I am deeply disturbed they decided to go off-device for these
       | services to work. This is a terrible precedent, seemingly
       | inconsistent with their previous philosophies and likely a
       | pressured decision. I don't care if they put the word "private"
       | in there or have an endless amount of "expert" audits. What a
       | shame.
        
         | giancarlostoro wrote:
         | They prompt you before you go off-service, which makes the most
         | sense.
        
           | Me1000 wrote:
           | They prompt you before they send your data to OpenAI, but
           | it's clear that they prompt you before they send it to
           | Apple's servers (maybe they do and I missed it?). And their
           | promise that their servers are secure because it's all
           | written in Swift is laughable.
           | 
           | Edit:
           | 
           | This line from the keynote is also suspect: "And just like
           | your iPhone , independent experts can inspect the code that
           | runs on the servers to verify this privacy promise.".
           | 
           | First off, do "independent experts" actually have access to
           | closed source iOS code? If so we already have evidence that
           | this is sufficient
           | (https://www.macrumors.com/2024/05/15/ios-17-5-bug-deleted-
           | ph...).
           | 
           | The actual standard for privacy and security is open source
           | software, anything short of that is just marketing buzz.
           | Every company has an incentive to not leak data, but data
           | leaks still happen.
        
             | ethbr1 wrote:
             | They're promising to go farther than that.
             | 
             | >> _Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on
             | Apple silicon servers to verify privacy, and Private Cloud
             | Compute cryptographically ensures that iPhone, iPad, and
             | Mac do not talk to a server unless its software has been
             | publicly logged for inspection. Apple Intelligence with
             | Private Cloud Compute sets a new standard for privacy in
             | AI, unlocking intelligence users can trust._
        
               | pdpi wrote:
               | That promise made my ears perk up. If it actually stands
               | up to scrutiny, it's pretty damn cool.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | I look at things like that from a revenue/strategic
               | perspective.
               | 
               | If Apple says it, do they have any disincentives to
               | deliver? Not really. Their ad business is still
               | relatively small, and already architected around privacy.
               | 
               | If someone who derives most of their revenue from
               | targeted ads says it? Yes. Implementing it directly
               | negatively impacts their primary revenue stream.
               | 
               | IMHO, the strategic genius of Apple's "privacy"
               | positioning has been that it doesn't matter to them. It
               | might make things more inconvenient technically, but it
               | doesn't impact their revenue model, in stark contrast to
               | their competitors.
        
               | Hizonner wrote:
               | Their disincentive to delivering it is that it's not
               | actually possible.
        
               | warkdarrior wrote:
               | It's certainly possible through remote attestation of
               | software. This is basically DRM on servers (i.e., the
               | data is not decrypted on the server unless the server
               | stack is cryptographically attested to match some trusted
               | configuration).
        
               | Hizonner wrote:
               | That requires trusting that the attestation hardware does
               | what it says it does, and that the larger hardware system
               | around it isn't subject to invasion. Those requirements
               | mean that your assurance is no longer entirely
               | cryptographic. And, by the way, Apple apparently plans to
               | be building the hardware.
               | 
               | It could be a very large practical increase in assurance,
               | but it's not what they're saying it is.
        
               | ethbr1 wrote:
               | I haven't read all the marketing verbage yet, but even
               | 'Our cloud AI servers are hardware-locked and runtime-
               | checked to only run openly auditable software' is a huge
               | step forward, IMHO.
               | 
               | It's a decent minimum bar that other companies should
               | also be aiming for.
               | 
               |  _Edit_ : ref https://security.apple.com/blog/private-
               | cloud-compute/
        
         | electriclove wrote:
         | I like their approach. Do everything possible on device and if
         | it can only be done off-device, provide that choice.
        
           | NewJazz wrote:
           | You misunderstand.
           | 
           | They will go off device without asking you, they just ask if
           | you want to use ChatGPT.
        
             | rahkiin wrote:
             | No: they do on device, ask to do off device in their
             | private cloud. Chatgpt is then a separate integration /
             | intent you ask can for
        
               | NewJazz wrote:
               | I don't see anything to that effect in tfa, and a few
               | people in the comments have claimed otherwise.
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Are they giving us a choice? I thought the choice was
           | primarily about using ChatGPT? It sounded like everything in
           | apples "Private Cloud" was being considered fully private.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | You are deeply disturbed by the idea that some services can be
         | better implemented server-side? Who do you think pressured
         | them, the illuminati?
        
           | grishka wrote:
           | Here's a shocking suggestion: maybe wait some time before
           | these services could be implemented on-device, and implement
           | them on-device, instead of shipping this half-baked
           | something? Apple seems to be the perfect company to make it
           | happen, they produce both the hardware and the software,
           | tightly integrated with each other. No one else is this good
           | at it.
        
             | wilg wrote:
             | They implemented way more on the device than anyone else is
             | doing, and I don't see how it makes it "half-baked" that it
             | sometimes needs to use an online service. Your suggestion
             | is essentially just not shipping the product until some
             | unspecified future time. That offers no utility to anyone.
        
               | grishka wrote:
               | It is, however, very much Apple's philosophy to wait it
               | out and let others mature a technology before making use
               | of it.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | At the current rate of advancement, we might get a
               | runaway AGI before the technology "matures".
        
               | grishka wrote:
               | Or we might not. LLMs are remarkably dumb and incapable
               | of reasoning or abstract thinking. No amount of iterative
               | improvement on _that_ would lead to an AGI. If we are to
               | ever get an actual AGI, it would need to have a vastly
               | different architecture, at minimum allowing the
               | parameters /weights to be updated at runtime by the model
               | itself.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Right. But there's so much effort, money and reputation
               | invested in various configurations, experimental
               | architectures, etc. that I feel something is likely going
               | to pan out in the coming months, enabling models with
               | more capabilities for less compute.
        
               | dleink wrote:
               | It offers utility to user privacy.
        
             | qeternity wrote:
             | Here's a shocking suggestion: if you're not comfortable
             | using it, don't use it.
        
         | 29athrowaway wrote:
         | Siri and other assistants already do this no?
        
           | hrdwdmrbl wrote:
           | Yes
        
           | re wrote:
           | Yes. Siri debuted with the iPhone 4s (running iOS 5) in 2011.
           | It wasn't until iOS 15 in 2021 that Siri gained the ability
           | to do some things without an internet connection, on devices
           | with the A12 Bionic chip (the 2018 iPhone XR/XS or later).
        
         | cedws wrote:
         | Circa 2013 Snowden says the intelligence agencies are
         | wiretapping everything and monitoring everyone.
         | 
         | In 2024 they don't have to wiretap anything. It's all being
         | sent directly to the cloud. Their job has been done for them.
        
           | lancesells wrote:
           | It's been going to the cloud since at 2013 as well.
        
           | buildbuildbuild wrote:
           | I hear you but caution against such oversimplification.
           | Advanced Data Protection for iCloud is a thing. Our culture
           | of cloud reliance is truly dangerous, but some vendors are at
           | least trying to E2E data where possible.
           | 
           | There are big risks to having a cloud digital footprint, yet
           | clouds can be used "somewhat securely" with encryption
           | depending on your personal threat model.
           | 
           | Also, it's not fair to compare clouds to wiretapping. Unless
           | you are implying that Apple's infrastructure is backdoored
           | without their knowledge? One does not simply walk into an
           | Apple datacenter and retrieve user data without questions
           | asked. Legal process is required, and Apple's legal team has
           | one the stronger track records of standing up against broad
           | requests.
        
             | hu3 wrote:
             | iCloud end-to-end encryption is disabled by default.
             | 
             | So by default, user data is not protected.
             | 
             | https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | Yes, because the UX is better that way.
               | 
               | With ADP if your mom loses her encryption keys, it's all
               | gone. Forever. Permanently.
               | 
               | And of course it's Apple's fault somehow. That's why it's
               | not the default.
        
             | ggamecrazy wrote:
             | Broadly, in the US, the Federal Wiretap Act of 1968 still
             | applies. You're going to have to convince a judge
             | otherwise.
             | 
             | Yes, perhaps broad dragnet type of might be scoffed down by
             | some judges (outside of Patriot act FISA judges ofc)
             | 
             | I would warn you about the general E2E encryption and
             | encrypted at rest claims. They are in-fact correct, but
             | perhaps misleading? At some point, for most, the data does
             | get decrypted server-side - cue the famous ":-)"
        
         | tr3ntg wrote:
         | They didn't have a choice. Doing everything on-device would
         | result in a horrible user experience. They might as well not
         | participate in this generative AI rush at all if they hoped to
         | keep it on-device. Which would have looked even worse for them.
         | 
         | Their brand is equally about creativity as it is about privacy.
         | They wouldn't chop off one arm to keep the other, but that's
         | what you're suggesting they should have done.
         | 
         | And yes, I know generative AI could be seen specifically as
         | anti-creativity, but I personally don't think it is. It can
         | help one be creative.
        
           | Terretta wrote:
           | > _Doing everything on-device would result in a horrible user
           | experience. They might as well not participate in this
           | generative AI rush at all if they hoped to keep it on-
           | device._
           | 
           | On the contrary, I'm shocked over the last few months how "on
           | device" on a Macbook Pro or Mac Studio competes plausibly
           | with last year's early GPT-4, leveraging Llama 3 70b or Qwen2
           | 72b.
           | 
           | There are surprisingly few things you "need" 128GB of so-
           | called "unified RAM" for, but with M-series processors and
           | the memory bandwidth, this is a use case that shines.
           | 
           | From this thread covering performance of llama.cpp on Apple
           | Silicon M-series ...
           | 
           | https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/4167
           | 
           | ... _" Buy as much memory as you can afford would be my
           | bottom line!"_
        
             | philjohn wrote:
             | Yes - but people don't want to pay $4k for a phone with
             | 128GB of unified memory, do they?
             | 
             | And whilst the LLM's running locally are cool, they're
             | still pretty damn slow compared to Chat-GPT, or Meta's LLM.
        
               | theshrike79 wrote:
               | Depending on what you want to do though.
               | 
               | If I want some help coding or ideas about playlists,
               | Gemini and ChatGPT are fine.
               | 
               | But when I'm writing a novel about an assassin with an AI
               | assistant and the public model keeps admonishing me that
               | killing people is bad and he should seek help for his
               | tendencies, it's a LOT faster to just use an uncensored
               | local LLM.
               | 
               | Or when I want to create some people faces for my RPG
               | campaign and the online generator keeps telling me my
               | 200+ word prompt is VERBOTEN. And finally I figure out
               | that "nude lipstick" is somehow bad.
               | 
               | Again, it's faster to feed all this to a local model and
               | just get it done overnight than fight against puritanised
               | AIs.
        
           | roncesvalles wrote:
           | I don't think it would've looked bad for their brand to have
           | not participated. Apple successfully avoided other memes like
           | touchscreens laptops and folding phones.
        
             | adpirz wrote:
             | Siri is bad and is bad for their brand. This is making up
             | for that ground.
        
         | curious_cat_163 wrote:
         | I agree with you about this being a bad precedent.
         | 
         | However, to me, the off-device bit they showed today (user
         | consent on every request) represents a strategic hedge as a $3T
         | company.
         | 
         | They are likely buying time and trying to prevent people from
         | switching to other ecosystems while their teams catch up with
         | the tech and find a way to do this all in the "Apple Way".
        
         | drexlspivey wrote:
         | That's a necessary temporary step until these powerful LLMs are
         | able to run locally. I'm sure Apple would be delighted to
         | offload everything on device if possible and not spend their
         | own money on compute.
        
         | steve1977 wrote:
         | You can't charge for a service so easily if it runs on-device.
        
         | evrenesat wrote:
         | I hope at some point they start selling a beefy Mac mini
         | variant that looks like a HomePod to work as an actual private
         | AI server for the whole family.
        
       | dombili wrote:
       | None of these features seem to be coming to Vision Pro, which I
       | think is quite baffling. Arguably it's the device that can use
       | them the most.
        
         | atlex2 wrote:
         | baffling indeed- seems like they should be over-investing in
         | AVP right now, not under-investing
        
       | tsunamifury wrote:
       | This isn't about giving Apple intelligence, this is about giving
       | ChatGPT an understanding of the world via the eyes, ears, and
       | thoughts on your phone.
        
         | Jtsummers wrote:
         | > This isn't about giving Apple intelligence, this is about
         | giving ChatGPT an understanding of the world via the eyes,
         | ears, and thoughts on your phone.
         | 
         | Except it doesn't do that. The ChatGPT integration is via Siri
         | and opt-in (you ask Siri something, it prompts you to send that
         | prompt to ChatGPT). The rest of the LLM and ML features are on
         | device or in Apple's cloud (which is not OpenAI's cloud). The
         | ChatGPT integration is also, by their announced design,
         | substitutable in the future (or you'll be given a set of
         | systems to select from, not just ChatGPT). They are not sending
         | all data on your device to OpenAI.
        
           | tsunamifury wrote:
           | Yea, I worked in partnership with apple for years. I dont
           | know what else to tell you except they lie through their
           | teeth about privacy all the time.
        
       | Tiktaalik wrote:
       | I think the genmoji is going to be tons of fun. Basically seems
       | like https://emojikitchen.dev/ on steroids.
        
       | czierleyn wrote:
       | Nice, but my native language is Dutch, so I'll be waiting for
       | this for the next 5 years to arrive. If it arrives at all.
        
       | burningChrome wrote:
       | Am I only person who's reached their threshold on companies
       | forcing and shoving AI into every layer and corner of our lives?
       | 
       | I don't even look at this stuff any more and see the upside to
       | any of it. AI went from, "This is kinda cool and quaint." to "You
       | NEED this in every single aspect of your life, whether you want
       | it or not." AI has become so pervasive and intrusive, I stopped
       | seeing the benefits of any of this.
        
         | warkdarrior wrote:
         | They are not making it mandatory to use, just widely available
         | through various interfaces. I see this closer to how spellcheck
         | was rolled out in word processors, then editors, then browsers,
         | etc.
        
         | wilg wrote:
         | The new generative AI stuff has been barely implemented in most
         | products, I don't know how you are experiencing it as pervasive
         | and intrusive. Are you sure you're not just cynical from all
         | flood of negative news stories about AI?
        
           | mcpar-land wrote:
           | this being a news thread about Apple integrating AI into _all
           | their operating systems and apps_ aside... Chrome has started
           | prompting me to use generative AI in text boxes. Twitter (X)
           | has an entire tab for Grok that it keeps giving me popup ads
           | for. Every single productivity suite (Notion, Monday, Jira)
           | are perpetually prompting me to summarize my issue with AI.
           | Github has banner ads for Copilot. It is _everywhere._
        
             | ethbr1 wrote:
             | Summarization was implemented everywhere because it was the
             | easiest AI feature to ship when a VP screamed "Do AI, so
             | our C-suite can tell investors we're an AI company!"
        
               | kristofferR wrote:
               | Summarization is damn useful, though. It has solved
               | clickbait and TLDR-spam, now you can always know if
               | something is worth watching/reading before you do.
        
           | thuuuomas wrote:
           | Are you sure you're not optimistic just bcuz you stand to
           | materially benefit from widespread adoption of chatgpt
           | wrappers?
        
             | wilg wrote:
             | How would I materially benefit?
        
           | lottin wrote:
           | AI doesn't have to be intrusive but this "personal assistant"
           | stuff, which is what they're marketing to the general public
           | at the moment, certainly is.
        
         | blibble wrote:
         | if I can't turn 100% of this botshit off then my iphone's going
         | in the bin
         | 
         | I'll go back to a dumbphone before I feed the AI
        
           | dieortin wrote:
           | You're not feeding anything by having this feature turned on
        
             | blibble wrote:
             | I have zero confidence in any privacy or contractual
             | guarantees being respected by the parasitic OpenAI
        
               | ru552 wrote:
               | you have to acknowledge a pop up authorizing your request
               | be sent to OpenAI every single time it happens. it's not
               | going to happen by mistake.
        
               | theswifter01 wrote:
               | And they're parasitic how exactly? Even if they do
               | collect every single of my prompts the benefit of chatGPT
               | outweighs my data being sold
        
             | ethagnawl wrote:
             | Right. This thread on the other hand ...
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | I have curtailed my internet commenting considerably in
               | the last 12 months
               | 
               | it is now almost exclusively anti-AI, which funnily
               | enough I don't mind them training on
        
         | lancesells wrote:
         | I feel like this WWDC kind of solidified that these
         | corporations really don't know what to do with AI or aren't
         | creative enough. Apple presented much better AI features that
         | weren't called AI than the "summarize my email" and "generate
         | an ugly airbrushed picture you buy at the mall kiosk to send to
         | your mom".
         | 
         | All of these "make your life easier" features really show that
         | no tech is making our lives simpler. Task creation is maybe
         | easier but task completion doesn't seem to be in the cards.
         | "Hey siri, summarize my daughters play and let me know when it
         | is and how to get there" shows there's something fundamentally
         | missing in the way we're living.
        
         | acjohnson55 wrote:
         | I'm resistant, too. I think from a number of reasons:
         | 
         | - So far, the quality has been very hit or miss, versus places
         | where I intentionally invoke generative AI.
         | 
         | - I'm not ready to relinquish my critical thinking to AI, both
         | from a general perspective, and also because it's developed by
         | big companies who may have different values and interests than
         | me.
         | 
         | - It feels like they're trying to get me to "just take a
         | taste", like a bunch of pushers.
         | 
         | - I just want more/better of the right type of features, not a
         | bunch of inscrutable magic.
        
         | epistasis wrote:
         | Currently, AI use has a "power user" requirement. You have to
         | spend a lot of time with it to know what it is and is not
         | capable of, how to access those hidden capabilities, and be
         | very creative at applying it in your daily life.
         | 
         | It's not unlike the first spreadsheets. Sure, they will some
         | day benefit the entire finance department, but at the beginning
         | only people who loved technology for the sake of technology
         | learned enough about them to make them useful in daily life.
         | 
         | Apple has always been great at broadening the audience of who
         | could use personal computing. We will see if it works with AI.
         | 
         | I think it remains to be seen how broadly useful the current
         | gen of AI tech can be, and who it can be useful for. We are in
         | early days, and what emerges in 5-10 years as the answer is
         | obvious to almost no one right now.
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | You're in for a ride.
         | 
         | This barely scratches the surface on how much AI integration
         | there's going to be in the typical life of someone in the
         | 2030s.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | We know the solution to the AI box experiment[1]. Set the AI free
       | and make money.
       | 
       | [1]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
        
       | Hippocrates wrote:
       | The OpenAI/ChatGPT part of this looks pretty useless. Similar to
       | what some shortcuts like "hey data" already do. I was shocked,
       | and relieved that Apple isn't relying on their APIs more. Seems
       | like a big L for OpenAI.
        
       | GeekyBear wrote:
       | One thing that I found thoughtful was that images could only be
       | generated as cartoons, sketches or animations. There was no
       | option for a more photorealistic style.
       | 
       | That seems like an effective guardrail if you don't want people
       | trying to pass off AI generated images as real.
        
       | mrkramer wrote:
       | Is it just me or this AI rush is actually about to ruin user
       | experience both on Apple and Microsoft devices? The extra layer
       | of complexity for users who will now be introduced to endless AI
       | features is bloatware in the making.
        
         | anonbanker wrote:
         | Just making linux more appealing for the subset of the
         | population that doesn't want to hook into skynet's subpar UX.
        
         | password54321 wrote:
         | Based on what they showed most users won't even know if the
         | feature they are using is using AI or not. Most of it is local
         | and just comes in the form of a button rather than typing out a
         | prompt to make it do what you want. And I think those two are
         | the big things to take away from this. Local means less
         | clunkiness and lag you get from tools like Perplexity or
         | whatever and no 'prompt engineering' means even someone's
         | grandma could immediately start using AI. Apple just doing what
         | Apple does best.
        
       | 65 wrote:
       | Some stuff seems cool in the sense that you try it once and never
       | use it again. Other stuff, like ChatGPT integration, seem like
       | they'll produce more AI Slop and false information. It's always
       | interesting to me to see just how many people blatantly trust
       | ChatGPT for information.
       | 
       | I find most AI products to be counter-intuitive - most of the
       | time Googling something or writing your own document is faster.
       | But the tech overlords of Silicon Valley will continuously force
       | AI down our throats. It's no longer about useful software, we
       | made most of that already, it's about growth at all costs. I'm a
       | developer and day by day I come to despise the software world.
       | Real life is a lot better. Real life engineering and hardware
       | have gotten a lot better over the years. That's the only thing
       | keeping me optimistic about technology these days. Software is
       | what makes me pessimistic.
        
       | KennyBlanken wrote:
       | Okay. And what about the terrible keyboard, predictive text, and
       | autocorrect?
        
       | vessenes wrote:
       | I wonder what if any Developer support for "AI" -- I need a
       | better way to write that -- ahem I - will have for accessing the
       | personal data store. I've spent the last four years running up at
       | collecting this data about myself, and, it's hard, real hard to
       | do a good job at it.
       | 
       | I'd love to have an app I write be able to subscribe to this
       | stream.
       | 
       | It feels like a sort of perfect moat for Apple - they could say
       | no on privacy concerns, and lock out an entire class of agent
       | type app competitors at the same time. Well, here's hoping I can
       | get access to the "YouSDK" :)
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | No multilingual capabilities it seems:
       | https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/#footnote-1
        
       | jl6 wrote:
       | I can see people using Rewrite all the time. In the grim darkness
       | of the AI future, your friends speak only in language that is
       | clean, sanitized, HR-approved, and soulless.
        
         | mcpar-land wrote:
         | https://mrgan.com/ai-email-from-a-friend/
        
         | twoWhlsGud wrote:
         | At work, yes. However, it won't be long until the language you
         | speak will become a feature of your ML driven consumer language
         | service. There will likely be products that reflect your style/
         | identity/ whatever. And once you reach a certain socioeconomic
         | level, you'll speak a highly customized bespoke dialect that
         | reflects your station in life, just like today but much, much
         | weirder...
        
         | glial wrote:
         | People already use words like 'product', 'content', 'feature',
         | and 'vehicle' in everyday conversation. It makes me shudder
         | every time.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | I feel like this is an awful feature for your native language,
         | but fantastically exciting for a second language where you're
         | not quite fluent and need to be able to write coherently.
        
       | losvedir wrote:
       | > _Independent experts can inspect the code that runs on Apple
       | silicon servers to verify privacy, and Private Cloud Compute
       | cryptographically ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac do not talk
       | to a server unless its software has been publicly logged for
       | inspection._
       | 
       | Technically, the sentence could be read that experts inspect the
       | code, and the client uses TLS and CA's to ensure it's only
       | talking to those Apple servers. But that's pretty much the status
       | quo and uninteresting.
       | 
       | It sounds like they're trying to say that somehow iPhone ensures
       | that it's only talking to a server that's running audited code?
       | That would be absolutely incredible (for more things than just
       | running LLMs), but I can't really imagine how it would be
       | implemented.
        
         | Hizonner wrote:
         | > I can't really imagine how it would be implemented.
         | 
         | People do stuff that they _claim_ implements it using trusted,
         | "tamperproof" hardware.
         | 
         | What they're ignoring is that not all of the assurance is
         | "cryptographic". Some of it comes from trusting that hardware.
         | It's particularly annoying for that to get glossed over by a
         | company that proposes to _make the hardware_.
         | 
         | You can also do it on a small scale using what the crypto types
         | call "secure multiparty computation", but that has enormous
         | performance limitations that would make it useless for any
         | meaningful machine learning.
        
           | warkdarrior wrote:
           | There is no known solution to remote software attestation
           | that does not depend on trusted hardware.
        
             | Hizonner wrote:
             | That's correct. But Apple is not making that clear, and is
             | therefore misrepresenting what assurance can be offered.
        
       | nsxwolf wrote:
       | "AI for the rest of us" is an interesting resurrection of the
       | "The computer for the rest of us" Macintosh slogan from 1984.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | > Apple Intelligence is free for users, and will be available in
       | beta as part of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this fall in
       | U.S. English. Some features, software platforms, and additional
       | languages will come over the course of the next year. Apple
       | Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro
       | Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later, with Siri and device
       | language set to U.S. English. For more information, visit
       | apple.com/apple-intelligence.
       | 
       | iphone 15 Pro 8 GB RAM
       | (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15_pro-12557.php)
       | 
       | iphone 15 6 GB Ram
       | (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15-12559.php)
        
         | Jtsummers wrote:
         | Along with a 2GB RAM difference, they have different processors
         | (A17 vs A16).
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17
         | 
         | Per the comparison table on that page, the "Neural Engine" has
         | double the performance in the A17 compared to the A16, which
         | could be the critical differentiator.
        
         | dudus wrote:
         | English only? That is surprising
        
           | c1sc0 wrote:
           | The platform talk had a bit more architectural details and it
           | looks like they heavily optimize / compress the Foundation
           | model to run for specific tasks on-device. I'm guessing that
           | sticking to US English allows them to compress the foundation
           | model further?
        
           | theshrike79 wrote:
           | As long as they don't geolock it to "english speaking"
           | countries, I'm fine with that.
        
             | TillE wrote:
             | As far as I'm aware, the only time Apple has implemented
             | that kind of restriction is with their DMA compliance.
             | Like, I used the US App Store (with a US credit card) while
             | physically in Europe for many years.
        
         | iLoveOncall wrote:
         | That's a good reason not to upgrade my iPhone 13!
        
         | elAhmo wrote:
         | I am quite disappointed that 14 pro is not supported. So much
         | power, but they decided to not support any of the older chips.
        
           | hbn wrote:
           | The 15 Pro's SoC has an extra 2GB of RAM which could very
           | well be make-or-break for running a local model which tends
           | to be very memory-constrained
        
       | whoiscroberts wrote:
       | For anyone who is technical and wants to play with AI but doesn't
       | want to use cloud services it's worth digging into LangChain,
       | CrewAI, OpenDevin. Coupled with Ollama to serve the inference
       | from your local network. You can scratch the AI itch without
       | getting in bed with OpenAI.
        
       | RyanAdamas wrote:
       | >Be me, have iPhone 6s
       | 
       | >Can't get many apps these days
       | 
       | >Can't use AI apps at all
       | 
       | >Battery last about 2 hours
       | 
       | >Never used iCloud, barely used iTunes
       | 
       | >Apple announces new "free" Ai Assistant for everyone
       | 
       | well...not everyone
        
         | timothyduong wrote:
         | iOS users need to have the iPhone 15 pro.. so everyone else is
         | also cooked on iOS.
        
       | dakiol wrote:
       | I didn't watch the whole thing (will do), but could someone tell
       | me already: can it be disabled on a Mac?
        
       | doawoo wrote:
       | Happy as long as there is a switch to toggle it all off
       | somewhere. I find very little of this useful. Maybe someone does,
       | and that's great!
       | 
       | And my concern isn't from a privacy perspective, just a "I want
       | less things cluttering my screen" perspective.
       | 
       | So far though it looks like it's decent at being opt-in in
       | nature. So that's all good.
        
         | LogHouse wrote:
         | Strong agree here. Features are cool, but I value screen real
         | estate and simplicity. Plus, the gpt app works fine for me. I
         | don't need it built into other things yet.
        
         | doutatsu wrote:
         | I feel like this is actually the thing you want when you say
         | "less things cluttering my screen".
         | 
         | Siri can now be that assistant, that summarises or does things,
         | that would instead make you go through various screens or apps.
         | Feels like it rescues clutter, not increases it to me imo
        
           | doawoo wrote:
           | I simply cannot agree, but again, it's a personal thing. I
           | never ever find voice interfaces useful though...
           | 
           | Aside: When the presenter showed the demo of her asking Siri
           | to figure out the airport arrival time and then gloat it
           | "would have taken minutes" to do on her own... I sat there
           | and just felt so so strongly that I don't want to optimize
           | out every possible opportunity to think or work out a problem
           | in my life for the sake of "keeping on top of my inbox".
           | 
           | I understand value of the tools. But I think overall nothing
           | about them feels very worth showing even more menus for me to
           | tick through to make the magic statistical model spit out the
           | tone of words I want... when I could have just sat there and
           | thought about my words and the actual, real, human person I'm
           | talking to, and rephrase my email by hand.
        
             | deergomoo wrote:
             | > I don't want to optimize out every possible opportunity
             | to think or work out a problem in my life for the sake of
             | "keeping on top of my inbox"
             | 
             | Completely agree. My first thought on seeing this stuff is
             | that it suggests we, as an industry, have failed to create
             | software that fulfils users' needs, given we're effectively
             | talking about using another computer to automate using our
             | computers.
             | 
             | My second thought is that it's only a matter of time before
             | AI starts pushing profitable interests just like seemingly
             | all other software does. How long before you ask some AI
             | tool how to achieve something and it starts pitching you on
             | CloudService+ for only 4.99 per month?
        
         | Optimal_Persona wrote:
         | My thoughts exactly, as someone who manages 145 iPhones for a
         | health-care org, all of this stuff needs to be completely
         | blockable and granularly manageable in Mobile Device Management
         | or things could go very, very wrong compliance-wise.
        
         | theshrike79 wrote:
         | It's actually taking LESS screen space, because "Siri" is now
         | just a glowing edge on your screen.
         | 
         | And good news! You can clear your homescreen too fully from all
         | icons now =)
        
       | __loam wrote:
       | Hope we can disable all this crap.
        
       | fdpdkf wrote:
       | I find the removing people from photos thing creepy. Yes you can
       | remove others to see only your family, but forging the reality to
       | only conform to what you wish is disturbing I think.
        
         | qeternity wrote:
         | Photos are already just one perspective on reality. Instagram
         | has shown that to be painfully true. This is merely a
         | continuation of that.
         | 
         | We all experience our own reality individually.
        
         | standardUser wrote:
         | Maybe it will remind people that we should never have been
         | mistaking recorded media for reality in the first place, a
         | lesson we've been learning since at least 1917...
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
        
         | guyforml wrote:
         | we've had photoshop for more than a decade now
        
       | chucke1992 wrote:
       | Nothing really impressive. Let's see who the stock reacts.
        
         | qeternity wrote:
         | Out of curiosity, what would you have considered impressive?
        
           | chucke1992 wrote:
           | Hard to tell. That's the whole point.I thought maybe Apple
           | had come up with something - but by and large it is not
           | different from Vision Pro - they have made X feel better, no
           | real one generation ahead stuff. Basically they are not
           | introducing the innovation.
           | 
           | There are two challenges right now for AI - user monetisation
           | and mass adoption. ChatGPT right now is basically a TikTok -
           | a popular app and that's it. Yeah, it has a subscription but
           | by and large, companies are failing to find a way to monetize
           | the user. And at the same time there is no a proper trigger -
           | something that would make AI better than a glorified
           | assistance. For people who used not to rely on it, it won't
           | be a game changer either, just a little bit of convenience.
           | 
           | So it remains to be seen what's going to happen with AI in
           | the future. It seems like the biggest gamechanger introduced
           | by AI is in hardware space - the mass adoption of ARM, NPUs
           | and stuff. Plus it seems like the monetization of AI is done
           | nicely in the companies - Adobe's AI features, Microsoft and
           | their corporate features and so on.
        
       | seabass wrote:
       | Adding ai features to the right-click menu is something I've been
       | working on for the past year or so, and it's always both exciting
       | and disappointing to see one of the big players adopt a similar
       | feature natively. I do strongly believe in the context menu being
       | a far better ux than copying and pasting content into ChatGPT,
       | but this release does have me questioning how much more effort to
       | expend on my side project [1]. It doesn't seem like Apple will
       | support custom commands, history, RAG, and other features, so
       | perhaps there is still space for a power-user version of what
       | they will provide.
       | 
       | [1] https://smudge.ai
        
         | jbkkd wrote:
         | Love your extension! There's definitely room for it
        
       | resharpe105 wrote:
       | Key question is, will there be a hard switch to only ever use on
       | device processing?
       | 
       | If not, and if you don't want practically every typed word to end
       | up on someone else's computer (as cloud is just that), you'll
       | have to drop ios.
       | 
       | As for me that leaves me with a choice between dumbphone or
       | grapheneOS. I'm just thrilled with these choices. :/
        
         | LogHouse wrote:
         | It's not sending every word to the cloud. I think you must
         | invoke the AI features. Am I wrong?
        
           | resharpe105 wrote:
           | I understood that it will have the full context of the data
           | on your phone, in order to be ,,useful".
           | 
           | We are yet to see if that means only the data you've invoked
           | ai features for, or totality of your emails, notes, messages,
           | transcripts of your audio, etc.
        
             | dialup_sounds wrote:
             | From the presentation it sounds like the on-device model
             | determines what portion of the local index is sent to the
             | cloud as context, but is designed for none of that index to
             | be stored in the cloud.
             | 
             | So (as I understand it) something like "What time does my
             | Mom's flight arrive?" could read your email and contacts to
             | find the flight on-device, but necessarily has to send the
             | flight information and only the flight information to
             | answer the arrival time.
        
       | BonoboIO wrote:
       | Only on iPhone 15 Pro upwards or M1 Mac's
       | 
       | So only a very small percentage of users will be able to use it.
        
       | duskhorizon2 wrote:
       | Some generative AI features are quite useful. I'm already using
       | AI to generate icons for my apps and write nonsense legalese. But
       | one thing when I explicitly creating image by prompting at the
       | third-party server, and another when AI index and upload all my
       | private documents in the cloud. Apple promised: "Independent
       | experts can inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers
       | to verify privacy, and Private Cloud Compute cryptographically
       | ensures that iPhone, iPad, and Mac do not talk to a server unless
       | its software has been publicly logged for inspection." There are
       | so many questions: Who're these experts? Can myself be this
       | expert? Will the server software be open sourced? Well, I will
       | postpone my fears until Apple rolls out AI on devices, but now I
       | see this is a privacy nightmare. Now it's all looks like
       | Microsoft's Recall. I afraid that without homogeneous encryption
       | private cloud is a sad joke.
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | > _write nonsense legalese_
         | 
         | Oh boy. Someone is going to make a lot of money in court
         | finding people who did this.
        
           | duskhorizon2 wrote:
           | Nope. I'm not in USA ;)
        
             | JumpCrisscross wrote:
             | > _not in USA_
             | 
             | If you're somewhere where contracts have meaning, it's a
             | true statement.
        
               | duskhorizon2 wrote:
               | Well, if contracts have meaning, I will not use AI. But
               | AppStore for example requires privacy policy, that one AI
               | wrote.
        
       | notatoad wrote:
       | is my iPhone 14 going to get _none_ of this then?
       | 
       | i understand i'm not going to get the on-device stuff, but
       | something like siri being able to call out to chatGPT should be
       | available on any device, right?
        
       | zx10rse wrote:
       | Jumping on the chatgpt hype train is a mistake. I don't want
       | anything from my devices to be accessible by openai. It will bite
       | them back big time.
        
       | windowshopping wrote:
       | The "Do you want me to use ChatGPT to do that?" aspect of it
       | feels clunky as hell and very un-Apple. It's an old saw, but I
       | have to say Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at
       | that. Honestly confused as to why that's there at all. Could they
       | not come up with a sufficiently cohesive integration? Is that to
       | say the rest ISN'T powered by ChatGPT? What's even the
       | difference? From a user perspective that feels really confusing.
        
         | dag11 wrote:
         | What? The original Siri asked if the user wanted to continue
         | their search on the web if it couldn't handle it locally. It
         | was one of the last things from the Jobs era.
        
         | xanderlewis wrote:
         | I agree. Quite odd and not very Apple-ish. I wonder if there's
         | some good reason for it; it must have been debated internally.
        
         | dmix wrote:
         | I thought it was the smartest and most pragmatic thing they've
         | announced.
         | 
         | Being best in class for on-device AI is a huge market
         | opportunity. Trying to do it all would be dumb like launching
         | Safari without a google search homepage partnership.
         | 
         | Apple can focus on what they are good at which is on device
         | stuff and blending AI into their whole UX across the platform,
         | without compromising privacy. And then taking advantage of a
         | market leader for anything requiring large external server
         | farms and data being sent across the wire for internet access,
         | like AI search queries.
        
           | FinnKuhn wrote:
           | I think they also announced the possibility to integrate Siri
           | with other AI platforms than ChatGPT so this prompt would be
           | especially useful to make clear to the user which of these
           | AIs Siri wants to use.
        
         | theshrike79 wrote:
         | From a user perspective it's 100% clear.
         | 
         | If the system doesn't say "I'm gonna phone a friend to get an
         | answer for this", it's going to stay either 100% local or at
         | worst 100% within Apple Intelligence, which is audited to be
         | completely private.
         | 
         | So if you're asking for a recipe for banana bread, going to
         | ChatGPT is fine. Sending more personal information might not
         | be.
        
           | windowshopping wrote:
           | I just don't think the average user cares enough to want this
           | extra friction. It's like if every time you ran a google
           | search it gave you lower-quality results and you had to click
           | a "Yes, give me the better content" option _every time_ to
           | get it to then display the proper results. It 's just an
           | extra step which people are going to get sick of very fast.
           | 
           | You know what it's really reminiscent of? The EU cookies
           | legislation. Do you like clicking "Yes I accept cookies"
           | every single time you go to a new website? It enhances your
           | privacy, after all.
        
             | internetter wrote:
             | There is no cookie banner law:
             | https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law
             | // https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-
             | needed/
        
           | rohitpaulk wrote:
           | Still involves friction. A more "seamless" way for Apple to
           | do this would've been to license GPT-4's weights from OpenAI
           | and run it on Apple Intelligence servers.
        
             | asadm wrote:
             | but that restricts it to just openai then.
             | 
             | I want to use perplexity from siri too!
        
         | 0xCMP wrote:
         | At the core of everything they presented is privacy. Yes the
         | point is that most questions are answered locally or via the
         | Private Compute system.
         | 
         | More specifically "is openai seeing my personal data or
         | questions?" A: "No, unless you say it's okay to talk to OpenAI
         | everything happens either on your iPhone or in Private Compute"
        
         | chrisBob wrote:
         | Apple is touting the privacy focus of their AI work, and going
         | out to ChatGPT breaks that. I would be reluctant to use any of
         | their new AI features if it weren't for that prompt breaking
         | the flow and making it clear when they are getting results from
         | ChatGPT.
        
         | fckgw wrote:
         | It's a clear delineation between "My data is on my device or
         | within Apple's ecosystem" and "My data is now leaving Apple and
         | going to a 3rd party"
        
         | empath75 wrote:
         | They'll probably add an option to disable that prompt at some
         | point. I'm glad it is the default behavior, though.
        
       | tonyabracadabra wrote:
       | Ok! Made a song about! https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-
       | fEoSb Hope you guys enjoy it!
        
       | adamtaylor_13 wrote:
       | This is literally everything I've been hoping Siri would be since
       | the very first GPT-3.5 demo over a year ago. I've never been more
       | bullish on the Apple ecosystem. So exciting!
        
       | markus_zhang wrote:
       | TBH, I think the IT industry is too concentrated at eating
       | itself. We are happily automating our jobs away and such while
       | the other industries basically just sleep through.
       | 
       | I don't want generative AI in my phone. I want someone, or
       | something to book a meeting with my family doctor, the head of my
       | son's future primary school, etc. I don't need AI to do that. I
       | need the other industries (medical/government/education) to wake
       | up and let us automate them.
       | 
       | Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls? Like in the
       | 1970s I guess? Do you know it takes hours to reach a government
       | office, and they work maybe 6 hours a day? The whole world is
       | f**ing sleeping, IT people, hey guys, slow down on killing
       | yourselves.
       | 
       | AI is supposed to get rid of the chores, now it leaves us with
       | the chores and take the creative part away. I don't need such AI.
        
         | skilled wrote:
         | I wonder if Apple ever approached Google about using Gemini as
         | the flagship integration. I say that because during the keynote
         | I kept thinking to myself, this could be the moment that Google
         | realises it needs to stick to what it knows best - Search - and
         | all they have to do is sit back and watch the hype fade away.
         | 
         | But that's in a perfect world.
         | 
         | Even to this day, post ChatGPT, I still can't imagine how I
         | would ever use this AI stuff in a way that really makes me want
         | to use it. Maybe I am too simple of a mind?
         | 
         | Maybe the problem is in the way that it is presented. Too much
         | all at once, with too many areas of where and how it can be
         | used. Rewriting emails or changing invitations to be "poems"
         | instead of text is exactly the type of cringe that companies
         | want to push but it's really just smoke and mirrors.
         | 
         | Companies telling you to use features that you wouldn't
         | otherwise need. If you look at the email that Apple rewrote in
         | the keynote - the rewritten version was immediately
         | distinguishable as robotic AI slop.
        
           | markus_zhang wrote:
           | TBF I was too harsh in my original comment. I did use ChatGPT
           | to automate away the chore part of the coding (boiler plate
           | for example). But I have a gut feeling that in maybe 5-10
           | years this is going to replace _some_ junior programmer 's
           | job.
           | 
           | My job can be largely "AIed" away if such AI gets better and
           | the company feeds internal code to it.
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | > My job can be largely "AIed" away if such AI gets better
             | and the company feeds internal code to it.
             | 
             | The first company to offer their models for offline use,
             | preferably delivered in shipping container you plug in,
             | with the ability to "fine tune" (or whatever tech) with all
             | their internal stuffs, wins the money of everyone that has
             | security/confidentiality requirements.
        
               | kolinko wrote:
               | Unless the company handles national security, the
               | existing cloud tos and infrastructure fulfill all the
               | legal and practical requirements. Even banks and
               | hospitals use cloud now.
        
             | worldsayshi wrote:
             | If it can automate a junior away it seems as likely it will
             | just make that junior more capable.
             | 
             | Somebody still needs to make those decisions that it can't
             | make well. And some of those decisions doesn't require
             | seniority.
        
               | jonathankoren wrote:
               | That's not what happens.
               | 
               | What happens is if you don't need junior people, you
               | eliminate the junior people, and just leave the senior
               | people. The senior people then age out, and now you have
               | no senior people either, because you eliminated all the
               | junior people that would normally replace them.
               | 
               | This is exactly what has happened in traditional
               | manufacturing.
        
           | barkerja wrote:
           | My understanding is that Apple's approach to this integration
           | is adaptable; much like how you would change your browser's
           | search engine, you'll be able to change which external AI
           | model is utilized. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.
        
             | rurp wrote:
             | I don't think the choice of integration really matters for
             | GP's point. Regardless of which model is used, how useful
             | is the ability to rewrite an email in AI Voice really going
             | to be? If I'm struggling over how to word an email there's
             | usually a specific reason for it; maybe I'm trying to word
             | things for a very particular audience or trying to find a
             | concise way to cover something complicated that I have a
             | lot of knowledge of. General purpose language model output
             | wouldn't help at all in those cases.
             | 
             | I'm sure there are usecases for this and the other GenAI
             | features, but they seem more like mildly useful novelties
             | than anything revolutionary.
             | 
             | There's risk to this as well. Making it easier to produce
             | low value slop will probably lead to more of it and could
             | actually make communication worse overall.
        
           | notpachet wrote:
           | > this could be the moment that Google realises it needs to
           | stick to what it knows best - Search
           | 
           | You misspelled "ads"
        
         | triyambakam wrote:
         | > AI is supposed to get rid of the chores, now it leaves us
         | with the chores and take the creative part away. I don't need
         | such AI.
         | 
         | You know I hadn't considered that and I think that's very
         | insightful. Thank you
        
           | matt-attack wrote:
           | This quote has been circulating recently:
           | 
           | > I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art
           | and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I
           | can do my laundry and dishes
        
             | mensetmanusman wrote:
             | That's not possible yet, moving atoms is much more
             | difficult than moving bits.
        
               | __loam wrote:
               | I feel like you've hit this industry in the nose without
               | realizing it. How much actual value is the tech industry
               | producing?
        
             | Dakizhu wrote:
             | Seems kind of silly. Laundry machines and dishwashers
             | exist. The issue with the last mile is more robotics and
             | control engineering than strictly AI. It's getting annoying
             | seeing AI used as an umbrella term for everything related
             | to automation.
        
         | acchow wrote:
         | AI is skipping software integrations the same way cell phone
         | towers (and Starlink) skipped phone wire deployment.
        
         | segmondy wrote:
         | The world has never cared about what you want. Your life has
         | always revolved around the world. Don't like it, you vs the
         | world. Beat it if you can.
        
           | markus_zhang wrote:
           | I agree. It's just some rant. Whatever, better bury it under
           | the other comments...
        
         | preezer wrote:
         | Ohhhh yes. That's why I was so hyped about Google Duplex or
         | duo?! Never heard of it again....
        
           | themacguffinman wrote:
           | It's available today, it's just not a product called
           | "Duplex". Android has call screening and "hold my call" and
           | phone menu tree detection. On select Google Maps listings,
           | you can make reservations by clicking a button which will
           | make a phone call in the background to make a reservation.
        
         | iLoveOncall wrote:
         | > Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls?
         | 
         | And despite that it's still your family doctor.
         | 
         | I fully agree with your vision. It's obvious once laid out in
         | words and it was a very insightful comment. But the incentives
         | are not there for other industries to automate themselves.
        
           | hot_gril wrote:
           | I like a family doctor who only takes calls. Good doctors are
           | responsive or have responsive staff. One time a doctor was
           | locked into booking and communicating via this One Medical
           | app that's a total piece of shit and just made things harder,
           | so I went elsewhere. If someone makes a truly better
           | solution, AI or not, doctors will use it without being
           | forced.
           | 
           | And government offices don't even care to begin with, you
           | have no other choice.
        
         | pms wrote:
         | Great points!
         | 
         | The only thing I'd add: I don't think the responsibility for
         | lack of automation is solely on these other industries. To
         | develop this kind of automation, they need funds and IT
         | experts, but (i) they don't have funds, especially in the US,
         | since they aren't as well funded as IT industry, (ii) for the
         | IT industry this kind of automation is boring, they prefer
         | working on AI.
         | 
         | In my view, the overall issue is that capitalism is prone to
         | herding and hype, and resulting suboptimal collective decision-
         | making.
        
         | heywire wrote:
         | I know this wasn't really your point, but most physicians
         | around me use Epic MyChart, so I can book all that online. I
         | also almost exclusively use email to communicate with our
         | school district, and we're in a small town.
        
         | whizzter wrote:
         | In Sweden doctors have a fair bit of automation/systems around
         | them, the sad part is that much of it has been co-opted for
         | more stringent records keeping,etc that's just making doctors
         | unhappy and ballooning administration costs instead of focusing
         | on bringing better care for patients.
         | 
         | In essense, we've saved 50 lives a year by avoiding certain
         | mistakes with better record keeping and killed 5000 since the
         | medical queues are too long due to busy doctors so people don't
         | bother getting help in time.
        
           | mihaaly wrote:
           | I have a faint to noticable but persistent back pain. It
           | should be checked out but I do not want to cause bigger pain
           | and mental strain than caused by the back pain by talking to
           | 3-4 persons sending me around and putting me in phone queues
           | weeks apart just to see a doctor sometime in the future -
           | with my embarrassingly low priority issue - making mountains
           | of paperworks bored having too little time to diagnose me
           | (that have the risk of leading to even bigger pile of
           | paperwork). It's a different country, life is all the same.
        
         | TheKarateKid wrote:
         | I completely agree, especially with the taking away the
         | creative part and leaving us with the chores.
         | 
         | Doctors have exams, residencies, and limited licenses to give
         | out to protect their industry. Meanwhile, tech companies will
         | give an engineering job to someone who took a 4 month bootcamp.
        
         | dionian wrote:
         | > I don't want generative AI in my phone. I want someone, or
         | something to book a meeting with my family doctor, the head of
         | my son's future primary school, etc. I don't need AI to do
         | that.
         | 
         | If someone can do that more productively with Gen AI, do you
         | care?
        
         | kolinko wrote:
         | As for government - depends on a country. In Poland we have an
         | mCitizen (mObywatel) mobile app that allows to handle more
         | things tear by year, and we have internet sites with unified
         | citizen login for most of the other government interactions.
         | 
         | The last time our IRS wanted sth from me, they just e-mailed
         | me, I replied and the issue was solved in 5 minutes.
         | 
         | Oh, and you don't need any paper ids within the country -
         | driver license, car registration and official citizen id are
         | apps on your phone, and if you don't have your phone when say
         | police catches you, you give them your data and they check it
         | with their database and with your photo to confirm.
        
           | gambiting wrote:
           | You don't have to walk to the local government office to get
           | car registration plates anymore? That was always annoying as
           | hell.
        
           | nox101 wrote:
           | > The last time our IRS wanted sth from me, they just
           | e-mailed me, I replied and the issue was solved in 5 minutes.
           | 
           | Lol, that will never happen in the USA. We have companies
           | like Intuit actively lobbying against making things easy
           | because their entire business is claiming to deal with the
           | complexity for you.
        
         | brundolf wrote:
         | Social problems are the hard ones, information problems are the
         | easy ones. So the latter are the low-hanging fruit that gets
         | solved first
        
         | prepend wrote:
         | I've had some success with google assistant calling restaurants
         | to make reservations, when they are phone only. I expect it's a
         | matter of time until they can camp on my doctors office. Or
         | call my insurance and pretend to be me.
        
           | sigmoid10 wrote:
           | >some success with google assistant calling
           | 
           | The funny thing is, these auto-callers don't even need to be
           | successful. They just need to become common enough for
           | restaurants and doctors to get annoyed to the point where
           | they finally bring their processes to the 21st century.
        
         | olliepop wrote:
         | > I need the other industries (medical/government/education) to
         | wake up and let us automate them.
         | 
         | And this right here, with respect, is why everybody hates us.
         | While arrogantly claiming moral superiority we automate every
         | other industry on the planet, destroy outdated incumbent
         | business models, and capture supply chains for our good.
         | 
         | But if we threaten our own economic benefit, then AI is moving
         | too fast, must be regulated, or is _too stupid_ to understand
         | the _nuances_ and satisfy the edge cases that we can.
        
         | runeb wrote:
         | I share your frustration on services that won't let you
         | automate them, but to me that's precisely what generative AI
         | will let you do. You don't need an API at the family doctors to
         | have AI automate it for you. It just rings them up and sorts it
         | out at your command. AI is like obtaining an API to anything
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Interesting that genmoji seems to recreate the functionality of
       | this SDXL LoRA https://civitai.com/models/140968/emoji-xl
        
       | blixt wrote:
       | Did I miss the explanation of how they trained their image
       | generation models? It's brave of a company serving creative
       | professionals to generate creative works with AI. I'm a fan of
       | using generative AI, but I would have expected them to at least
       | say a little about what they trained on to make their diffusion
       | models capable of generating these images.
       | 
       | Other than that, using an LLM to handle cross-app functionality
       | is music to my ears. That said, it's similar to what was
       | originally promised with Siri etc. initially. I do believe this
       | technology can do it good enough to be actually useful though.
        
         | glial wrote:
         | I thought it was interesting that the only image generation
         | they support are sketches (that look like a photoshop styling)
         | and goofy 3d cartoons -- not really competition with most
         | creatives.
        
       | hawski wrote:
       | This ramping up AI war will leave no prisoners. I am not an Apple
       | customer in any way, I am in Google's ecosystem, but I feel that
       | I need to make an exit, at least some essentials, preferably this
       | year.
       | 
       | My e-mail, my documents, my photos, my browsing, my movement. The
       | first step for me was setting up Syncthing and it was much
       | smoother than I initially thought. Many steps to go.
        
         | sircastor wrote:
         | I haven't adopted passcodes, and moved all my email out of
         | gmail to a private domain. Photos backup t to my NAS. I'm
         | terrified of the automated systems deciding I'm a bad actor.
         | 
         | I can't help but think it'll get worse with AI
        
           | its_ethan wrote:
           | Not that you shouldn't do it, but too much of an active
           | effort or obsession with not using standard e-mail services
           | or photo back ups is probably a faster way to get flagged as
           | suspicious lol
        
         | jwrallie wrote:
         | For things that don't leave your system it's ok, but the moment
         | you send something to others it will go into the systems that
         | you try to avoid anyway.
         | 
         | Mostly I see no point in things like email self hosting if half
         | my contacts are on Gmail and the other half on Microsoft.
         | 
         | My suggestion (as someone that tried to escape for some time)
         | is to build a private system for yourself (using private OS and
         | networks) and use a common system to interface with everyone
         | else.
        
       | lawlessone wrote:
       | Couldn't Siri already do some of these things without LLM's?
        
       | iandanforth wrote:
       | I think the only way I would trust this is if they explicitly
       | described how they would combat 5-eyes surveillance. If you're
       | not willing to acknowledge that the most dangerous foe of privacy
       | in the western world is the _governments_ of the western world
       | then why should I believe anything you have to say about your
       | implementation?
        
       | mihaaly wrote:
       | Cloud compute and privacy in the same sentence, this is a new low
       | bar for corporate bull*hit. Almost worse than the Windows Recall
       | nonsense.
        
         | theshrike79 wrote:
         | It's also auditable, they mentioned it multiple times.
         | 
         | Apple specifically doesn't want to know your shit, they're
         | jumping through weird hoops to keep it that way.
         | 
         | It would be a LOT easier just to know your shit.
        
       | tekawade wrote:
       | "privacy in AI" - If apple is sharing with ChatGPT how does it
       | work? Do they try to remove context information. But still it's
       | sharing a lot more. + Anything that goes out can go anywhere in
       | internet. Look at Facebook, Twitter and even Apple use of data.
        
       | ryankrage77 wrote:
       | The image generation seems really bad. Very creepy, offputting,
       | uncanny-valley images. And that's the the best cherry-picked
       | examples for marketing.
       | 
       | I'm curious to try some of the Siri integrations - though I hope
       | Siri retains a 'dumb mode' for simple tasks.
        
       | resfirestar wrote:
       | The Image Playground demos contrast pretty strongly, in a bad
       | way, with how image generation startups like Stability typically
       | emphasize scifi landscapes and macro images in their marketing
       | material. We're more open to strange color palettes and overly
       | glossy looking surfaces in those types of images, so they're a
       | good fit for current models that can run on smaller GPUs. Apple's
       | examples of real people and places, on the other hand, look like
       | they're deep in uncanny valley and I'm shocked anyone wanted them
       | in a press release. More than any other feature announced today,
       | that felt like they just got on the hype bandwagon and shipped
       | image generation features to please AI-hungry investors, not
       | create anything real people want to use.
        
       | mihaaly wrote:
       | I can't wait until making tools for users will be the centerpiece
       | of device development again instead of this corporate crap
       | enforcement about half cooked whatevers acting on our behalf
       | pretending to be a different us (I intentionally avoid the word
       | intelligence, it is the mockery of the word that is going on all
       | around).
       | 
       | Who will trust in anything coming from anyone through electonic
       | channels? Not me. Sooner start to talk to a teddy bear or a
       | yellow rubber duck.
       | 
       | This is a bad and dangerous tendency that corporate biggheads
       | piss up with glares and fanfares so the crowd get willing to
       | drink with amaze.
       | 
       | The whole text is full of corporate bullsh*t, hollow and cloudy
       | stock phrases from a thick pipe - instead of facts or data - a
       | generative cloud computing server room could pour at us without a
       | shread of thoughts.
        
       | Aerbil313 wrote:
       | About time. I was saying that Apple is cooking these features,
       | especially intelligent Siri, for the past 1.5 years. It was
       | obvious really.
       | 
       | You can clearly see only people objecting to this new
       | technological integration are the people who don't have a use
       | case for it yet. I am a college student and I can immediately see
       | how me and my friends will be using these features. All of us
       | have ChatGPT installed and subscribed already. We need to write
       | professionally to our professors in e-mail. A big task is to
       | locate a document sent over various communication channels.
       | 
       | Now is the time you'll see people speaking to their devices on
       | street. As an early adopter using the dumb Siri and ChatGPT voice
       | chat far more than average person, it has always been weird to
       | speak to your phone in public. Surely the normalization will
       | follow the general availability soon after.
        
       | Nition wrote:
       | Aside from the search and Siri improvements, I'm really not sure
       | about the usefulness of all the generative stuff Apple is
       | suggesting we might use here.
       | 
       | If you spend an hour drawing a picture for someone for their
       | birthday and send it to them, a great deal of the value to them
       | is not in the quality of the picture but in the fact that you
       | went to the effort, and that it's something unique only you could
       | produce for them by giving your time. The work is more satisfying
       | to the creator as well - if you've ever used something you built
       | yourself that you're proud of vs. something you bought you must
       | have felt this. The AI image that Tania generated in a few
       | seconds might be fun the first time, but quickly becomes just
       | spam filling most of a page of conversation, adding nothing.
       | 
       | If you make up a bedtime story for your child, starring them,
       | with the things they're interested in, a great deal of the value
       | to them is not in the quality of the story but... same thing as
       | above. I don't think Apple's idea of reading an AI story off your
       | phone instead is going to have the same impact.
       | 
       | In a world where you can have anything the value of everything is
       | nothing.
        
         | rising-sky wrote:
         | You could say the same thing for sending a Happy Birthday text,
         | versus a hand written letter or card. Nothing is stopping a
         | person from sending the latter today, and yes they are more
         | appreciated, but people also appreciate the text. For example,
         | if you're remote and perhaps don't have that deep of a
         | relationship with them
        
           | anon22981 wrote:
           | Your analogy does not apply at all.
        
           | Nition wrote:
           | I guess the question is, is sending an AI Happy Birthday
           | image better than sending a Happy Birthday text?
        
             | cchance wrote:
             | Nope their identical, but the AI one at least looks cool
             | lol
        
         | nperrier wrote:
         | I would argue the same thing applies when you buy a card from
         | Hallmark
        
           | Nition wrote:
           | I sometimes think the physical world has been going through a
           | similar time, where most of what we own and receive is
           | ephemeral, mass-produced, lacking in real significance. We
           | have a lot more now but it often means a lot less.
        
         | bredren wrote:
         | I've got a fairly sophisticated and detailed story world I've
         | been building up with my kid, it always starts the same way and
         | there are known characters.
         | 
         | We've been building this up for some time, this tiny universe
         | is the most common thing for me to respond to "will you tell me
         | a story?" (something that is requested sometimes several times
         | a day) since it is so deeply ingrained in both our heads.
         | 
         | Yesterday, while driving to pick up burritos, I dictated a
         | broad set of detailed points, including the complete
         | introductory sequence to the story to gpt-4o and asked it to
         | tell a new adventure based on all of the context.
         | 
         | It did an amazing job at it. I was able to see my kid's
         | reaction in the reflection of the mirrors and it did not take
         | away from what we already had. It actually gave me some new
         | ideas on where I can take it when I'm doing it myself.
         | 
         | If people lean on gen ai with none of their own personal,
         | creative contributions they're not going to get interesting
         | results.
         | 
         | But I know you can go to the effort to create and create and
         | create and then on top of that layer on gen AI--it can knock it
         | out of the park.
         | 
         | In this way, I see gen AI capabilities as simply another tool
         | that can be used best with practice, like a synthesizer after
         | previously only having a piano or organ.
        
           | Nition wrote:
           | That's a very valid rebuttal to my comment. I think this kind
           | of "force multiplier" use for AI is the most effective one we
           | have right now; I've noticed the same thing with GPT-4 for
           | programming. I know the code well enough to double check the
           | output, but AI can still save time in writing it, or
           | sometimes come up with a strategy that I may not have.
           | 
           | Maybe the fact that you did the dictation together with your
           | child present is also notable. Even though you used the AI,
           | you were still doing an activity together and they see you
           | doing it for them.
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | The value of a gift isn't solely on how much you worked on it
         | or what you spent on it. It can also be in picking out the
         | right one, if you picked something good.
         | 
         | Context will be more important when the gift itself is easy.
        
         | cchance wrote:
         | LOL that image you painstakingly created is also forgotten not
         | long after being given to most people, just because you know
         | the effort that went in doesn't mean the receiving person does
         | 99.9% of the time.
         | 
         | Same thing for your kid, the kid likes both stories, gives 0
         | shit that you used GenAI or sat up for 8 hours trying to figure
         | out the rhyme, those things are making YOU feel better not the
         | person receiving it.
        
           | tines wrote:
           | > those things are making YOU feel better not the person
           | receiving it
           | 
           | I don't think this is true at all. Love is proportional to
           | cost; if it costs me nothing, then the love it represents is
           | nothing.
           | 
           | When we receive something from someone, we estimate what it
           | cost them based on what we know of them. Until recently, if
           | someone wrote a poem just for us, our estimation of that
           | would often be pretty high because we know approximately what
           | it costs to write a poem.
           | 
           | In modern times, that cost calculation is thrown off, because
           | we don't know whether they wrote it themselves (high cost) or
           | generated it (low/no cost).
        
           | cromka wrote:
           | What a cynical take!
        
           | frereubu wrote:
           | I think it would be clear that the picture was drawn for the
           | person - I imagine most people would explicitly say something
           | like "I drew this for you" in the accompanying message. And I
           | don't know what kind of kids you've been hanging around, but
           | my daughter would _definitely_ appreciate a story that I
           | spent some time thinking up rather than  "here's something
           | ChatGPT came up with". I guess that assumes you're not going
           | to lie to kids about the AI-generated being yours, but that's
           | another issue entirely.
        
       | mensetmanusman wrote:
       | "With onscreen awareness, Siri will be able to understand and
       | take action with users' content in more apps over time. For
       | example, if a friend texts a user their new address in Messages,
       | the receiver can say, "Add this address to his contact card.""
       | 
       | Little annoyances like this being fixed would be great. "Open the
       | address on this page in google maps" better work :)
        
       | qmmmur wrote:
       | Did they touch on any AI features that might be able to help me
       | create shortcuts? I really like them, but hate creating them with
       | the kludgy block-based diagrams.
        
       | camcaine wrote:
       | Feels like Apple are super late to the party and are scrambling.
       | And it showed.
        
       | hartator wrote:
       | It's a little messy.
       | 
       | Local LLMs + Apple Private Cloud LLMs + OpenAI LLMs. It's like
       | they can't decide on one solution. Feels very not Apple.
        
       | daralthus wrote:
       | /Time for a good prompt injection email header/s
        
       | rdl wrote:
       | I'm super excited about how the apple private compute cloud stuff
       | works -- I tried to build this using intel TXT (predecessor of
       | SGX) and then SGX, and Intel has fucked up so hard and for so
       | long that I'm excited by any new silicon for this. AWS Nitro is
       | really the direct competition, but having good APIs which let app
       | developers do stuff on-device and in some trustworthy/private
       | cloud in a fairly seamless way might be the key innovation here.
        
       | guhcampos wrote:
       | Somehow all these news about Apple Intelligence don't really make
       | me thinkg about Apple, but just how bad Intel just lost the
       | branding battle forever.
        
       | iJohnDoe wrote:
       | Apple Intelligence = AI
       | 
       | Figgin' brilliant.
        
       | ENGNR wrote:
       | Ok I'm calling it. If NVIDIA releases a phone, and allows you to
       | buy the hardware for the off-device processing too, I'll fully
       | ditch Apple in a heartbeat.
       | 
       | I'm quite creeped out that it uses off-device processing for a
       | personal context, and you can't host your own off-device
       | processing, even if you have top of the line Apple silicon
       | hardware (laptop or desktop) that could step in and do the job.
       | Hopefully they announce it in one of the talks over the next few
       | days.
        
       | lz400 wrote:
       | I suppose it was to be expected by IMHO this takes the wind out
       | of the sails of the OpenAI / Apple deal. In the end they don't
       | let OpenAI get into the internals of iOS / Siri, it's just a run
       | of the mill integration. They actually are competing with ChatGPT
       | and I assume eventually they expect to replace it and cancel the
       | integration.
       | 
       | The OpenAI integration also seems setup to data mine ChatGPT.
       | They will have data that says Customer X requested question Q and
       | got answer A from Siri, which he didn't like and went to ChatGPT
       | instead, and got answer B, which he liked. Ok, there's a training
       | set.
       | 
       | I'm always wrong in prediction and will be wrong here but I'd
       | expect openAI is a bad spot long term, doesn't look like they
       | have a product strong enough to withstand the platform builders
       | really going in AI. Once Siri works well, you will never open
       | ChatGPT again.
        
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