[HN Gopher] Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligenc...
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       Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using
       Differential Privacy
        
       Author : layer8
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2025-04-14 20:04 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (machinelearning.apple.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (machinelearning.apple.com)
        
       | hayst4ck wrote:
       | If you believe Apple acts in good faith right now, these tariffs
       | that could absolutely cripple the company, are a means of putting
       | Apple in a situation where they can't say no to giving access to
       | all the backups of apple devices to the surveillance state. This
       | type of thing doesn't need to be done directly, but could be done
       | constructively.
       | 
       | That means every text and every photo from every app including
       | signal as well as every password put into apple passwords. Apple
       | intelligence/Siri alone is an information gathering agent that
       | even potentially takes into account messages you type but don't
       | send. Siri is enabled to "learn from every app" by default.
       | 
       | Apple's culture of extreme internal secrecy also clashes with the
       | external promise of privacy. That means many of the people who
       | sell you on privacy would likely believe that Apple is acting in
       | good faith themselves. That is possible with strict
       | compartmentalization. It's possible for each individual public
       | offering of Apple to be secure and private and the people saying
       | that to believe it, while overall it is not.
       | 
       | Unfortunately, without rule of law and a functioning judiciary,
       | staving off attacks against apple's autonomy from the government
       | will eventually be a losing battle and you will no longer be able
       | to judge what Apple is doing, but what they are capable of doing.
        
       | airstrike wrote:
       | _> Improving Genmoji_
       | 
       | I find it odd that they keep insisting on this to the point that
       | it's the very first example. I'm willing to bet 90% of users
       | don't use genmoji and the 10% who have used it on occasion mostly
       | do it for the lulz at how bizarre the whole thing is.
       | 
       | It seems to me that they don't really have a vision for Apple
       | Intelligence, or at least not a compelling one.
        
         | bitpush wrote:
         | When other companies are curing skin cancer, discovering new
         | proteins, creating photorealistic images/videos, Apple is ..
         | creating Genmojis. lol
        
       | matt3210 wrote:
       | I don't want AI to be part of anything I do unless it's opt-in.
       | When I want to use AI I'll go use AI I don't need or want it
       | integrated into my other tools.
       | 
       | I especially dont want it nativly on my phone or macbook unless
       | it's opt-in. the opt-out stuff is soooo frustrating.
        
       | jsenn wrote:
       | > _This approach works by randomly polling participating devices
       | for whether they've seen a particular fragment, and devices
       | respond anonymously with a noisy signal. By noisy, we mean that
       | devices may provide the true signal of whether a fragment was
       | seen or a randomly selected signal for an alternative fragment or
       | no matches at all. By calibrating how often devices send randomly
       | selected responses, we ensure that hundreds of people using the
       | same term are needed before the word can be discoverable. As a
       | result, Apple only sees commonly used prompts, cannot see the
       | signal associated with any particular device, and does not
       | recover any unique prompts. Furthermore, the signal Apple
       | receives from the device is not associated with an IP address or
       | any ID that could be linked to an Apple Account. This prevents
       | Apple from being able to associate the signal to any particular
       | device._
       | 
       | The way I read this, there's no discovery mechanism here, so
       | Apple has to guess a priori which prompts will be popular. How do
       | they know what queries to send?
        
         | warkdarrior wrote:
         | You could brute force it by querying about all 500k English
         | words. With 1.3+ billion iPhone users, that means about 2600
         | users will see any goven word, which may be enough to observe
         | trends.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-14 23:00 UTC)