Actually, really liked the Apple Intelligence announcement. It must be a very exciting time at Apple as they layer AI on top of the entire OS. A few of the major themes.
Step 1 Multimodal I/O. Enable text/audio/image/video capability, both read and write. These are the native human APIs, so to speak.
Step 2 Agentic. Allow all parts of the OS and apps to inter-operate via "function calling"; kernel process LLM that can schedule and coordinate work across them given user queries.
Step 3 Frictionless. Fully integrate these features in a highly frictionless, fast, "always on", and contextual way. No going around copy pasting information, prompt engineering, or etc. Adapt the UI accordingly.
Step 4 Initiative. Don't perform a task given a prompt, anticipate the prompt, suggest, initiate.
Step 5 Delegation hierarchy. Move as much intelligence as you can on device (Apple Silicon very helpful and well-suited), but allow optional dispatch of work to cloud.
Step 6 Modularity. Allow the OS to access and support an entire and growing ecosystem of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT announcement).
Step 7 Privacy. <3
We're quickly heading into a world where you can open up your phone and just say stuff. It talks back and it knows you. And it just works. Super exciting and as a user, quite looking forward to it.
Yikes. Just hit em with the ol' "<3" for privacy. Does not inspire confidence.
How so? Many people want to use AI in privacy, but it’s too hard for most people to set it up for themselves currently.
Having AI tools on the OS level so you can use it in almost any app and that is guaranteed to be processed on device in privacy will be very useful if done right.
Yeah just like Microsoft Recall right? An AI that has access to every single thing you do (and would also be recording, otherwise how does it know "you") can never be private by design. Its literal design is to know everything about you, your actions, and your habits. I wouldn't trust anyone to be able to create an actually secure piece of software that does the above. It will always be able to be stolen/sold/abused.
But how can we best sell your data to advertisers otherwise?