Nothing surprising in today’s NYT story about Apple’s AI plans. I wanted to comment on this part:

Apple plans to bill the improved Siri as more private than rival A.I. services because it will process requests on iPhones rather than remotely in data centers.

Apple genuinely believes in privacy, even if it is also a strategy credit for them. Using generative AI on iPhones will make for a much better Siri. I’m looking forward for it. But we shouldn’t expect it to be in the same league as GPT-4 unless they can find some way to seamlessly blend on-device and server-based AI, likely much later.

@manton When you say Apple believes in privacy, I’m afraid you give them too much credit. Apple is a multinational corporation. It doesn’t believe in anything except increasing shareholder value. I’m glad Apple has embraced privacy, but they embrace it because it’s profitable, not out of altruism.

@manton Apples updates to Siri with GenAi is going to finally bring Siri to V1 of Google home and Alexa I suppose? I am lucky if she can understand even simple phrases like “play my favorite songs”. They should give up on this and just partner.

@stupendousman I’ve long thought the design of Siri is all wrong. It should be more cloud-based so that it can work consistently across devices and be extensible with services. Doesn’t appear that Apple agrees but we’ll see.

@jonah That’s true. Apple just needs to be careful that they don’t ship a “worse but private” product. I think they can do both.