In an interview with Fast Company‘s Michael Grothaus, Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi discussed the newly unveiled Apple Intelligence and the company’s privacy-focused approach to artificial intelligence (AI). The interview took place hours after Apple’s WWDC 2024 Keynote on Monday.
Apple Intelligence is a new personal intelligence system coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that’s built to understand personal context and provide users with the most helpful, relevant responses possible.
Sharing his thoughts on AI as a whole, Federighi said that “it’s a substantial transformative technology, in the same way the internet has been; in the same way mobility has been.” The Apple exec added that he sees the development and advancement of AI as a “big wave” that will play out over many years to come.
While Apple is entering the AI game later than existing flagbearers like OpenAI and Microsoft, the company appears to be taking a heavily privacy-focused approach to the technology.
“Data handling practices around different AI services and chatbots vary substantially, and some of the guarantees—if you can call them that—are limited,” Federighi told Fast Company.
“We wanted to establish an entirely different bar,” the exec continued. “So we viewed it as foundational, and as a prerequisite to how we offered personal intelligence, that your personal information remained entirely yours and under your control. And no one, not even Apple, would have any visibility onto that information, even if our data center was processing your request.”
While Apple Intelligence will be powered heavily by on-device processing — thanks to the cutting-edge processors in the iPhone 15 series and Apple Silicon Macs and iPads, the technology will still have to rely on Apple’s servers in the cloud to handle more complex queries. As such, Apple has developed the Private Cloud Compute (PCC) framework to ensure user privacy in these cases.
Not only does Apple’s implementation of server-side AI only send the minimum information required from the user’s device to the cloud for processing, but PCC also prevents data requests from being stored by the server or accessed by anyone at Apple. What’s more, Apple is also giving independent security researchers access to its server implementation of Apple Intelligence to verify the tech giant’s privacy and security claims.
Apple also announced ChatGPT integration across its platforms during WWDC. “These very large frontier models have interesting capabilities that some users appreciate, and we saw that integration into our experiences could make [those capabilities] much more accessible than [they are] today,” Federighi said about the partnership.
Apple is putting a lot of stock into its AI endeavours. Federighi affirmed that the company wants to bring Apple Intelligence to all of its users, even those in countries like China where regulations around generative AI are much stricter. “We certainly want to find a way to bring all of our best product capabilities to all of our customers,” he said. “We don’t have timing to announce right now, but it’s certainly something we want to do.”
Apple Intelligence will be available in beta starting this fall. To use Apple Intelligence, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro series smartphone or newer, or an iPad or Mac with an M1 chip or newer. In other words, only the newest Apple devices will support all the latest and greatest Apple Intelligence features at launch.
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