Apple Intelligence handles the cloud and privacy differently
Apple is having its generative AI cake and eating it, too. Apple Intelligence, which was unveiled today at WWDC 2024, is largely a product of local generative models of varying sizes, but even the power of the A17 Pro chip is not always enough to handle every one of your substantive queries.
Sometimes, Apple will have to go out to the cloud. Not any cloud, mind you, but its own Private Compute Cloud where your data is protected in ways, according to Apple, it might not be on other cloud-based generative AI systems.
In a post-WWDC 2024 keynote deep dive session, Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and Apple Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea explained exactly how Apple Intelligence and the systems it will support, like that all-new Siri, will decide when to keep your queries on device, when to reach out to Apple’s Private Compute Cloud, and how Apple Intelligence decides what to share with that cloud.
«It is very early innings here,» said Federighi while explaining the AI journey, the challenges Apple faced, how they solved them, and the road ahead.
What Apple is doing here is no small thing, and it could be said that Apple dug the hole in which it sits. Apple Intelligence is essentially a series of generative AI models of varying sizes that see deep inside your iPhone to know you. Knowing you means they can help you in ways other LLM models and generative AIs probably cannot. It’s like how your partner or parent can soothe you because they know everything about you, whereas a stranger can only guess what might comfort you but is just as likely to get it wrong.
