Apple Closes in on Deal with OpenAI to Put ChatGPT on iPhone
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I find it a bit weird that Apple with its massive market share and RnD budget apparently wasn‘t able to get a team and traction (or at least any significant acquisitions or acquihires) on AI with the writing being on the wall since quite some time now. Makes me a bit worried about their privacy angle and that it might disappear.
To make a decent LLM you need to ignore data protection and throw all available text into a huge model. If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.
You're reaching, a lot. Apple is more privacy-friendly than most companies at the moment - no argument there, but they still sell your privacy on the web to Google in exchange for a 36% cut of advertising revenue [1] which amounts to ~$20 billion [2], or a rather petty amount of ~$10/device [3].
These same "morals" also allow them to hand over data on all Chinese citizens to the CCP, among countless other privacy-destroying compromises they have to make in order to profit from the Chinese market [4]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/google-witness-a...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-... (https://archive.is/oPg1C)
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23583501/apple-iphone-ipad...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... (https://archive.is/MQmY7)
Frankly I don't want Apple to try to be the best at everything, because they generally aren't. I've been bitten by iMovie getting worse, Time Machine doing a terrible job, Apple Maps being less than useful for a long time, iCloud being generally lackluster, and more. I'd much rather they outsource the service to a company that is solely focused on the task. There's no reason they couldn't ensure those services remain private or secure.
At which point it just starts recording a voice memo until we tell it we’re done. Then it summarizes what it’s heard into todo items, grocery lists, list of potential appointments or stops to make. It manages to deal with the pauses, the umms, the stammering, the “let’s get some orange soda. No, wait, make that grape.”
Basically, listen in to my wife and I talk about our day and summarize it into action items.
If your iPad is worth 20% of Apple’s profits, you bet Tim will be hand-holding you through the obnoxious setup process.
To strong-arm someone means to impel them by physical force, especially against resistance, not to give them so much money they'll be happy to cooperate. That's basically the exact opposite of strong-arming.
> If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
There is probably a need for an alternative term to describe these kinds of models, because they're not exactly open-source in the traditional sense
If a deal is made it will almost certainly be to self host OpenAI’s models, the same way Microsoft does. Apple will use RAG to ground requests in the user’s own iCloud data, and no user data will be sent to OpenAI or be used to train any OpenAI models.
I’ve been very excited about the idea that Apple takes a stab at having it run locally, because it would help improve what I consider to be by far the largest UX issue: the awkward latency.
Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if they work with openai to release less powerful local models just for simple Siri use cases so they can keep using privacy for marketing.
This is one sad thing about the free market: everybody is _not_ average in one way or the other, but all we get are products made for average people, so in the end everybody is a little bit unhappy. Some people are far from average, therefore they must be very unhappy. Now if only the products we bought weren't so much locked down, we could modify them and use them however we wanted to.
Free, like Siri? Free to a point, then payment needed? Limited abilities are free? Subscription only?
This would maybe align with the 'limited abilities are free' approach.
1. The device sale itself, either raising the ASP or offsetting some other cost (to Apple) savings
2. Recurring payments for iCloud (or any rebranding it might undergo along with the feature)
Apple’s pricing model, if not totally predictable, is exceedingly formulaic. If they deviate from these into some sort of nickel and diming on “AI” features alone, that would almost certainly be a clear sign that they’re betting against it as a long term selling point.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11514
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.14619 (with 1.1B parameters, this appears to be their attempt at building a lightweight LLM)
Makes you wonder if this will be baked in or if they'll give users the ability to opt-out of data sharing on a self-proclaimed "private" OS.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40322104
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7993358-chatgpt-ios-app-...