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.