Apple, on the other hand, has made a pretty serious effort to ensure that no employee can access your data on these AI systems. That’s hugely different! They’re going as far as to severely restrict logging and observability and even building and designing their own chips and operating systems. And ensuring that clients will refuse to talk to non-audited systems.
Yes, we can’t take Apple’s word for it. But I think the third party audits are a huge part of how we trust, and also verify, that this system will be private. I don’t think it’s far to claim that “Apple knows what you’re doing.” That implies that some one, at some level at Apple can at some point access the data sent from your device to this private cloud. That does not seem to be true.
I think another facet of trust here is that a rather big part of Apple’s business model is privacy. They’ve been very successful financially by creating products that generate money in other ways, and it’s very much not necessary or even a sound business idea for them to do something else.
While I think it’s fair to be skeptical about the claims without 3rd party verification, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Apple’s approach isn’t better for your data and privacy than openAI or Google. (Which I think is the broad implication — openAI tracks prompts for its own model training, not to resell, so it’s also “only openAI knows what your doing.”)