How do you even compete with Apple? They have a vertically integrated stack from privacy preserving silicon to ai tech. I thought apple was going downhill, but now with private-cloud and ondevice intelligence, it makes my linux box + typing into chatgpt look like a joke.

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I guess I could use on-device models, but linux is not even close to having system-wide integration of local models that can access many different systems and integrate them. We need whole new kinds of apis and system interfaces for this. I suspect it’s at least 20+ years away. Apple is way ahead of the curve here.
you’re average android phone is likely 100x worse than apple privacy wise. Apple makes money on hardware, not user data. They wouldn’t put so much effort into secure enclaves, e2e encryption, and private ai clouds otherwise, as all of this makes data collection harder. Unless you’re using grapheneOS, the anti-apple pro-android privacy crowd is a larp and misinformed. Android is built by google, a company who could care less about your privacy.
Eggs/n/Jakey's avatar
Eggs/n/Jakey 1 year ago
They basically just put Microsoft owned tech on their phones. I don't think siri having more functionality will really change much, most normies don't really use chatgpt other than for school or work. Seems almost boring compared to their previous work. Like the Vision pro was hyped for 2 days before people realized the user base wasn't there. I know it was more for enterprise but Idk seems like another half assed product/enviroment.
rieger_san's avatar
rieger_san 1 year ago
This is the good old Steve Jobs tactic. Look around what is currently out. Make it better and sell it to the people
Hypnagog's avatar
Hypnagog 1 year ago
...Because you have to trust them. Can't audit their tech at all. Big black hole with a loud microphone apple is.
This makes me sad, it feels like open source tech is way behind now. AI is going to change computing and people are going to forget about the days when we didn’t have it. It will look like old and obscure tech, even more than it already is. The opensource ai crowd needs to pick up the pace or open source computing is fucked and it will become less relevant than ever.
Just wait until Im running AI and Graphene OS on this bad-boy, see who has the last laugh then. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Nokia_3310_blue.jpg/1200px-Nokia_3310_blue.jpg
Even if they used half the techniques they described in this post it would already be a huge privacy improvement over the way people are using ai today.
indeed, I'm just sceptical of the "intelligence" part, but that's me, just an offline cloudless non-gpt luddite 😄
I want to use apple more now, thats the problem. If I can do the same kind of things I am doing with openai but in a way that preserves my privacy and doesn’t send all my personal data to them, that is too good not to use. I’m sad because they are doing everything right in ways that would make me want to use it over my linux box.
Couldn’t it just log and send the report when you reconnect? “iPhone Storage > System Data” has quite a few GB of black box data that is constantly fluctuating in size. Could easily be logs that I never see.
Hypnagog's avatar
Hypnagog 1 year ago
Again, they may open their stack for use (APIs or whatever) but can you audit the code?
Apple has an ad platform as well. Every Facebook ad user is using an Apple-made identifier to correlate interests instead of a Meta-made one. That apple made identifier so that they could control the ad space and sell their own ad platform: Don't fool yourself into thinking that Apple is much different than Google. They are all selling your data. Google is just upfront that they are selling it.
100%. Graphene is it’s own league but the average Samsung phone etc has absolute shite privacy. I’d trust that shit 100 times less than an Apple phone. Apple provides no freedom but seems to have better privacy overall.
I'm agnostic about Apple and Google, but the thing that strikes me is this. You ask Google, do you share my data. They say hell yeah. Do you profile me. Hell yeah we do. Apple has never admitted anything until they were caught out. Did you give China access to stay in their market. That's commercially sensitive. Do you use device information to profile us. Silence! They're just bad in different ways. Google is blatant. Apple is devious.
Yeah (and as an Apple user, I’m playing devil’s advocate), isn’t it the epitome of centralised centralisation a company can get? Zaps/Apple store kinda demon-strated this.
How long before they actually provide data to governments? Via backdoors or otherwise. At least in EU where there is no place for e2ee. no thanks. theirs business model is something I wouldn't touch with 5m stick.
jb55's avatar jb55
How do you even compete with Apple? They have a vertically integrated stack from privacy preserving silicon to ai tech. I thought apple was going downhill, but now with private-cloud and ondevice intelligence, it makes my linux box + typing into chatgpt look like a joke.
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rieger_san's avatar
rieger_san 1 year ago
Centralization isn’t always bad in my eyes Yes, the App Store is centralized and this zap thing was bullshit. But let’s be honest, how many people are using an alternative App Store on android where it’s possible since day one to install one.
yes their tyrannical control of what is allowed on the appstore is a huge downside, which is why I think they should just allow you to install a dmg or something directly onto the phone like android. Let us run the software we want to run ffs.
Default avatar
unknown 1 year ago
Install it on my S23U please.
From now on, I identify as an AI skeptic/luddite.
jb55's avatar jb55
How do you even compete with Apple? They have a vertically integrated stack from privacy preserving silicon to ai tech. I thought apple was going downhill, but now with private-cloud and ondevice intelligence, it makes my linux box + typing into chatgpt look like a joke.
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Sid Shattuck's avatar
Sid Shattuck 1 year ago
Very morbid. I can't see myself trusting Apple (or any other closed source big tech operator) enough to use something like this... But there most likely comes a point where there isn't a real choice to opt out, implied or otherwise.
Having followed Apple for close to three decades, I knew this would happen as soon as the first llama dropped. They tend to have a longer horizon and miss out on a lot of practical opportunities while lining up for something most people aren't thinking about yet. Given their surprising advance in unified memory and decision to make over-powered but under-featured mobile devices, preparing to run something heavy in the near future is a reasonable conclusion. But, their advantage is going to be limited by their ecosystem. iOS is a lot more constrained than an open source OS, and while it can be a hot mess, it's also possible to lock those down too. It just takes time and code. Perhaps code written by LLMs.
Yesterday I downloaded a local LLM app to my iPhone 15 Pro Phi3 mini was throwing 15 tokens / sec. Don't get sidetracked by Apple, everyone is going the same place, and very soon.
personalized ai assistants who offload tons of computing interface complexity. Normies will eat this up. Techies will too. It will save tons of time. There’s no going back after this. Star trek computer is where we are headed.
coming from one who obviously has a far greater handle on these technologies, this is both surprising and appreciated. as one of the big corps, i will always have concerns . they have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar a few to many times. too good too be true products, they certainly delivered. now they are pursuing ai? its a small step to data collection .... .... there are always questions. GM
Hypnagog's avatar
Hypnagog 1 year ago
I use my own llms on ollama.ai . 100% private and open source.
You get privacy from no one either way On iOS Apple is responsible for leaks and on Pixel Google is responsible for leaks On Samsung nobody is responsible for leaks because Samsung don't take responsibility for anything, they sell toys and bargain products
I am not an apple fanboy. I use my linux box and hand-built desktop environment 90% of the day. I have an apple phone because android phones are terrible privacy wise, unless you use graphene but then I can’t use my bitcoin apple/google pay debit card.
Apple are the ones that straight up announced they won't allow privacy on their devices anymore and can report people for what's on their devices
Like it or not, from the beginning, what Apple does, sets the tone for where everyone else goes. I can’t stand Apple now. But ignoring what they are doing is foolish.
Saying that a device made by an ad company is less concerned with privacy than a company that's been beating the privacy drum for more than a decade? There are many things to criticize Apple for, but this isn't one of them.
It’s revolutionary stuff. And it’s also running closed AI that is probably too “nice” to find real truth in the world. It will be a powerful tool that can only go so far.
Apple is positioning to be the digital world order, collecting information from every user through AI. Frightening.
How do you compete against them? Provide a similar platform that is open source and amenable to third party developers, forking, modifying, allowing markets to bloom. Provide the substrate for a complex adaptive system and it will devour the railroaded completion like complex adaptive systems always do.
jb55's avatar jb55
How do you even compete with Apple? They have a vertically integrated stack from privacy preserving silicon to ai tech. I thought apple was going downhill, but now with private-cloud and ondevice intelligence, it makes my linux box + typing into chatgpt look like a joke.
View quoted note →
Can't tell if this is serious or sarcasm. Also suspicious of sudden epiphanies like this. ChatGPT is a privacy headache but that doesn't drag Linux into the same label, nor does it make Apple the only alternative when there's a ton of local server options available... it takes a few seconds to download LM Studio or Ollama... there's no need for drama ,🦙. View quoted note →
Unless you’re reading the source of every dependency and you build all of your software from source, you’re always trusting someone, even in open source. Many times the software you install on your computer was built by someone else, which has the chance to inject malware, separate from the code you read from their repo.
OpenAI are lobbying US govnt to force GPU manufacturrers to put chips in to prevent them running 'unnaproved' models for 'safety' . ie to block open source and privacy.
People will crave traditional computers that don't spy on you all day long, the way people crave Monero or Tor - none of which will and should never ever be integrated into AI. I'm not sure I would even read a newspaper on an AI chipped machine.
Only if you ignore the unsolved and persistent MAJOR, high risk,problem: It doesn't actually work. No AI model is accurate enough to avoid disaster: there will be countless stories of AI telling your boss something you didn't want said, or making purchases you didn't want, telling you to add glue to pasta sauce. These problems aren't going away, and the only way to stop such risks is to make AI a less useful assistant, which is what a standard computer is.
Just because Apple could do better doesn't make them the same as Google. Take web browsers: Safari could do better, but they were the first to limit tracking cookies, and they took some hits on compatibility to do so. Chrome is now also limiting tracking cookies, but only for other people because Chrome quietly includes an almost unique set of experiment flags, but only when talking to Google owned sites. This is why I can't trust Google.
AI assistant will be a short lived gimmick, in the sense that if you don't mind it being completely inaccurate for all the integrated tasks you give it, then it will SORT OF work. But when it makes mistakes, it will move beyond just annoying (like when alexa doesn't understand your words) to destructive and catastrophic. Apple doesn't want to use its own AI because it doesn't want that responisibility. It informs you that you are using OpenAI. Because its an unreliable toy.
But isn't your #argument essentially; believe what Apple tell us? I can't trust someone I never met to tell me the truth. I don't understand how you can. Apple can say what they like. It's what they do I'll judge them on. And #apple and #google do the same thing. They betray our trust. I would judge #Microsoft the same way, if they were in this argument. The real contrast here is #Linux. If they spy on us we can see it in the code. That's the real deal with #opensource #software. We don't need to trust it. We can see what they're doing. That's the model I prefer. I use an #android phone and an #ipad but I don't expect them to protect my #privacy. That would be naive.
plebeian's avatar
plebeian 1 year ago
Sure and in time they will know literally everything about you. Their value will come not from great products but from the information they possess and this will be even more valuable to the apparatus.
They’re just really good at taking the time to ship great stuff, that’s often in service of some greater vision that’s visible only to a small number of the leadership. Jobs set up the factory and it’s still churning out unmatched products. Every engineer there gets the last ounce of effort squeezed out them by WWDC by the system he set up. It would be even better if Jobs was still around of course, albeit with a tad more burnout.
I'm not able to read the source. I use Homebrew on MacOS and Flathub on Linux. I think Homebrew has a larger install base. Is it crazy for me to trust my use of MacOS more? I also monitor outgoing traffic with Little Snitch and use hardening guides to reduce telemetry.