Let Tim Cook

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2:54Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host and generally optimistic man, Ed Zitron.

3:12Last week, Apple announced Apple Intelligence, a suite of features coming to iOS 18, that's the next version of the iPhone software, in a presentation that Fast Company called Uninspired, Futurism called Boring, and Axios claimed failed to excite investors. They did not even check the stock took. Anyway, the presentation, given at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, usually referred to as WWDC, and where Apple usually announces its next software updates, felt remarkably demure in comparison to May's Google I.O. conference, which is Google's equivalent, where CEO Sundar Pichai and head of search Liz Reed hyped the next generation of Google products and search updates that absolutely nobody asked for.

3:55Historically, Worldwide Developers Conference is where Apple announced major updates to both its product and software lineups. At WWDC 2005, the late Steve Jobs announced the company would move from IBM-designed and Motorola-manufactured PowerPC processors, allowing for faster and more power-efficient computers, as well as the ability to dual-boot Windows, a huge moment for Macs that was met with rancorous applause from people that really should have known better. 15 years later, Tim Cook, now CEO, would announce Apple's shift away from Intel's stagnating x86 architecture to Apple's homegrown ARM-based processors, starting with the M-series processors that have now become ubiquitous across Macs and iPads, one which was met with the bombastic promise that these were the most powerful chips ever created.

4:44I should add, by the way, the M-series processors are actually probably one of the better things that's come out in the last 10 years. The average MacBook Air is insanely fast now. Like, I have a MacBook Pro. It's phenomenal. A lot of you say I'm not positive, okay? These are things I like. Here are things I like. Are you happy now? I am, kind of. Anyway, WWDC is where Apple has unveiled every new version of the Mac operating system OSX. It's where the original Mac Pro, FaceTime, and the iPhone App Store were introduced to the world. This is the conference where Apple flexes its muscles and boasts about how powerful and important Apple is.

5:24Now you can understand why this year was just so strange. Gone was Apple's trademark bombast, its propensity to tell the world how good it was at everything and how important its next big thing was. Instead, we got this weird juxtaposition between we're putting AI on your phone and it's totally fine. It's not a big deal. You shouldn't be scared at all. It's not that big a deal. Please don't be mad at us. despite this ostensibly being apple's big artificial intelligence play ceo tim cook and svp of engineering craig federighi spent far more time explaining how much they love privacy and cherish your data and would never share it with anyone and listen to all the ways we're keeping it private before casually sauntering into a series of product updates that appear to actually use AI for a purpose and kind of useful, and heartily suggests that Apple is intentionally trying to distance itself from the AI hype train.

6:23And while it's integrating ChatGPT into iOS 18, which don't worry, I'll get to later, it's doing so at an arm's length approach, with most of the day-to-day AI work done by the company's own models and actually on your device. these ai integrations which arrived sometime in the fall to the iphone 15 pro and iphone 15 pro max that's autumn for my british readers and listeners along with ipads and macbooks with m1 or later chips they're fairly straightforward and don't do anything we haven't really seen elsewhere which is kind of the apple game apple's ai can generate transcripts of calls but not before warning participants that it's doing so generate images through a tool called image playground help write and rewrite emails, kind of like Grammarly does, and perform distinct actions across multiple apps, like adding slides to a presentation or opening a web image with the Photos app, where you can edit it.

7:18The last item's a little bit fuzzy as it extends to both Apple's own apps and other third-party apps, and the functionality itself is expected to roll out over the coming year or so. And as ever, take any promises made without a demo with a big grain of salt, which I guess is just a regular grain of salt when you think about it. Apple also says that Siri will soon have an awareness of what's on your screen and be able to respond appropriately. In one of their demos, you're filling out a form that asks for your driver's license number. Siri can then look through your photo library, identify any pictures of your license, and grab the pertinent information for you.

7:52Equal parts useful and creepy, and also I really do not recommend having a picture of your driver's license saved on your phone. But thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, you can now generate your own custom emojis! a feature that screams we have to fill a few minutes of this goddamn presentation. But nevertheless, they were quite excited, more excited than the OpenAI integration, which, as I've said, I will get to later, as it requires a bit of space for me to laugh. Apple claims that many of these features run entirely on your device, and those that don't use something called private cloud compute, where Apple claims, in a lengthy privacy statement I'll link to, that at no time will anyone ever have any access to any of the data that's being processed on their servers, even, and I quote, during active processing, meaning when Apple's servers are handling the request.

8:43Apple has also offered security researchers the opportunity to personally verify the claims it's making, and in general, the news, it seems to have been well received, though some, like Chief Privacy Officer Steve Wilson of Exabeam told Dark Reading, worry that threats in generative AI are poorly understood, and that, despite Apple's best efforts, and no doubt heavy policing, some will slip through the cracks. On some level, Wilson is being a little alarmist, with his only criticism being that we don't know everything about this thing, generative AI, and thus should be scared about what we don't know, which isn't wrong.

9:21On the other hand, he's right insofar in that we are relatively early days into the mass-scale use of large language models like Apple's, like GPT, like Anthropics Claude. Apple has chosen, albeit cautiously, to take the risk of integrating these models into devices at a time when companies like Google and Meta have proven that one cannot simply trust that a multi-trillion dollar company will maintain the stability and privacy of a product, or for that matter, can guarantee the accuracy of its outputs. It also really doesn't help, that Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Washington Post that Apple's AI is short of 100 % when it comes to hallucinations, which as a reminder are when these LLMs tell you something authoritatively that isn't true.

10:06And this is a little bit worrying when we're talking about an AI model that's taking actions across your apps. These features are predominantly running on Apple's own models, like I've said, so not on GPT or Claude or anything, which according to Apple are trained using licensed data, such as images licensed from Shutterstock. Data selected to enhance specific features, no idea what this means, but it's from licensed data at least, as well as publicly available data collected by Apple's web crawler Applebot, which Apple allows publishers to opt out of using a rule added to their website's code.

10:43Which I should add does not solve the bloody problem if Apple has already used the data for training purposes, which is bordering on impossible to confirm. I should add I have added this code to my website. You're not getting my blogs, Mr. Cook. And the thing is, if Apple already has done this, if they've already scraped this stuff, if they've used publicly available, which could mean any website on Google, for example, it's indicative of some really shady, shitty, underhanded behavior. While it's fair to say that Applebot, the web scraper, isn't new, it arrived at some point in 2015, it wasn't really publicized that much, save for a few posts on Apple rumor sites speculating that the company was working on a replacement to Google Search.

11:26Which, by the way, never happened because Google pays over$10 billion a year to Apple for that monopoly. Jesus Christ. Prior to the launch of Apple's generative AI features, Applebot's sole stated purpose was to provide data for Siri and Searchlight, the search built into macOS X that scours both the user's hard drive so that it can pull data out. So say you're looking for a file or it can search for something on the internet. Generally a useful feature, but an entirely different one to a generative AI one. If Apple is already training its models on data scraped by Applebot, it would be immensely deceptive using a tool way beyond its intended purpose, or at least its advertised one.

12:07If this came to pass, those unwilling to have their content repurpose this training data for a trillion dollar tech company would really have nowhere to go. What are you going to do? Getting an AI to unlearn something isn't exactly straightforward, and Apple has yet to explain how that might work. I've reached out to Apple for comment here, but it's unclear exactly how it intends to fulfill this promise that you can opt out of being included in their training data, especially if the Applebot crawler has already allowed said data to be fed into the model. If I hear back, it'll be a little bit of a pain in the ass, but I will update that here.

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16:47Except it's doing so in a way that's a little bit easier for the media to swallow, because the main selling point of its AI is not vomiting out oodles of anodyne business bullshit. Unless you're using the smart reply feature in mail, which drafts a response to an email for you. I'm just, I really don't understand people who need that. I'm sorry if you can't email someone back with your brain words. What's going on? Seriously, what's going on? But it sucks though. It really sucks. Even for the smallest feature to have to steal people's work. Especially when you have, what,$200 billion in the bank?

17:25Just a complete mark of disrespect against anyone who isn't an Apple user and plenty of people who are. This is particularly worrying when you consider Apple's image generation features, which will function similarly to ChatGPT and stable diffusion. And yes, I'm getting to ChatGPT. While I'd love to believe that Apple has only used licensed content to train its models, it really isn't the case. And if their version of publicly available includes things from Google or DeviantArt or social networks, Apple's just part of the problem. They're just part of the pillaging of the internet. They are stealing, just like all the other big tech companies.

18:01And there's just, this is a time when I feel a little helpless for everyone. I don't know what you do here. And I don't think we're going to hear anything back from them. But as I mentioned, I've requested comment from Apple about this, and I hope that I get an answer. Apple's approach to PR doesn't fill me full of hope, though. It's almost as contemptuous as Tesla's. They only really provide comment and interviews or review samples to those journalists they've deemed worthy, and only really on certain subjects. It's a style that mirrors the kind of haughty, snooty image it crafted in the mid-2000s, with those goddamn I'm-a-Mac ads, with reporters divided into worthy and unworthy camps, meaning, by the way, those who would bend the knee to Mr.

18:45Jobs and his company. and those who would not. And by the way, there weren't many who wouldn't. But okay. If you can put these very real concerns aside, Apple's AI announcement feels equal parts useful and extremely strange. These are not world-changing integrations. They're useful ones. Transcriptions, a bit of Siri that works like it's meant to, that can take actions across multiple apps and know what you're talking about based on what and on the screen. Theoretically, at least, a better photos app with better search, which is already in the product already, and the ability to edit photos with AI and remove things from backgrounds.

19:23These are cool features. These are the kind of things that Google would staple onto a Pixel phone to pretend you're going to buy one instead of an iPhone. And these are all things that a user could foreseeably want to use in their daily lives without being told that they're in the future, in large part because they are not. In fact, I'd argue that Apple's biggest generative AI push is in trying to sell us back the idea that Siri can actually do stuff years after most users accepted that it was kind of a voice-controlled roulette wheel that occasionally understood you. And for my Scottish, British, and other people with accent friends, that's very occasionally.

20:01What's weird, though, is my Apple TV remote can understand me every time. I can say like the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and it will pop up immediately, but I tell my phone, hey, can you play this song on this HomePod? And it just freaks out. It has a complete conniption. It's so strange. Nevertheless, putting all my jokes aside, looking at everything here, I just can't get over how reserved Apple is being about artificial intelligence. While Google has desperately tried and completely failed to convince Wall Street that it's building and selling the future by putting generative AI into search and making it worse, Apple's almost desperate to explain how boring and normal your iPhone and Mac could be, and how Apple intelligence is just another feature that will make you want to keep using Apple products rather than the reason that Apple should be worth$40 trillion and keep growing forever.

20:56I like how Wired's Will Knight put it. He said that AI is a feature rather than the product. And this is what's really interesting about this. Apple really doesn't feel like they're selling us the future. They feel like they're selling us the present. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's good that Apple isn't rushing. But also the fact that Apple isn't rushing kind of says something about the wider AI movement. It suggests that, outside of what they're offering, they don't really see much value to it. And now we reach the funny part. Quietly stapled onto the end of the announcement of Apple Intelligence was integration of OpenAI's chat GPT in arguably the vaguest least consequential way that I've ever seen a product launch.

21:42After spending an hour and a half, actually more so, talking about how great its own AI features were, Craig Federighi mentioned that, and I quote, There are other artificial intelligence tools available that can be useful for tasks that draw on board world knowledge or offer specialized domain expertise. Just completely stupid. Anyway, saying that Apple wanted users to be able to, and again I quote, use these external models without having to jump between different tools, integrating them directly into Apple's OS, starting with the pioneer and market leader OpenAI. Apple's integration with OpenAI, the supposed big dog, the big swinging dick of the tech industry, in the biggest announcement for the company in years, was explicitly advertised as the first of multiple integrations with multiple models.

22:30I'm not even kidding, literally that was the end of the announcement. It's very funny. And even then, ChatGPT's integration with Siri is entirely opt-in, with certain requests that they were very unspecific about, occasionally prompting Apple to ask you if you'd like to run them through ChatGPT. Like, I have these ingredients, what meal can I make? And other questions that tens, maybe even hundreds of people will find useful. Or having ChatGPT write a bedtime story for your kid, if for some reason you lack books or creativity. Or you feed into this weird thing with AI people where they think everything has to be about you and that you must be the star of every story.

23:07That's a separate podcast, Ed, put it away. ChatGPT can also generate images and summarize documents, features already available in Apple's own AI. This underwhelming addition to an already placid announcement ends with Apple adding that it intends to add support for other AI models in the future before moving on to how developers can integrate Apple's own AI. The deal that would supposedly cement Sam Altman's hold on Silicon Valley and OpenAI ended up being a two-minute-long sidebar at the end of a near two-hour-long announcement, one that requires users to agree every single time they interact with it, with no specifics about how often that a user would actually see ChatGPT.

23:49Despite the insane romanticization of Sam Altman's incredible technology, Apple's approach is one that begins and ends with them saying, do you really want to use this? And a remarkable lack of excitement or trust. While it remains to be seen exactly how often you'll be prompted to use it, ChatGPT's addition to Apple products feels far more like something cooked up to please Wall Street. And it worked, briefly making Apple the most valuable US company, beating Microsoft just for a minute, all without having to invest billions of dollars into another company. now quick side note there's undoubtedly here a level of cya covering one's ass here if apple could it would undoubtedly monopolize ai on the iphone much like it has with app distribution and browser rendering engines that's the bit of the web browser that turns html css and javascript into a web page from the beginning apple has sought absolute control of the ios and its derivatives, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS ecosystems, using user safety as a justification for, well, their kind of benevolent dictatorship.

24:57The problem is, the line between protecting users and anti-competitive behavior is thin, and indeed regulators, particularly those in the European Commission, aren't convinced that Apple's ironclad control of the iPhone is entirely altruistic. And that's why you can access alternative app stores in the European Union, and even install apps directly from the web. And it's why you're no longer tied into using the Safari WebKit rendering engine, even if you install an alternative browser like Brave or Safari. Or Firefox, indeed. If Apple iced out OpenAI or Anthropic, they both could conceivably complain about Apple to the European Commission, who might rule in favor of them and order Apple to start supporting their models, in addition to levying a huge multi-billion dollar euro fine.

25:40And so, Apple chose to save itself the hassle and the cost and buried OpenAI and the rest of them in the back.

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