Bereft of fresh ideas or new products, Apple’s main offering at its long-awaited annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference in Cupertino, California, is a cobbled-together artificial intelligence (AI) offering.
While AI may be Silicon Valley’s latest buzzword and marketing tool, “Apple Intelligence,” as Apple AI is branded, is already attracting heavy criticism – even from other tech giants. By pairing Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Apple’s voice-activated assistant, Siri, Apple hopes to make AI mainstream. But its critics say that all Apple has done is create a cybersecurity nightmare for corporations while sounding a death knell for the personal privacy of Apple users.
“It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!… Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river,” says Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX founder and the owner of X Corp, formerly Twitter.
Musk added that employees and visitors to his companies would ‘have to check their Apple devices at the door’, where they would be stored in a ‘Faraday cage’ that blocks electromagnetic fields. He cited cybersecurity as the reason for his caution concerning Apple’s latest offering.
“An unacceptable security violation”
“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS [operating system] level, then Apple devices will be banned at my company. That is an unacceptable security violation,” says Musk.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is, of course, not alone in betting the farm on AI, despite the consensus view at last week’s InfosSecurity Europe 2024 conference in London that the term ‘AI’ is little more than marketing hype for the latest advances in machine learning. This technology has been around for some years.
Nevertheless, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have been racing to develop new ‘AI-powered’ offerings, and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is anxious not to be left behind. His big competitor, Microsoft, is, for example, said to have invested billions in OpenAI. Apple’s new partnership with OpenAI will feed into its own proprietary generative AI features, which it has dubbed “Apple Intelligence.” Cook described it as a “new personal intelligence system” based on Apple’s generative AI models customized to the user.
Siri will be fitted with GPT-4o, the latest version of a chatbot that some say sounds like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the movie ‘Her’. Prior to Musk’s heavy criticism of the new offering, Apple promised users that their private information and queries would not be logged or stored. The new offering also includes AI-summarized documents in Mail and Notes and an image-generating AI dubbed ‘Image Playground’ in addition to ChatGPT’s integration with Siri.
