Actually, really liked the Apple Intelligence announcement. It must be a very exciting time at Apple as they layer AI on top of the entire OS. A few of the major themes.
Step 1 Multimodal I/O. Enable text/audio/image/video capability, both read and write. These are the native human APIs, so to speak.
Step 2 Agentic. Allow all parts of the OS and apps to inter-operate via “function calling”; kernel process LLM that can schedule and coordinate work across them given user queries.
Step 3 Frictionless. Fully integrate these features in a highly frictionless, fast, “always on”, and contextual way. No going around copy pasting information, prompt engineering, or etc. Adapt the UI accordingly.
Step 4 Initiative. Don’t perform a task given a prompt, anticipate the prompt, suggest, initiate.
Step 5 Delegation hierarchy. Move as much intelligence as you can on device (Apple Silicon very helpful and well-suited), but allow optional dispatch of work to cloud.
Step 6 Modularity. Allow the OS to access and support an entire and growing ecosystem of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT announcement).
Step 7 Privacy. <3
We’re quickly heading into a world where you can open up your phone and just say stuff. It talks back and it knows you. And it just works. Super exciting and as a user, quite looking forward to it.
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Kernel process LLM
God I hope not. That sounds extremely insecure. Definitely do not do this in the kernel.
Why do I feel like this is making me Recall another recent awful idea?
“and it just works”
has he even used an llm before?
He sort of invented it, so you have to think he’s commenting on the concept here, not the implementation.
I have tried a lot of medium and small models, and there it just no good replacement for the larger ones for natural text output. And they won’t run on device.
Still, fine-tuning smaller models can do wonders, so my guess would be that Apple Intelligence is really 20+ small and fine tuned models that kick in based on which action you take.
An LLM has no comprehension of what it says. It’s just a puppy that is really good at performing for treats. This will always yield nonsense a meaningful proportion of the time.
I don’t care how statistically good your model can be under certain constraints and inputs. At the end of the day, all you’ve done is classically condition your computer.
It goes a tad bit beyond classical conditioning… LLM’a provides a much better semantic experience than any previous technology, and is great for relating input to meaningful content. Think of it as an improved search engine that gives you more relevant info / actions / tool-suggestions etc based on where and how you are using it.
Here’s a great article that gives some insight into the knowledge features embedded into a larger model: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/
That’s great. But that’s not how it’s being marketed and sold to the public. It’s being sold as an oracle (as in crystal ball, not database). And it’s misleading and hurting people as a result.
I’ll reiterate: An LLM has no comprehension of what it says.
It’s a matter of engineering ethics, on multiple levels:
- the training data in the vast majority of cases is outright stolen
- it’s being sold as something that it’s not, and the result is causing real damage to people and society in a ton of ways we’re still discovering
- most people deeply involved in developing LLMs, and basically all of the technical leadership, are categorically ignoring and abrogating any and all responsibility around this “magical” new system they’ve made. We’ve seen this before with social networking. We know where this road leads.
I’m not saying the tech should be banned. That’s obviously idiotic. Neural nets can - and are - used for tons of fascinating and excellent applications. It’s just that my staunch opinion is that LLMs are a terrible application of that the tech at this stage of development, and it’s particularly terrible that OpenAI/Microsoft/etc are aggressively foisting this technology on the public, and simultaneously refusing to take any ethical responsibility for it.
To be honest, I’m not sure what we’re arguing - we both seem to have a sound understanding of what LLM is and what it is not.
I’m not trying to defend or market LLM, I’m just describing the usability of the current capabilities of typical LLMs.
I’m saying that I wish that more people involved with the core development of the technology took the ethical considerations seriously, and communicated those concerns as a first-order issue when they talk about applications like this.
It’s fascinating tech, but the way it’s being employed these days is deeply irresponsible.
Yikes. Just hit em with the ol’ “<3” for privacy. Does not inspire confidence.
How so? Many people want to use AI in privacy, but it’s too hard for most people to set it up for themselves currently.
Having AI tools on the OS level so you can use it in almost any app and that is guaranteed to be processed on device in privacy will be very useful if done right.
You think your iPhone isn’t collecting data on you? Is that what you’re saying?
Unless you are designing and creating your own chips for processing, networking etc, then privacy today is about trust, not technology. There’s no escaping it. I know iPhone and Apple is collecting data about me. I currently trust them the most on how they use it.
There are degrees of trust though. You can trust the developers and people who audited the code if you have no skill/desire to audit it yourself, or you can trust just the developers.
And even closed systems’ behavior can be monitored and analyzed.
Yes definitely, Apple claimed that their privacy could be independently audited and verified; we will have to wait and see what’s actually behind that info.
Apple claimed that their privacy could be independently audited and verified.
How? The only way to truly be able to do that to a 100% verifiable degree is if it were open source, and I highly doubt Apple would do that, especially considering it’s OS level integration. At best, they’d probably only have a self-report mechanism which would also likely be proprietary and therefore not verifiable in itself.
They have designed a very extensive solution for Private Cloud Computing: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
All I have seen from security persons reviewing this is that it will probably be one of the best solutions of its kind - they basically do almost everything correctly, and extensively so.
They could have provided even more source code and easier ways for third parties to verify their claims, but it is understandable that they didn’t, is the only critique I’ve seen.
I look forward to Apple Marketing coming up with their usual line of nonsense, like a meaningless name for an existing capability that they are claiming to have invented.
I watched an abbreviated video. Pretty much everything they announced was available on other platforms 5+years ago
But now it’s on your iPhone.
I agree that it’s dumb.
It will still make stock go up.
