Ed Zitron: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
www.macrumors.com
Memory prices have doubled, Macs and iPads have gone up, and iPhones are expected to follow. Ed Zitron – who writes the Where's Your Ed At newsletter, hosts the Better Offline podcast, and has been described by Politico as the AI boom's most "acerbic gadfly" – has spent years arguing the buildout driving those costs will never pay for itself. We asked him what happens to Apple if he's right. You've been calling AI a bubble since before it was fashionable.

(…) Apple Intelligence was both the worst and best thing to happen to Apple as far as the AI bubble goes.

It was a mass-radicalization of its users against AI – an attempt to cram a barely-functional series of add-ons that nobody asked for in the most-obtrusive way possible, with summaries that were almost immediately turned into memes and a new Siri that was, somehow, even worse than the old Siri.

And I think that told Apple to pump the brakes. It’s barely spent anything on capex. It’s barely done anything with AI. Despite headline after headline claiming it’s “falling behind,” nobody can really explain what it is it’s falling behind on or why it matters. People hate Apple Intelligence, and I think Apple knows that, and so they’re going to jingle the keys for the markets by putting “AI” on stuff without ever really putting their back into it.

  • Jumbie
    202·
    6 days ago

    Explain this.

    From a regular user’s view, my understanding is that my personal data remains on-device and leaves only with my express action or consent.

    • db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      124·
      6 days ago

      Your consent is still required, but Apple is making promises about anonymity and privacy they simply can’t guarantee when sending data to a 3rd party server.

      Apple is using its years of marketing as a privacy forward company just to put one of the worst technologies for privacy a tap away from uninformed users. (E.g. my parents who will tap ‘OK’ on every popup thrown at them.) After years of headlines of how dangerous consulting LLMs for health concerns can get, Apple launches ChatGPT integration in Apple Health.

      Additionally Apple has made promises to be carbon neutral by 2030, impossible if we start to measure the true cost of Apple Intelligence. Unless of course we just blame that on Google or OpenAI. You know, like Foxcon was responsible for the suicide nets and horrendous conditions in the iPhone factories.

      For more than a decade Apple has trained its employees on supplier responsibilities, ethical code of conduct and marketed their privacy and environmental causes. None of these values are compatible with OpenAI or Google, who are now running Siri and Apple Intelligence.

      • Jumbie
        93·
        6 days ago

        I get your concern and I feel the same way. However, you’ve used concerns as fact when even the link you’ve provided counteracts your argument.

        Guess I’ll wait to see if Apple’s promises match their previous ones they fulfilled when they used ChatGPT for AI. I’ve still found no evidence to the contrary.

        • db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          5·
          6 days ago

          I agree my initial comment was oversimplified, but what you say is not fact but only concern contradicts Apple’s own statements about what data they share with 3rd parties under the Apple Intelligence product.

          If putting “OpenAI must process your information solely for the purpose of fulfilling your request and not store your information or any responses it provides unless required under applicable laws. OpenAI also must not use your information to improve or train its models.” on their website is enough of a guarantee for you that OpenAI won’t do what they please, then good luck.

    • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      6 days ago

      Next OS release (around September) will be the built-in Google Gemini partnership. Apple isnt rolling their own AI, and instead will be outsourcing it to a third party.

      • Jumbie
        8·
        6 days ago

        They already did this with ChatGPt and were still able to partition my data.

        The explanations/writeups I’ve seen for the next OS suggest the same behavior, although I see concerning parts about how much the AI will be in use on your device.

        Do you have more information on that? I can’t find anything but conspiracy theories but I’m eager to have actual information to back those accusations.

        • blitzen@lemmy.ca
          2·
          6 days ago

          So far, that’s my understanding as well. That anything that touches personal data remains on device by default and only leaves the device on your explicit commands. Of course I may be missing something, but this feels like Apple eating their cake and having it too, even if the cake isn’t as good.

          • Jumbie
            2·
            6 days ago

            The accusation that Apple will give your data to Google et al is one you made. You state that queries will be sent off-device but don’t recognize that this is with consent and exactly how it worked with ChatGPT integration.

            It’s a valid fear but not a valid fact.

            • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 days ago

              I havent yet made any claim that Apple is sending your data to Google.

              Apple acknowledges these issues per their Private Cloud Compute newsroom release:

              Cloud AI security and privacy guarantees are difficult to verify and enforce. If a cloud AI service states that it does not log certain user data, there is generally no way for security researchers to verify this promise — and often no way for the service provider to durably enforce it. For example, a new version of the AI service may introduce additional routine logging that inadvertently logs sensitive user data without any way for a researcher to detect this. Similarly, a perimeter load balancer that terminates TLS may end up logging thousands of user requests wholesale during a troubleshooting session.

              It’s difficult to provide runtime transparency for AI in the cloud. Cloud AI services are opaque: providers do not typically specify details of the software stack they are using to run their services, and those details are often considered proprietary. Even if a cloud AI service relied only on open source software, which is inspectable by security researchers, there is no widely deployed way for a user device (or browser) to confirm that the service it’s connecting to is running an unmodified version of the software that it purports to run, or to detect that the software running on the service has changed.

              It’s challenging for cloud AI environments to enforce strong limits to privileged access. Cloud AI services are complex and expensive to run at scale, and their runtime performance and other operational metrics are constantly monitored and investigated by site reliability engineers and other administrative staff at the cloud service provider. During outages and other severe incidents, these administrators can generally make use of highly privileged access to the service, such as via SSH and equivalent remote shell interfaces. Though access controls for these privileged, break-glass interfaces may be well-designed, it’s exceptionally difficult to place enforceable limits on them while they’re in active use. For example, a service administrator who is trying to back up data from a live server during an outage could inadvertently copy sensitive user data in the process. More perniciously, criminals such as ransomware operators routinely strive to compromise service administrator credentials precisely to take advantage of privileged access interfaces and make away with user data.

              We are still waiting for a full write-up on how Private Cloud Compute can protect against this, but I’m sure Apple will release more information as we get closer to September.

        • 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          Its even messier than that when you start looking at the upcoming CEO transition and the current White House administration taking donations from certain C-suite Apple executives.

      • Jumbie
        3·
        5 days ago

        I didn’t make any claims so I don’t need to explain anything to you.

        Are you assuming we’re arguing?