APPLE INTELLIGENS & ITS TRYST PRIVAC WITH

Jumping two years late into the frank Apple with Apple Intelligence tries to address one of the biggest concerns around Generative AT Privacy.

- SahilMohan Gupta

IN 2011, A DAY BEFORE STEVE JOBS passed away, Apple’s former senior VP of software, Scott Forstall, took the stage to showcase Siri, which would be part of the iPhone 4S. Siri was supposed to be an AI assistant that would use its wicked smarts to make your smartphone experience simpler. You could speak to it and ask it questions, and it would whip out answers from the Internet.

Given the state of the networks and processing power at the time, it was impressive technology and its promise was enormous. In the years that have ensued, it has become a caricature of sorts as within two years it was usurped by Google and Amazon, and Apple’s advances were meagre.

Siri was originally an app on the App Store that caught the eye of Apple’s fabled mercurial co-founder and exCEO, the late Steve Jobs. He had made it his mission to woo its founders to join Apple. Jobs had personally called Dag Kittlaus, the AI wizard who had cofounded Siri. This was at a time when Jobs was ailing with pancreatic cancer. While reticent, the Siri team agreed to join Apple, but today none of the cofounders are left at Apple.

The founders of Siri, including Dag Kittlaus, left Apple within a couple of years of Jobs’ passing to found another startup which again dabbled in building another virtual assistant called Viv. This startup was then absorbed by Samsung, which eventually turned into Bixby.

But while all this happened, Apple kept going further and further away from its promise of an AI-powered smartphone as Siri meandered and Apple’s stance on privacy just didn’t allow it to become an AI powerhouse that Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, its Silicon Valley and Seattle-based peers, have become. And all this happened before Generative AI was even a term.