Google can now read your WhatsApp messages

People have been clowning on Apple for being behind on the AI stuff and -- while I'd never defend how they promised a bunch of features in 2024, showed them in ads, and sold iPhones based on vaporware, but still haven't shipped most of the features -- I will say, I imagine a lot of the hold-up is because they realized how dangerous it is to start trusting AI with the sensitive data on your phone. It's probably not too hard to make it work most of the time, but even if there's a 0.0001% chance the AI will send a sensitive image meant for your wife to your boss, you should probably reconsider shipping.

I don't believe Google has the tact to care as long as they look like a market competitor in something.

> even if there's a 0.0001% chance the AI will send a sensitive image meant for your wife to your boss, you should probably reconsider shipping.

Not the best example since Siri has been misunderstanding us for many, many years.

You really meant to send that I love you to Louis coworker, right? Not to "Love"? Too late

> but even if there's a 0.0001% chance the AI will send a sensitive image meant for your wife to your boss, you should probably reconsider shipping.

That's too low of a probability for Apple to care. The probability that YOU would do it yourself by some random series of accidents is probably orders of magnitude higher than that.

Do you really think you're going to send 1,000,000 nudes to your wife without accidentally sending one to the wrong person!?

No. It's well documented and reported that Apple's hold-up is because of technical incompetency.

There's a "sensational news story" multiplier.

It's the other way around. The probability is so low that it is incredibly unlikely to happen to any given individual. You would have to be paranoid to worry about it. On the other hand the probability is so high that, when considering the size of Apple's user base, such incidents would happen regularly.

Behind on AI? Apple was the first to intercept personal communications and create inappropriate synopses of breakup texts for its users.

They mean that the baseline probability of someone manually doing that to themselves without AI is higher than that.

I know right?

They have always been behind. Why would this time be any different?

> Do you really think you're going to send 1,000,000 nudes to your wife without accidentally sending one to the wrong person!?

That seems like the wrong way to spin this hypothetical probability.

A quick search says there are 1.38B iPhone users worldwide. According to[0], 87.8% of 18+ year olds have sexted, so let's estimate that to mean 1.21B users. Even if we assume users only ever send one nude, that means 1,210 gaffes if you assume one in a million.

[0] https://www.womens-health.com/sexting-statistics

> You really meant to send that I love you to Louis coworker, right? Not to "Love"? Too late

Why make up stuff like this? Siri confirms everything that sends data.

I can't help but wonder what "Thoughts on AI" would say if Steve were still here.

Steve Jobs predicted LLMs in 1985. He was 40 years ahead of everyone else.

(Search: Steve Jobs predicted the future of AI)

Why wonder? We can use AI to generate what he might have said! /s

> -- I will say, I imagine a lot of the hold-up is because they realized how dangerous it is to start trusting AI with the sensitive data on your phone.

It was probably Apple being incompetent with their AI approach rather than being careful

I’ve not read this; do you have any links?

If true, that's pathetic on Apple's part. The unreliability of LLMs was maybe the biggest topic in the entire tech industry around that time. To be ignorant of that basic fact would be an incredibly bad look.

I have no insider knowledge but to me on the outside it looks like the same old panicky hype-chasing we've all seen in other contexts. Some executives kept reading and hearing about AI AI AI!, and were terrified of being left behind. The many voices of reason within the company pointing out the correct risks and tradeoffs to consider were ignored while the over-confident voices blustered their way onto the roadmap.

I for one am glad they did this for the humor alone.

That's not quite true, especially if you're using something like CarPlay. I have personally had this interaction:

Me: Hey Siri, text Jen [my wife] I love you.

Siri: OK, texting Johnny Chan [my ex-boss] I love you.

Me: What NO!

Johnny: Uh...

That happened. It's not something I read about or made up. It went pretty much exactly like that.

That doesn’t provide any nontrivial insights—yes, Siri is built on keyword detection, but it’s also much older. But why are they having such a hard time creating an LLM-based Siri 2.0? Still no clue.

Precisely. Its incredible that people think Apple is playing 4D chess with AI, when in reality the simplest answer is the most plausible - Apple has no clue wth to do with AI. Their own assistant - Siri - has been in shambles for close to a decade.

Structurally Apple is in a disadvantage, in the AI race. And no amount of waiting, or polish is going to help them - unless they partner with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

Very well known.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...

https://youtu.be/elfCDnMx3Ug?si=lP9OpeU9rpO2RIla

This is a setting under Settings > Siri & Search > Automatically send messages.

It's disabled by default, but it's possible you turned it on by accident or got a bad default setting I suppose.

Not to defend Apple - A lot of attempts of integrating AI are shot in the dark that lilely make no sense.

However, Apple did have a use case that would be an obvious improvement. The very thing LLMs excel at is at processing and generating natural language. Improving Siri with LLM capabilities was the obvious move, especially at a time where LLM providers are willing to burn cash to reach a wider use base. It speaks volumes of a company that is just rent seeking their position in the smartphone market at this point.

Appreciated, thank you

Perhaps cost reason? Unlike Google, Apple mostly rent their servers from the big cloud providers. Rolling this out to all Apple devices must be very expensive.

Maybe, but my point was that this link wasn’t a source for anything at all, despite being presented as evidence here

"Too late" is tongue in cheek, but the point stands. Apple has been comfortable shipping crappy products for as long as I can remember. Even Jobs was pissed at them shipping MobileMe in its sorry state.