I thought it was the smartest and most pragmatic thing they've announced.

Being best in class for on-device AI is a huge market opportunity. Trying to do it all would be dumb like launching Safari without a google search homepage partnership.

Apple can focus on what they are good at which is on device stuff and blending AI into their whole UX across the platform, without compromising privacy. And then taking advantage of a market leader for anything requiring large external server farms and data being sent across the wire for internet access, like AI search queries.

I think they also announced the possibility to integrate Siri with other AI platforms than ChatGPT so this prompt would be especially useful to make clear to the user which of these AIs Siri wants to use.

From a user perspective it's 100% clear.

If the system doesn't say "I'm gonna phone a friend to get an answer for this", it's going to stay either 100% local or at worst 100% within Apple Intelligence, which is audited to be completely private.

So if you're asking for a recipe for banana bread, going to ChatGPT is fine. Sending more personal information might not be.

I just don't think the average user cares enough to want this extra friction. It's like if every time you ran a google search it gave you lower-quality results and you had to click a "Yes, give me the better content" option every time to get it to then display the proper results. It's just an extra step which people are going to get sick of very fast.

You know what it's really reminiscent of? The EU cookies legislation. Do you like clicking "Yes I accept cookies" every single time you go to a new website? It enhances your privacy, after all.

There is no cookie banner law: https://www.bitecode.dev/p/there-is-no-eu-cookie-banner-law // https://www.amazingcto.com/cookie-banners-are-not-needed/

In theory there isn't. In practice > 99% of the website I visit have a cookie banner thingy. Including the EU own website (https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en).

Think about it: even a government agency isn't able to produce a simple static web page without having to display that cookie banner. If their definitions of "bad cookies that require a banner" is so wide that even they can't work around it to correctly inform citizens, without collecting any private data, displaying any ad or reselling anything; maybe the definition is wrong.

For all intent and purposes, there is a cookie banner law.

They could not have a cookie banner, but their privacy policy states pretty clearly why they want your consent. It is to "gather analytics data (about user behaviour)". Additionally you don't need to consent to this and can access everything without them "collecting any private data, displaying any ad or reselling anything". The only reason they ask for consent is to gather analytics, which is similar to you being asked for your postal code when paying while shopping.

The cookie banners are a cargo cult.

Someone somewhere figured out that it might be a good idea and others just copied it.

It's interesting you phrase it that way, because that's sort of how DuckDuckGo works with their !g searches. I'm not saying that's good or bad, it's just an observation.

Still involves friction. A more "seamless" way for Apple to do this would've been to license GPT-4's weights from OpenAI and run it on Apple Intelligence servers.

but that restricts it to just openai then.

I want to use perplexity from siri too!

It's a clear delineation between "My data is on my device or within Apple's ecosystem" and "My data is now leaving Apple and going to a 3rd party"

At the core of everything they presented is privacy. Yes the point is that most questions are answered locally or via the Private Compute system.

More specifically "is openai seeing my personal data or questions?" A: "No, unless you say it's okay to talk to OpenAI everything happens either on your iPhone or in Private Compute"

Apple is touting the privacy focus of their AI work, and going out to ChatGPT breaks that. I would be reluctant to use any of their new AI features if it weren't for that prompt breaking the flow and making it clear when they are getting results from ChatGPT.

What? The original Siri asked if the user wanted to continue their search on the web if it couldn't handle it locally. It was one of the last things from the Jobs era.

I agree. Quite odd and not very Apple-ish. I wonder if there’s some good reason for it; it must have been debated internally.

They'll probably add an option to disable that prompt at some point. I'm glad it is the default behavior, though.