Maybe apple will have a bigger effect on ai adoption than any other company.
Local inference is huge for anything that requires even a little bit of privacy.
Local inference is huge for anything that requires even a little bit of privacy.
This. Nobody really cares about local processing for privacy.
Even those that claim to often don't mean it. Remember the total freakout over Apple's proposed local, privacy-preserving processing to detect CSAM before uploading it to iCloud? The consensus seemed to be that secret, opaque, and un-auditable cloud-based scanning was much preferable.
After all, it's hard to care when you don't have power as an end user too act on those feelings.
"It was pretty open"
Not really. The scanning code wasn't open source. Apple didn't explain how their proprietary hashing algorithm worked, let alone providing any source code. It was just the promise of Apple about how the whole thing would work. If that's sufficient, then iCloud scanning is as open as local scanning.
Auditability of DB updates doesn't mean much either. Even if a third party organization detected "new additions" to the CSAM DB, what would be the next step? There would be no way to verify if those hashes actually correspond to CSAM. A dictatorship, for example, would just say "yes it's CSAM, trust us", and you'd have no option but to trust their word. Even in the US, there is no way to verify if CSAM DB fully corresponds to actual CSAM. It's just NCMEC's word. We simply don't know.