Theory Ventures reposted this
What stood out to me in yesterday’s Apple announcement wasn’t the headline, but the subtitle. “Setting a new standard in privacy.” For privacy to become one of the leading selling points of software, competitive dynamics & user preferences have evolved. The mantra repeated over the last 20 years on the internet has been privacy is dead. Users simply don’t care. People are willing to trade their privacy for free & targeted experiences. Since 2020, Apple has marketed their products as the private alternativepoking fun at how public we all are about the minutia of our lives. Apple is competing using the challenger sale : Apple is telling the market, to use AI, you should want private AI, you should want to control your own data because it’s valuable. Apple’s massive distribution will affect consumer & enterprise preferences. It’s already happening. Enterprises push for their data to be under their control in virtual private clouds, in open data formats like Iceberg, to run AI models in their own environments - the cloud-prem architecture. These models are their intellectual property & a key competitive advantage. We’ve all learned Google’s core search business - arguably the best business model on the internet - is the commercialization of a machine learning algorithm from user & enterprise data. Fool me once… The broader market has realized how valuable data can be - both users who provide it & businesses who leverage it. These changing preferences will create demand for new architectures : software products that run in customer environments where the data remains in control of the user & buyer. This architectural shift creates a massive new opportunity for software startups to challenge the multi-tenant, centralized data incumbents with their own privacy-focused challenger sale. Many will debate whether the architecture is truly private. Is Apple using secure enclaves & SGXs, OpenAI promising not to log queries from Apple users, & users opting-in to sending their data to OpenAI private enough? Will Google rearchitect Gemini to do the same thing to power Apple products? https://lnkd.in/g-ukCuGt
Neetu Pathak
3mo
This, along with other evolving market needs, is why we are creating a hybrid AI infrastructure and introducing the concept of Adaptive Inference. Our system processes as much data as possible on end-user devices based on available compute resources and falls back on the cloud when needed. We also split a single model to process part of a single inference request on the device and the rest in the cloud.
Rish Gupta
3mo
Tomasz Tunguz love the post. This is why we Spot AI architecture is helping hundreds of business customers.
As a privacy nut, I’m here for it. I don’t know that I believe yet that with this new Apple Intelligence there really will be privacy from Apple. But I applaud the start. I think we’ll start seeing users want to take control of their data. It’ll be interesting to see if Adobe loses many subscribers over this privacy dust up that they’re in.
Val Bercovici
3mo
This insight is the new big picture for Global 2000 enterprise IT. AI may be the catalyst, but local (edge) processing with cloud bursting has been held back by cybersecurity and privacy stagnation. Apple’s innovative new Private Cloud Computing proves we can move past ‘shared responsibility’ limitations to enable powerful data controls for cloud tenants and edge-core workload spanning which maximizes UX and resource utilization everywhere.
Controlling our data is crucial with the current tech landscape and AI's rapid growth. Many aren't aware of the importance of being careful with inputs given to GenAI tools like ChatGPT. It's encouraging to see Apple taking the lead on this. I'm curious to see how they'll achieve it.
Pedro Cortés
3mo
Spot on about Apple's privacy push. It's clear that user preferences are evolving towards valuing privacy more.
Samantha McKenna
3mo
Privacy's sexy now Tomasz Tunguz! I'll be interested to see how much say/control the user has moving forward, and if it's more than just unchecking boxes.
Lawrence Kelly
3mo
There is truth to the famous 1999 quote below. Inevitably ones data is in so many places, so complete privacy is not possible. ChatGPT is a special case as is all LLMs if they are keeping the conversation history, so be careful what you chat about etc. The quote from Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy in 1999, that "you have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." means that there are no consumer privacy laws
Tyson Supasatit
3mo
They win my money. I appreciate the transparency they provided into the architecture and Private Compute Cloud, even releasing the images for security researchers to analyze.
AI and Robotics investor
3moIt's a strongly competitive position and one that is difficult for Google to compete with given their business model. My understanding from friends working at Apple is that privacy is something they deeply care about rather than just being smart business strategy.