Latest news with #PrivateCloudCompute
CNBC
01-08-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Facing questions on AI strategy, Tim Cook says Apple is 'very open' to acquisitions
Apple's AI strategy and investment was on the mind of analysts on an earnings call after the company reported third-quarter earnings that showed overall revenue grew by 10% year over year. While Apple was never going to announce major acquisitions or initiatives on an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook's remarks on Thursday confirm that the company is going to invest more heavily in the technology. Cook said Apple is going to "significantly" grow the company's investments in AI. He added that Apple was always looking to buy companies of any size that could help it develop its AI offerings. "We're very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap," Cook said. "We are are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature." Cook said that Apple had acquired "around" seven companies so far this year, although not all of them were focused on AI. While Cook has said in the past that Apple is always evaluating potential acquisitions of all sizes, its largest purchase of all time was Beats Electronics in 2014 for $3 billion. He made the remarks Thursday as Apple has faced growing pressure from Wall Street to catch up to its Silicon Valley peers, all of whom have dedicated tens of billions of dollars toward the infrastructure necessary to power AI. Apple has never been the biggest spender on capital expenditures among big tech companies. It only reported $3.46 billion in capital expenditures in the June quarter, up from $2.15 billion in the year ago period. Its expenses this past quarter are the highest they have been since the quarter ending December 2022. If Apple spent as much as it did this quarter for a full year, that would be about $14 billion annually. That hardly compares to Google projecting $85 billion in capital expenditures for its fiscal 2025 last week, Meta's estimate of as much as $72 billion in annual capital expenditure spending, and Microsoft's $30 billion capital expenditures guide for the current quarter. "We are significantly growing our investment. We did during the June quarter. We will again in the September quarter," Cook said. He added that Apple was rearranging staff internally to focus more on AI. "We are also reallocating a fair number of people to focus on on AI features within the company," Cook said. "We have a great team, and we're putting all of our energy behind it." To be clear, Google and Microsoft run cloud businesses that rent out AI hardware, which Apple doesn't. And Apple finance chief Kevan Parekh said the company has a "hybrid" model to capital investments, in which it gains access to systems it needs through partners and records them as operating expenses. Apple also said that some of its capex will pay for servers using its own chips, which it calls Private Cloud Compute — not merchant chips from companies such as Nvidia. "I would say a significant portion of the driver of growth that you're seeing now is really driven by some of our AI related investments," Parekh said. Cook also downplayed any potential that AI-powered devices that haven't been invented yet might threaten Apple's iPhone franchise. Apple's former design guru Jony Ive teamed up with OpenAI in a $6.5 billion May deal, although they have yet to reveal what their product is, does or will cost. "It's difficult to see a world where iPhone's not living in it," Cook said, "That doesn't mean that we are not thinking about other things as well, but I think that that the devices are likely to be complementary devices, not substitution." Cook also made it clear to investors and analysts on the call that Apple does have an AI strategy that it's executing on. "Our focus, from an AI point of view, is on putting AI features across the platform that are deeply personal, private and seamlessly integrated," Cook said. When asked if he thought that if large language models — the core AI technology made by companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI — might be commoditized, Cook declined to answer and said he was keeping some parts of the company's strategy secret for now. "The way that we look at AI is that it's one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime" Cook said. "It will affect all devices in a significant way."
Deccan Herald
19-07-2025
- Deccan Herald
Shortcuts app gets booster dose of Apple Intelligence to improve productivity
Apple introduced Shortcuts (formerly Workflow) with iOS 12 in 2018 to improve the user experience on its products. In the following year, it was made a default app with the iOS 13 update. It allowed users to automate mundane tasks that involved multiple steps across multiple apps, into a single tap action of the on-screen button or through voice command to Siri digital Shortcuts app, which is now available on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices, will soon get Apple Intelligence capabilities to further simplify the automation of tasks and improve AI agent Big Sleep detects first major cybersecurity will be able to make good use of Apple Intelligence models for the Shortcuts app, either on-device or with cloud server connectivity, in addition to device owners can also take advantage of dedicated actions for Writing Tools and Image Playground to summarise text or generate new iOS 26: Seven key features you need to know about iPhone's new Shortcuts app has been enabled to work seamlessly on most third-party apps and also, and it can be summoned not just on the home screen, but also by action buttons on the latest iPhone models and even with a squeezing gesture on the Pencil Pro to perform an are some use cases of the AI-powered Shortcuts app:Take, for instance, a student can build a shortcut that uses the Apple Intelligence model to compare an audio transcription of a class lecture to the notes they took, and add any key points they may have missed. Users can also choose to tap into ChatGPT to provide responses that feed into their other instances, users can create a shortcut action, which involves sharing a fun GIF with friends. This process requires the user to pick a set of photos from the Photos app and stitch them to make a GIF, and then open the Messages app. With the help of Writing Tools, he/she can create a standard text template and send it to a closed group of the first time, the user has to detail the actions in the Shortcuts app and name them. Once it is set, the Shortcut task can be placed on the home screen and with a single tap, all the actions are performed instantly. Also, users can ask Siri to perform the actions with a single the data of the Shortcuts app is fully protected by Apple's robust security system. Even the complex AI-powered tasks which require cloud server connectivity are safeguarded by Private Cloud the uninitiated, Private Cloud Compute is Apple's propreitary technology. For image generation and other complex queries, Apple devices will connect with Private Cloud Compute servers powered by Apple silicon. All private conversations with Apple Intelligence relayed between a cloud server and the device remain anonymous at all times. No entity, including Apple, can access new features of Shortcuts app will be introduced with the iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe later this 2077: Ultimate Edition debuts on Apple Mac the latest news on new launches, gadget reviews, apps, cybersecurity, and more on personal technology only on DH Tech
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Confident Security, ‘the Signal for AI,' comes out of stealth with $4.2M
As consumers, businesses, and governments flock to the promise of cheap, fast, and seemingly magical AI tools, one question keeps getting in the way: How do I keep my data private? Tech giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and others are quietly scooping up and retaining user data to improve their models or monitor for safety and security, even in some enterprise contexts where companies assume their information is off limits. For highly regulated industries or companies building on the frontier, that gray area could be a dealbreaker. Fears about where data goes, who can see it, and how it might be used are slowing AI adoption in sectors like healthcare, finance, and government. Enter San Francisco-based startup Confident Security, which aims to be 'the Signal for AI.' The company's product, CONFSEC, is an end-to-end encryption tool that wraps around foundational models, guaranteeing that prompts and metadata can't be stored, seen, or used for AI training, even by the model provider or any third party. 'The second that you give up your data to someone else, you've essentially reduced your privacy,' Jonathan Mortensen, founder and CEO of Confident Security, told TechCrunch. 'And our product's goal is to remove that trade-off.' Confident Security came out of stealth on Thursday with $4.2 million in seed funding from Decibel, South Park Commons, Ex Ante, and Swyx, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The company wants to serve as an intermediary vendor between AI vendors and their customers – like hyperscalers, governments, and enterprises. Even AI companies could see the value in offering Confident Security's tool to enterprise clients as a way to unlock that market, said Mortensen. He added that CONFSEC is also well-suited for new AI browsers hitting the market, like Perplexity's recently released Comet, to give customers guarantees that their sensitive data isn't being stored on a server somewhere that the company or bad actors could access, or that their work-related prompts aren't being used to 'train AI to do your job.' CONFSEC is modeled after Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC) architecture, which Mortensen says 'is 10x better than anything out there in terms of guaranteeing that Apple cannot see your data' when it runs certain AI tasks securely in the cloud. Like Apple's PCC, Confident Security's system works by first anonymizing data by encrypting and routing it through services like Cloudflare or Fastly, so servers never see the original source or content. Next, it uses advanced encryption that only allows decryption under strict conditions. 'So you can say you're only allowed to decrypt this if you are not going to log the data, and you're not going to use it for training, and you're not going to let anyone see it,' Mortensen said. Finally, the software running the AI inference is publicly logged and open to review so that experts can verify its guarantees. 'Confident Security is ahead of the curve in recognizing that the future of AI depends on trust built into the infrastructure itself,' Jess Leao, partner at Decibel, said in a statement. 'Without solutions like this, many enterprises simply can't move forward with AI.' It's still early days for the year-old company, but Mortensen said CONFSEC has been tested, externally audited, and is production-ready. The team is in talks with banks, browsers, and search engines, among other potential clients, to add CONFSEC to their infrastructure stacks. 'You bring the AI, we bring the privacy,' said Mortensen.
Engadget
30-06-2025
- Business
- Engadget
Apple may power Siri with Anthropic or OpenAI models amid AI struggles
Apple is considering using AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic to deliver the more capable version of Siri it debuted at WWDC 2024, Bloomberg reports. The company has promised it could deliver a new version of its voice assistant that understands personal context and takes action inside of apps since last year, but officially delayed the updated Siri in March 2025. As part of this proposed new plan, Apple has asked Anthropic and OpenAI to train versions of its models that can run on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, secure servers running on Apple chips. The company already relies on its servers for certain AI features that can't be run locally. Apple uses OpenAI's ChatGPT for some parts of Apple Intelligence, but completely relying on a third-party company for Siri would be a major departure. "The company currently powers most of its AI features with homegrown technology that it calls Apple Foundation Models," Bloomberg writes,"and had been planning a new version of its voice assistant that runs on that technology for 2026." One of the few AI announcements Apple made at WWDC 2025 was to make those foundation models available to third-party developers. Even considering using third-party AI models reflects internal changes at Apple. Leadership of the company's AI teams has reportedly changed hands from John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, to Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering. Separately, Bloomberg reports Apple's Siri team is now being led by Mike Rockwell, who most recently oversaw the development of the Apple Vision Pro. As Bloomberg notes, an Anthropic or OpenAI-powered Siri would actually mirror Samsung's current approach to AI. Galaxy AI relies on some custom Samsung software, but primarily uses Google's Gemini. Using third-party models wouldn't preclude Apple from switching back to something in-house in the future. The company made a similar transition — albeit, perhaps too early — when it went from a Maps app that relied on Google Maps to its custom Apple Maps service in 2012. Wherever Apple lands, the updated version of Siri isn't expected to launch now until 2026. The company will ship a more modest collection of AI-adjacent features this fall with the launch of iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26.
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Business Standard
12-06-2025
- Business Standard
Soon, WhatsApp will offer AI-powered summaries of unread messages: Details
WhatsApp is testing a new AI-driven feature that enables users to privately generate summaries of unread messages in both personal and group chats. As per WABetaInfo, the feature is backed by Meta AI but operates within a system called Private Processing, which is designed to safeguard user privacy. Earlier this year, Meta announced its plans to introduce cloud-based AI features on WhatsApp, including tools to summarise unread chats and provide writing suggestions. These capabilities now appear to be entering the beta testing stage. According to WABetaInfo, the message summary function is currently available to a limited group of Android beta testers, with a wider rollout anticipated in the coming weeks. AI summary for WhatsApp Unread Messages: How it works The report explains that once Private Processing is enabled in the app's settings, users will see a special button when they have multiple unread messages. Tapping this button sends a secure, private request to the Private Processing system, which then generates a summary of the unread content. The report highlights that this process remains fully private, with no user data being stored. Private Processing ensures that all data is handled locally on the user's device, without access by WhatsApp, Meta, or any third-party entity. User interactions remain anonymous and unlinkable to personal identity, thanks to encrypted connections and secure routing. This functionality can be particularly useful for quickly catching up on long threads in active group chats, offering a brief overview without needing to scroll through every message—while keeping user privacy intact. The AI message summary is entirely optional. Users who prefer not to use it can simply ignore the unread messages button or disable the feature via Private Processing settings. Additionally, users with Advanced Chat Privacy enabled will not have access to this summary function. What is Private Processing? Meta previously introduced Private Processing as a way to protect user data while handling AI requests in the cloud. The system, described as a confidential computing framework, mirrors Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC), which was introduced last year to support Apple Intelligence while preserving privacy. According to Meta, Private Processing enables secure handling of AI-based tasks like message summarisation and writing suggestions, without granting access to personal data. It creates a protected virtual cloud environment where tasks are performed without Meta—or anyone else—seeing the actual message content.
