Apple purportedly will process data from AI apps in a virtual black box

Apple plans to process data from upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) apps in a virtual black box, making it impossible for its employees to access it, according to The Information.

Quoting four unnamed “Apple employees who worked on the project,” the article says that over the past three years, the tech giant has been working on a secret project known internally as “Apple Chips in Data Centers” (or ACDC) that wold allow for such black box processing.

From The Information: With the confidential-computing approach, Apple will be able to handle processing of AI-related data in the cloud while making it extremely difficult for hackers to gain access to the data even in the event of a data breach. It would also reduce Apple’s burden of having to hand over personal data from its servers in the event of a government or law enforcement request.

Expect to see details about Apple’s AI push at next month’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which kicks off on June 10. The company has purportedly closed in on an agreement with OpenAI to use the startup’s technology on the iPhone, “part of a broader push to bring artificial intelligence features to its devices,” reports Bloomberg, quoting unnamed “people familiar with the matter.”

The article says the two sides have been finalizing terms for a pact to use ChatGPT features in iOS 18. Apple also has purportedly held talks with Alphabet Inc.’s about integrating its Gemini AI engine into iOS 18. 

OpenAI is a U.S. based AI research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing “safe and beneficial” artificial general intelligence, which it defines as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” According to Google, Gemini is the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding), one of the most popular methods to test the knowledge and problem solving abilities of AI models.

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