[cwizou]

This may explain why they (weirdly), only announced it for iOS and iPadOS, as far as I can tell they didn't announce it for macOS.

My first thought was that they didn't want to make the model too easily accessible by putting it on macOS, in order to avoid adversarial attacks.

But knowing this now, Intel Macs are an issue as (not as I previously wrote because they differ in floating point implementation to ARM, thanks my123 for the correction) they will have to run the network on a wide variety of GPUs (at the very least multiple AMD archs and Intel's iGPU), so maybe that also factored in their decision ? They would have had to deploy multiple models and (I believe, unless they could make the models exactly converge ?) multiple distinct database server side to check back.

To people knowledgeable on the topic, would having two versions of the models increase the attack surface ?

Edit: Also, I didn't realise that because of how perceptual hashes worked, they would need to have their own threshold to matching, independent of the "30 pictures matched to launch a human review". Apple's communication push implied exact matches. I'm not sure they used the right tool here (putting aside the fact for now that this is running client side).

[kwerk]

It wasn’t part of the original announcement afaik but is coming to MacOS Monterey: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

Edit: cwizou correctly points out not all of the features (per Apple) will be on Monterey but the code exists.

[cwizou]

Is it ? I checked your link and they separate clearly which features comes to which OS, here's how I read it :

- Communication safety in Messages

> "This feature is coming in an update later this year to accounts set up as families in iCloud for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey."

- CSAM detection

> "To help address this, new technology in iOS and iPadOS"

- Expanding guidance in Siri and Search

> "These updates to Siri and Search are coming later this year in an update to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey."

So while the two other features are coming, the CSAM detection is singled out as not coming to macOS.

But ! At the same time, and I saw that after the editing window closed, the GitHub repo clearly states that you can get the models from macOS builds 11.4 onwards :

> If you have a recent version of macOS (11.4+) or jailbroken iOS (14.7+) installed, simply grab these files from /System/Library/Frameworks/Vision.framework/Resources/ (on macOS) or /System/Library/Frameworks/Vision.framework/ (on iOS).

So my best guess is, they trialed it on macOS as they did in iOS (and put the model there contrary to what I had assumed) but choose not to enable it yet, perhaps because of the rounding error issue, or something else.

Edit : This repo by KhaosT refers to 11.3 for the API availability but it's the same ballpark, Apple is already shipping it as part of their Vision framework, under an obfuscated class name, and the code samples runs the model directly on macOS : https://github.com/KhaosT/nhcalc/blob/5f5260295ba584019cbad6...

[kwerk]

Ah good catch and write up. I believe you’re right and likely a matter of time for Mac. Hard to tell if this means it’s shipping with MacOS but just not enabled yet.

[my123]

The model runs on the GPU or the Neural Engine, CPU arch isn't really a factor.

[cwizou]

My bad, I edited the previous post, thanks for this. Assuming this runs on Intel's iGPU, they would still need the ability to run on AMD's GPU for the iMac Pro and Mac Pro, so that's at least two extra separate cases.

[trangus_1985]

It's not a user facing feature, and x86 macs are the past already - I doubt they'll bother porting it.

[cyanydeez]

my primary expectation is this tech will be used for dcma2.0 and "for the kids" is the best way to launch it.