[tguedes]

From my understanding of the architecture, Apple and Google have basically developed a fork of Gemini that is built to run on Apple's PCC. There is no data being sent to any Google servers.

From this MacRumors article:

"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."

And

"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""

[brianmcnulty]

That seems to conflict with the recent security blog that says they are using Google Cloud infra and NVIDIA GPUs with PCC now [0].

They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.

I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).

[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/

[tguedes]

Ah thank you for that, the MacRumors article was misleading to not even have mentioned this.

[the_mar]

pardon my ignorance, but why does compute hardware pose any security concerns?

[tguedes]

It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.

With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.

From the Apple security blog:

> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.