Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here's how that will work.

The pitch offers an implicit contrast with the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta, which collect and store enormous amounts of personal data. Apple says any personal data passed on to the cloud will be used only for the AI task at hand and will not be retained or accessible to the company, even for debugging or quality control, after the model completes the request. Simply put, Apple is saying people can trust it to analyze incredibly sensitive data--photos, messages, and emails that contain intimate details of our lives--and deliver automated services based on what it finds there, without actually storing the data online or making any of it vulnerable. It showed a few examples of how this will work in upcoming versions of iOS. Instead of scrolling through your messages for that podcast your friend sent you, for example, you could simply ask Siri to find and play it for you.