The fundamental catch here is that 80%+ of the future benefit will likely come from the very thing that erodes privacy: deep integration and context. Imagine if a Gemini had your entire life in its context (haha scary I know!), prompting would be so much more powerful.

That's the core, uncomfortable trade-off we're all facing now.

It's not clear to me why certain classes of things still end up farmed out to the cloud (such as this, or is it?). Maybe their LLM hasn't been built in a very pluggable fashion.

... although, to be fair, they're negotiating with OpenAI to run the models in "secure enclaves", which should, assuming everything works right which is a huge assumption, keep Apple or anybody else from reaching inside and seeing what the model is "thinking about".

It's hard to predict exactly though. I remember thinking in 2001 that nobody except the busiest businessmen would need a cell phone. A landline at home is perfectly enough and in special cases there are phone booths. And in 2011 I thought the same about smartphones. Why would I need email while walking in the street? Can't it wait until I'm home at the desktop? If I need computer stuff on the go, I can take a laptop. Similarly, I'm not quite sure how exactly it will go but probably in 10 years you'll need to have an AI agent to function in society. The legacy infrastructure decays if nobody uses it even if you'd prefer not to jump on the bandwagon. Today you often MUST have an app downloaded to do things, e.g. some museums require it, sometimes government services are much more tedious otherwise. Some restaurants only have a QR code and no physical menu. Often news items (from school, or local municipality) are only shared in social media. Etc. etc. I can easily imagine that there will be things you can't manually do in 2035, only by asking your AI agent to do it for you. And it will scan all your data to make sure that what you're doing is impeccable in intent and safety and permissibility (like an inverse captcha: you must be Gemini or another approved bot to do the action. As a human you have to jump a million hoops that maybe takes days of providing various details etc. And Gemini will be easy to spook and will be opinionated about whether you should really get to do that action or not.). And it will communicate behind your back with the AI of the other party to decide everything. Or who knows what. But it will be necessary to use.

Which means, AFAICT, it doesn't matter if you turn it off or not, Google still collects information and stores it for 72 hours as part of the core functionality of the operating system.

Don't act like your opinion is the only one that matters. You may not, but other people do care about their privacy.

"Here's the thing: Google promises that under normal circumstances, Gemini cannot read or summarize your WhatsApp messages. But, and this is a big but, with the "help" of the Google Assistant or the Utilities app, it may view your messages (including images), read and respond to your WhatsApp notifications, and more."

Doesn't matter what your opinion is on privacy, google doesn't give you the option to opt out. - "regardless of whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off."

Of course, the easy solution is that nobody has conversations that might need privacy anymore; people can just always be in public persona mode. Hopefully we don’t end up with a society made up of inauthentic lonely people as a result.

How about paying once, owning a specific version and that's it?

In fact, I don't believe the ad model would have gone away if everyone started paying for a subscription. The bottom tier would still be filled with ads.

Ideally, the market would solve this. The companies that are pushing annoying would lose customers to the companies that don't. But since we don't live in a ideal world, I honestly think regulations would be the only way. Something like "If a customer pays for subscription in any way, you can't show ads" - and then let the companies put a realistic price to their subscription tiers, which makes it worthwhile for them.

Thanks, but that only leads to a screen asking whether I want to enable Gemini. I decline, and it goes back to the previous screen, without opening any settings form.

Apple Intelligence has similar marketing. In last year's WWDC, there was the whole "Siri, when is my mom's flight landing?" segment (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/101/ at 1h22m) that didn't generate any controversy. So for some reason people think Siri should rightfully be an OS-level feature but Gemini should not. Got it. I guess Apple's PR is just that much better than Google's.

I shouldn't need Google special-casing Gemini to allow LLMs to interact with my messages. I should be able to wire up Tasker to WhatsApp on one end, and to OpenAI or Anthropic models of my choice via API calls on the other end. Alas, Android is basically like iPhone now, just with more faux choice of vendors and less quality control.

Gemini uses the same APIs and permissions as any other Android app.

There are some extremely useful features that you can implement with AI, but currently only at the OS level, not with normal app permissions-- namely live translation of audio streams that belong to another app (calls, video playback, etc.).

But I suppose you're still right; it would still be better if Android had an API for sharing app audio streams like this.

Google has Gemma? So they could also blow Apple out of the water by competing directly there.

The era of Google providing costly features to users with no benefit to itself is coming to an end.

Why make up stuff like this? Siri confirms everything that sends data.

That seems like the wrong way to spin this hypothetical probability.

A quick search says there are 1.38B iPhone users worldwide. According to[0], 87.8% of 18+ year olds have sexted, so let's estimate that to mean 1.21B users. Even if we assume users only ever send one nude, that means 1,210 gaffes if you assume one in a million.

[0] https://www.womens-health.com/sexting-statistics

They have always been behind. Why would this time be any different?

(Search: Steve Jobs predicted the future of AI)

... looks over at Framework