Last year, Apple debuted a similar program, known as a private cloud, for its AI Apple Intelligence platform. And users can enable the service in a comprehensive Apple communication application, messages, in order to generate messages and compose the message “Intelligent answer” to both iPhones AND Mother.
Looking at private cloud processing and private processing side by side is like comparing, well, Apple and oranges. A private Apple cloud calculates all Apple intelligence wherever it can be used. On the other hand, private processing was specially built for WhatsApp and not at the base of the AI Meta function. Apple Intelligence is also designed for as much artificial intelligence processing as possible to the device and sending demands to the private cloud processing infrastructure if needed. Since such processing “on the device” or “local” requires powerful equipment, Apple has only designed Apple Intelligence to make it in recent generations of mobile equipment. Venerable iPhones and iPads will never support Apple intelligence.
Apple is a manufacturer of high -class smartphones and other equipment, while Meta is a software company and has about 3 billion users who have all types of smartphones, including senior and low devices. Rohlf and Colin Clemmons, one of the private processing engineers, claim that the design of AI functions for WhatsApp was not possible that could work locally on the spectrum of devices supporting WhatsApp. Instead, WhatsApp focused on the design of private processing to be as useful as possible as possible if it is to be violated.
“The project is about minimizing risk,” says Clemmons. “We want to minimize the value of system exposure.”
All effort, however, raises a more basic question why a safe and sound communication platform, such as WhatsApp, must offer AI functions at all. However, the finish line is adamant that users expect function at the moment and they will go wherever they have to get them.
“Many people want to use AI tools to help them when they are sent”, the head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart said Wired We -Mail. “We think that building a private way to do it is important because people should not switch to a less private platform to have the functionality you need.”
“Any comprehensive encrypted system that uses AI’s application outside the device will be more risky than the end system to the end. You send data to a computer in the data center, and this machine sees your private texts,” says Matt Green, cryptographer Johns Hopkins, who has read some privacy guarantees for private processing, but he did not view the complete system. “I think that WhatsApp, when they say they designed it so that it is as safe as possible, and I believe them when they say they can’t read your texts. But I think there is a risk. More private data will disappear from the device, and the machines they process will be the goal for hackers and national state opponents.”
WhatsApp also says that in addition to the basic AI functions, such as text summary and writing suggestions, private processing will create grounds for expanding to more sophisticated and involved AI functions in the future, which include processing and potential storage of more data.
As Green put it: “Considering all crazy things to which people use safe messengers, each of them will make private computers process a very large purpose.”