WhatsApp walks on a tight rope between the features of artificial intelligence and privacy

Last year, Apple He appeared for the first time a similar schemeKnown as Cloud Compute, for Apple Intelligence AI. Users can run the service in the applicable communications application by Apple and messages, to create messages summaries and create “smart response” messages iphone and Mac.

Looking at the special cloud account and special processing side by side is well compared, well, apple (S) and orange. Apple’s special cloud account supports all Apple intelligence everywhere that can be applied. On the other hand, special processing was specially designed for WhatsApp and did not support META’s AI’s features on a larger scale. Apple Intelligence is also designed to do as much artificial intelligence processing as possible on the device and only send requests to the infrastructure to calculate the special cloud when necessary. Since such treatment “on the device” or “local” requires strong devices, Apple only designed Apple Intelligence to run it on its last generations of mobile devices. IPhone and old iPad devices will never support Apple Intelligence.

Apple is a manufacturer for advanced smartphones and other devices, while Meta is a software company, and it has about 3 billion users who have all types of smartphones, including old and low devices. Rohlf and Colin Clemmons, a special processor, says it was not possible to design AI’s features for WhatsApp that could operate locally on the set of devices that WhatsApp serves. Instead, WhatsApp focus on special processing design to be as uninterrupted as possible for attackers if it can be violated.

“The design is reducing the risks,” says Cleimmons. “We want to reduce the value of bargaining on the system.”

Full effort raises a more basic question, though, about the reason for a safe communication platform like WhatsApp to provide artificial intelligence features at all. Nevertheless, Meta is designed that users expect features at this stage and will go anywhere to get them.

“Many people want to use artificial intelligence tools to help them when messages,” WhatsApp Will Cathcart told WIRED in an email. “We believe that building a special way to do this is important, because people should not have to turn into a less privacy platform to get the jobs they need.”

“Any encoded system to a party that uses AI’s inference outside the devices will be more dangerous than the final system.” I think WhatsApp when they say they are designed to be as safe as possible, and I think that when they say they cannot read Your texts. But I also think there are risks here. More data will be launched, and the machines that process this data will be a target for infiltrators and the opponents of the nation -state. “

WhatsApp also says, along with the basic AI features such as summarizing text and writing, we hope that special processing will be established as a basis for expanding to more complex and sharing features in the future that include processing, and possibly storing more data.

Green says, “Given all the crazy things that people use safe messengers, that is, all of this will make the special processing computers in a very big goal.”