Comment by dofm
7 days ago
Is there a meaningful Google-Apple boundary in operation?
They are buying the right to distill their own Gemini models and run them in their data centres (or at least data centres they control); unless I am missing something, this isn't going to be infrastructure that Google has operational control over.
If Apple is running the inference from Apple iPhones and Apple data centers then Apple has operational control. Google’s influence ends the moment they hand the weights over to Apple.
They are using Google Cloud.
https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/?linkId=100000...
"Now, we are collaborating with Google and NVIDIA to run new Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud, extending our industry-leading PCC privacy commitments to third-party data centers for the first time."
Per that link: I think there's an interesting question about whether a nefarious actor who's infiltrated a cloud provider with physical access to machines that are running signed operating systems, with signed binaries, with TDX remote attestation, and with hardware supply chain verification, has the ability to break the privacy guarantees of a tenant with Apple's sophistication.
Certainly, one could tamper with the hardware, but could one do it in a way that wouldn't get that machine immediately flagged, removed from the routing pool, and told to wipe its memory immediately, by a watchtower (perhaps even the routing layer itself) that runs in a separate secure Apple datacenter?
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That’s not so special, though? There’s a difference between Google infra running Google services.
Versus any F500 company running their services on GCP.
It’s a bit whacky to think about because Apple will operate Google owned software on GCP. But it should be sandboxed just the same.
I’m not making a normative privacy argument here. Just pointing out that this is cloud business as usual. Perhaps it’s interesting Apple is doing it, but basically everything else is already using either AWS or GCP at this point.
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Google Cloud, but, the way I read it, not Google’s AI offerings. They, basically, hire Google servers to run their software on it.
They also (claim to) ensure those servers run only software they have approved to run on it.
(Part of their software are models derived from Google Gemini, but that’s orthogonal to this)
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They are not _only_ using Google Cloud. They continue to build and invest in their own datacenters. It's not a binary choice.
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That is news — I guess not very surprising that they'd need more data centres than before.
But again there is no Apple-to-Google transfer in the inference in the sense of the comment I was originally replying to (I am not suggesting you're implying otherwise, obviously)
But I stand happily corrected where I said they aren't in the picture at all.
That is an interesting press release because it outlines what they would have had to do with any data centre they were outsourcing to.
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iCloud already uses Google Cloud, so that still doesn't change the operational boundaries of where data goes
I hope they are still using PCC hardware rather than running private data through third-party servers.
Right — I suppose I mis-phrased my first sentence a bit, because I guess it can be interpreted as me saying the boundary is blurred, when what I was trying to write is: in operation there is nothing crossing any boundary; Google are not in the picture.
But google is paying SpaceX/xAi for compute... so...