This means that Apple’s foundation model won’t suggest putting glue on your pizza, as Gemini famously did, simply because you can’t get it to answer those kinds of open-ended questions at all. Apple is treating this as a technology to enable new classes of features and capabilities, where there is design and product management shaping what the technology does and what the user sees, not as an oracle that you ask for things.
Instead, the ‘oracle’ is just one feature. Apple is drawing a split between a ‘context model’ and a ‘world model’. Apple’s models have access to all the context that your phone has about you, powering those features, and this is all private, both on device and in Apple’s ‘Private Cloud’. But if you ask for ideas for what to make with a photo of your grocery shopping, then this is no longer about your context, and Apple will offer to send that to a third-party world model – today, ChatGPT. A world model does have an open-ended prompt and does give you raw output, and it might tell you to put glue on your pizza, but that’s clearly separated into a different experience where you should have different expectations, and it’s also, of course, OpenAI’s brand risk, not Apple’s. Meanwhile, that world model gets none of your context, only your one-off prompt.
We have yet to see how well Apple’s context model really works, but in principle it does look pretty defensible. Neither OpenAI nor any of the other cloud models from new companies (Anthropic, Mistral etc) have your emails, messages, locations, photos, files and so on. Google does have both a world model, and access to your context if you use Android, but that’s a distinct minority in the USA (while even less of the Android
