EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
Learning in the right place
FOR THOSE WHO are disappointed that, in macOS 14 Sonoma, Apple hasn’t joined Microsoft or Google in the rush to include AI like ChatGPT, there are two good reasons: knowledge and privacy. Those wildly popular large language models don’t deal in knowledge, but persuasive language. Try pinning down ChatGPT on a topic in which you’re an expert, and you’ll quickly find its overconfident answers are devoid of insight, and Wikipedia is generally more trustworthy.
But most of all, this type of artificial intelligence depends on off–device processing, so interactions are sent to be stored and processed on someone else’s servers. Sonoma and Apple’s sibling operating systems instead prefer to learn from you in the privacy of on–device processing, and no one else will ever know the words it’s autocompleting for you.