Google follows Apple on AI privacy

If by some chance you can still recall the birth of Google Android on the coattails of iPhone, then this will sound familiar: The search giant and sometime Apple frenemy just announced its own take on cloud AI services done right, i.e.. Private Cloud Compute.

What is this?

Apple’s Private Cloud Compute service is a server based system that lets you access the power of servers to get challenging AI tasks done. Built from the ground up to support privacy, it’s a crown jewel in Apple’s approach to AI deployment, which is probably why Google seems to have copied it.

Google calls its take on what Apple has already an eerily familiar name, “Private AI Compute”, a new AI processing platform that promises cloud processing of requests while maintaining device security.

That means user data cannot be accessed by Google when a request is made, with everything encrypted. The idea once again is that you can access the power of servers to get AI tasks done, while maintaining privacy.

What Google said

“We built Private AI Compute: to unlock the full speed and power of Gemini cloud models for AI experiences, while ensuring your personal data stays private to you and is not accessible to anyone else, not even Google,” the company said, announcing the service.

What’s interesting about the approach is not only that it kind of emulates Apple’s own, but also that it comes as whispers intensify to claim Google and Apple have greed some kind of partnership under which the iPhone maker will use Google Gemini as a kind of white label AI service with which to improve Siri, pending introduction of Apple’s own LLM tech.

I’ll be your private answer

It’s also interesting as the move represents the growing realization across many in tech that cloud-based AI services need to be secure, private, and quite possibly localized to specific territories, a la Sovereign Cloud. There will be more announcements like these, I think, in future, as people grow to understand that Private Cloud Compute – and edge-based processing – are the future of AI services.

PS: We don’t know if Google will manufacture its private AI servers in the US, which Apple now does.

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