So, Apple has at long last stepped into the AI game, and appropriately named at least part of their offering Apple Intelligence, a designation that, in our mind, harkens to ‘Army Intelligence,’ ‘Military Intelligence,’ and in Apple’s case, rightly so.

Apple’s AI solution is a partnership with OpenAI, who last week announced the addition of Paul M. Nakasone, a retired US Army general and former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors. FYI, as the National Pulse reported, “Prior to his departure from the NSA, Nakasone authored an op-ed advocating for the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FISA legislation reauthorized a controversial provision that allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant as long as they’re communicating with noncitizens in a foreign country.

“Not everyone is thrilled about Nakasone’s new role at the AI firm, which will also see the former general seated at OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee,” Futurism reported. “The NSA has long been associated with surveillance of US citizens, and AI-embedded technologies are already renewing and escalating existing surveillance concerns. With that in mind, it might be unsurprising that former NSA employee and famed whistleblower Edward Snowden is among the OpenAI appointment’s outspoken detractors.

“They’ve gone full mask off: do not ever trust OpenAI or its products,” Snowden — emphasis his — wrote in a Friday post to X-formerly-Twitter, adding that “there’s only one reason for appointing” an NSA director “to your board.”

“This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth,” he continued. “You’ve been warned.”

“I do think that the biggest application of AI is going to be mass population surveillance,” Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, “so bringing the former head of the NSA into OpenAI has some solid logic behind it.”

Not that we didn’t see this coming from the start and sounded the alarm back then.

And now OpenAI is going to be woven into the iPhone.

During its announcement, Apple did stress several times that top of mind was users’ privacy and security. Methinks the lady doth protest too much and if there’s one thing that we’ve learned by now it’s that when one of the member companies of the tech mafia stresses privacy and security, yeah, you can pretty much plan on a further incursion/intrusion into both.

“Executives continually referenced how Apple’s AI system offers distinct privacy protections, including on-device processing and private servers powered by Apple silicon chips that enable higher compute tasks without storing user data. Code that runs on Apple silicon servers will be open to inspection from independent experts to verify the privacy claims.” Which, as anyone who uses Apple products knows is already long gone.

Can’t tell you how many times we’d been out shopping with a friend, would mention something and bang! An advert would show up on our iPhone.

“You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone’s AI cloud,” said Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering, in a dig at Apple’s rivals,” The Tech Fix reported.

“But many, most notably Elon Musk, are questioning how Apple can safeguard user data when it sends requests to ChatGPT.

“Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI,” Musk wrote on X. “They’re selling you down the river.”

OpenAI on the iPhone? Remember when Scarlett Johansson told OpenAI not to use her voice, but they cloned and used it anyway? Now imagine what they can do with your phone data, even if you don’t allow them to use it. Didn’t you opt in? Scarlett Johansson did push back, and they stopped, but for the record, are any of you out there Scarlett Johansson? Besides, Ms. Johansson, of course.

And note to self, as Bloomberg reported, “Apple to ‘Pay’ OpenAI for ChatGPT Through Distribution, Not Cash…The arrangement includes weaving ChatGPT, a digital assistant that responds in plain terms to information requests, into Apple’s Siri and new writing tools. Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said.”

Which means that they’re collecting your information and more, maybe not directly, but tomatoes, tomahtoes.

‘Woven’ is an interesting choice of words. Ever try to unweave a pattern from a sweater? We’re personally not at all skilled in weaving, but dollars to donuts, not sure that it can be done.

“Tim Cook is running out of ideas,” Business Insider India noted by way of MSN. While Steve Jobs was the creative genius, “(Current Apple CEO Tim) Cook is a numbers guy, not a design guy. Under his tenure, Apple’s share price has soared, and investors have been kept happy with increased share buybacks and a quarterly dividend. But other than the Apple Watch, which had already been in the works before Jobs’ death, there have been no earth-shattering product launches. Instead, his time as CEO has been defined by squeezing as much as possible out of the successes of the second Jobs era. But after a decade of doing that, iPhone sales are slowing, revenue is down, and the company, again, needs to find its next big thing.

“In his book “After Steve,” Tripp Mickle describes how Cook was focused on growing Apple’s share price and operational efficiency — with him saving the company money at every turn. He had a firm command of Apple’s supply chain and was instrumental in setting up Apple’s tax-avoidance mechanisms. After taking over the company, Cook slowly reined in the powerful design team, eventually leading Jobs’ ally Jony Ive, the chief design officer, to leave the company in 2019 after years of reducing his time there. The drawbacks of Cook’s divestment from product design and development are now becoming clearer.”

At its core, Apple is a hardware company. Jobs’ accomplishments that put Apple back on top upon his return in ’97 after a 12-year ‘hiatus:’ the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, “which shot Apple into the stratosphere and fueled a slew of side businesses, including the App Store, that generated many billions of dollars. By the time Jobs died in 2011, Apple was the most valuable tech company in the world,” as BI observed. Under Cook, the Apple Watch was launched – a project started by Jobs – but the Apple Car was abandoned, and the Vision Pro, which aimed to be a head-mounted computer, was not the runaway success Apple had hoped for and flagging demand has caused the company to cut back on production.

And while Apple is a hardware company, at his core, Tim Cook is a bean counter who seems to have lost sight of his core customer base, if the recent iPad commercial was any indication (The Apple iPad Commercial: That’s Not What’s Meant By ‘Crushing It’) and for which Apple was roundly excoriated.

Speaking of having a bean counter at the helm, it seems with its introduction of its long-awaited AI, Apple was more than happy to sell out its customer base – and it did so for beans. Onward and forward.