How to Get Apple Intelligence in the EU

[ric22]

AI will be the next autocorrect. It's going to be unusable at first, be vivified, then become a funny meme for the first few years.

Speaking of autocorrect... it's still pretty rubbish on Apple devices... maybe AI can fix it for them? 😅

 

[contacos]

Apple Intelligence on macOS within the EU has always been working, since 18.1 DB1, same as on (non-cellular) iPad. Just on iPhone (and cellular iPads) it uses the network coverage as indicator where you're based.
I first noticed it on my iPhone on iOS 17.3 or 17.4 after getting EU-Popups as soon as my phone automatically connected to German or France carrier when I visited a friend in Basel.

Gotcha! Weird that Apple is not using the same process to block iPhone Mirroring in the EU. It works just fine on my iPhone with an US Apple Account

 

[livetofail]

Apple Intelligence on macOS within the EU has always been working, since 18.1 DB1, same as on (non-cellular) iPad. Just on iPhone (and cellular iPads) it uses the network coverage as indicator where you're based.
I first noticed it on my iPhone on iOS 17.3 or 17.4 after getting EU-Popups as soon as my phone automatically connected to German or France carrier when I visited a friend in Basel.

Its awesome how you can write such confident nonsense. It didn’t work with beta 1. I have an M4 Wifi Ipad Pro and did everything from all US apple accounts to US VPN trough a router. Now with beta 2 its fine

 

[NagasakiGG]

Its awesome how you can write such confident nonsense. It didn’t work with beta 1. I have an M4 Wifi Ipad Pro and did everything from all US apple accounts to US VPN trough a router. Now with beta 2 its fine

Okay, strange. Then my colleagues at our branch in Germany must have been working on magical devices.

 

[livetofail]

Okay, strange. Then my colleagues at our branch in Germany must have been working on magical devices.

Seems so, or drunk too much.

 

[Haiku_Oezu]

Because Apple Intelligence is totally bespoke, using an on-device and hybrid-cloud model that Apple built. The integrations are designed to serve various purposes pretty much none of which are being an unreliable, hallucinating chatbot.

The only time ChatGPT is used is if Siri is asked a query it cannot answer. Previously, it'd give you search engine suggestions that'll likely give reasonable results. Now, it will instead - after in theory on the very first attempt, asking you to give it permission - ask ChatGPT to answer the query. Then you have to go to a search engine anyway because obviously you cannot trust LLM output given the propensity to hallucinate, and chances are, if you're asking a question, it's because you don't know the answer so have no way of knowing if the LLM is telling lies without verifying the output with a search engine anyway.

TL;DR, ChatGPT remains largely useless and unreliable, unless you want to generate bland pseudo-fictional prose that screams "this was written by an LLM because I couldn't be arsed writing it myself".



Well, yes. At what point in any of the non-hype reports about AI performance have you been led to believe that any of the crapware being sold by these for-profit, self-interested companies is actually reliable? The whole fundamental basis of LLMs is not solid and never will be. ChatGPT 4 (not 4o) is about as good as we'll ever see, because it's been trained on just about all text ever written already. The Apple models are dramatically smaller, and so are guaranteed to be dramatically less accurate.

A standard pre-"LLM GenAI hype era" machine learning model or even just a simple rules engine would do a far better job, as seen by the likes of Alexa's superior-to-Siri performance for a few years before the LLM hypetrain started rolling.

The problem is that if you were to ask something similar to chatGPT it would be able to answer because the one thing LLM’s are good at is, you know, understanding language

That’s the only legitimate use of these things, “AI” is not actually intelligent and I don’t expect it to

But I expect it to tokenize my input and understand basic queries, which it can then answer to

Simple as

 

[Motawa]

Doesn’t work anymore

 

[robbyb]

Actually, you don’t have to have a US AppleID Store Account, I tried a UK AppleID Store account and it’s working just fine. The article should be amended I think.

Agree. I did the same, although I did wonder if they took note of the .com in my AppleID.. I wouldn't have thought so. The American Accent is hard to get used to, though, and in CarPlay she's pretty much unable to pronounce a lot of road names correctly,

 

[robbyb]

It’s A GDPR thing. The uk was still in the eu when that came around and now they are still running their own version of it, just enforcing it themselves rather than through the EU. Whatever keeps Apple from rushing in with it in the EU might also affect the UK.

EU GDPR vs UK GDPR: A Comprehensive Comparison | GDPR Advisor

In today's digital age, data protection has become a crucial concern for individuals and organisations alike. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

www-gdpradvisor-co-uk.translate.goog

Interesting!

I've experienced GDPR as a data thing. And responsibility for keeping customer data secure. Data has to be secure under GDPR whether it is stored on paper in a filing cabinet, in a secure room. Or on a massive SQL database somewhere.

Under GDPR, customers have to be able to request a copy of their data, or even that their data is removed.

Apple Intelligence is just a smarter Siri, really. You manage your own data on your device, so just as stupid Siri shouldn't upset the people at UK GDPR, Smarter Siri shouldn't worry UK GDPR. You are still in charge of your own data on your local device.

And if a query is passed from smart Siri to Apple's New Servers (forgot what they are called), I understand that the request is all anonymised and the answer in encrypted and sent back to you.

And if Apple's Servers still don't have the answer, then your device asks you if you want data transferred to ChatGPT. Again, anonymised and encrypted. Your data is not really stored in any readable form at Apple Servers or ChatGPT, and so GDPR wouldn't be upset or have a role to play here.

Apple would be registered on GDPR as they store data like email addresses and the like for everyone with an Apple ID. So, for example, they would be a Data Controller for their App Stores. I can't quite see that Apple Intelligence would be a trip up for them on GDPR.

 

[Tom Nash]

Just to add to this thread and make my friends who are having problems getting Apple Intelligence outside of the US feel better... There appear to be inconsistencies (bug(s)?) in the acceptance process.

...

Located in San Francisco, Region United States, Primary system language US English, Siri Language US English, Siri voice US English 2.

On a MacStudio M1Ultra message "Apple Intelligence not available in your country or region" persists even on MacOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 2 Version 15.1 Beta (24B5024e).

Regarding the issue I reported earlier, partial quote above:
Completely resolved in beta 3.

 

[Zeit4geist]

is there a way to activate AI in europe with the final 18.0?

 

[surferfb]

is there a way to activate AI in europe with the final 18.0?

There's no way to activate AI anywhere in the world with 18.0. It is coming in 18.1. It's still unclear if attempts to bypass Apple's DMA compliance requirements will work when 18.1 is released widely.

 

[locust76]

I was just in the UK with my german iPhone 15 Pro Max. No Apple Intelligence in the EU, but as soon as I touched down in the UK, I was offered Apple Intelligence features. I activated them, everything was working as intended. When I arrived back in Germany, my phone locked those features again. I didn't change any region or language settings on my phone (Language English, Region Germany). So it's based on physical location, which means it's definitely a GDPR issue, which means Apple could be doing non GDPR-compliant things with that data. Maybe they're just waiting on approval from the EU, but it's definitely a legal issue. Not like with Apple Pay way back in the day when you could just switch your region and get access to those features.

 

[ps3zocker]

I was just in the UK with my german iPhone 15 Pro Max. No Apple Intelligence in the EU, but as soon as I touched down in the UK, I was offered Apple Intelligence features. I activated them, everything was working as intended. When I arrived back in Germany, my phone locked those features again. I didn't change any region or language settings on my phone (Language English, Region Germany). So it's based on physical location, which means it's definitely a GDPR issue, which means Apple could be doing non GDPR-compliant things with that data. Maybe they're just waiting on approval from the EU, but it's definitely a legal issue. Not like with Apple Pay way back in the day when you could just switch your region and get access to those features.

1. You can be in the EU and switch your language to English and use a US App Store account to access Apple Intelligence without issues.

2. Of course it's a legal issue. Apple said in a statement that they were not sure how Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and FaceTime Screen Sharing would be affected be the DMA, thus they will not have those features in the EU region for now. They're basically fearing that they would need to open the system to allow other AI providers deep integration into the system, and developers access to mirroring and system control APIs for the other two features. As the EU said, they will only decide if something violates the DMA after they have seen the features. So where is this going? No one knows.