Rather than functioning as conventional cameras, the sensors are expected to feed information into Visual Intelligence. This would allow Siri to answer questions about what is around the wearer or save information they encounter throughout the day.
This is not the first report suggesting Apple is developing AirPods with cameras. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman previously claimed the earbuds would collect “visual information in low resolution,” effectively acting as eyes for Apple’s AI features.
Potential uses could include asking Siri questions about nearby objects, saving information without taking out your iPhone, or receiving more detailed turn-by-turn directions based on the wearer’s surroundings.
The AirPods shown in the video resemble a slightly thicker version of the AirPods Pro 3, with longer stems seemingly providing room for the additional hardware.
Apple has not officially announced the device, so its final name, price, features, and launch date remain unknown. However, previous reports suggest the AirPods could arrive as early as September alongside Apple’s next generation of iPhones.
Even local only (which you know won’t be the case here) is an issue. It still allows one to record stuff that one shouldn’t.
We know literally nothing about the end product beyond the fact that it is rumored to have cameras and visual intelligence. And of course that it will have the other features current gen AirPods have.
There’s no reason to assume it will be able to record, or that the visual intelligence won’t require a new phone with local models.
If you know how either a camera or an LLM works, you sure the fuck do have reason to assume that.
Just because Apple uses a bunch of stupid fucking corpo buzzwords that say Visual Intelligence isn’t an LLM (they call it an “AFM” which just stands for “Apple Foundational Model”) doesn’t make it true. It’s an LLM; just a proprietary model Apple has made. It’s machine learning “AI.”
Eh? An LLM is a large language model. A language model would have no way to analyze an image. No matter the name assigned to it, it is literally impossible for it to be an LLM.
If you are misusing LLM to mean machine learning model, then… I mean stop using LLM because it’s just plainly incorrect.
There’s also the fact that current generation visual intelligence is image only. It doesn’t support video. Which makes a lot of sense, because streaming out high definition video would be quite the bandwidth requirement, and doing that constantly while someone is wearing AirPods would be insane.
The idea that cameras inherently imply recording is also kinda silly. Eye tracking in VR headsets use cameras, I promise that unless you do some hijinks those camera feeds are not recorded. Just like the camera on my robot vacuum, or the rear view camera on my car. All video recording requires cameras, but not all cameras require video recording.
They have to record to process the data. The recording may be limited to just living in the active memory, but it still records something in all those cases. The vaccuums even phone that data home; the most popular ones have been hacked numerous times, including one that let the hacker see other people’s robot vacuum camera feeds live.
Recording inherently means saving. The exact definition includes the word “permanent”. Arguing that recording in this case means “the image data exists in memory” is a level of semantics that means literally nothing in this argument. Yes, we are all quite aware that the image data exists in one form or another when the camera is on. The question is, is it creating a recording, streaming that out, or handling the data locally and disposing of the data before it reaches permanent storage.