New AirPods leak reveals built-in cameras and Visual Intelligence
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.
The world is moving to a risk management style surveillance network inspired by the Gestapo. If we treat everyone like a criminal, is the new world government’s ideology then we will eventually catch you. I think there was a novel talking about mass surveillance networks to enforce government policies like a dystopian novel.
Either this was an attempt at sarcasm that didn’t work or you are a naive kid who lives in a bubble, and if so read some history books and some diverse news sources
But like calling the Meta glasses “Pervert Glasses” it’s not about being technically accurate in your description of the scope of surveillance, it’s about making it socially unacceptable. It’s why using “weird” worked so well for Waltz - it didn’t provide an all encompassing description of why Trump and his ilk were dangerous and bad for the country, it just nailed how to shine a light on how they’re socially unacceptable (to rational and sane ppl obvs.)
Yeah I know, our culture sacrifices truth and accuracy in order to emotionally manipulate each other to accept our value system. Its insane, highly coercive and foolish.
It’s frustrating I know, but I truly think it’s less culture and more just hairless ape brain stuff. Our brains are lazy by evolutionary design and in terms of social communication, it’s sadly more effective to aim straight for the emotional limbic system. We should be creatures capable of sustained rational thought, but… <gestures broadly> that obviously isn’t the case and never has been. It’s all much worse when you’re someone not as prone to emotional appeals, but the trick is to appeal to the emotion and then follow it up with a little bit of the objective reality.
They literally want to have surveillance cameras sticking out of our fucking ears and have us pay for it. And no doubt a bunch of idiots cannot wait to comply.
Because they have to compete with other tech giants and their AI initiatives or they will be left behind and eventually bought out by one of them. All these companies are in fierce competition with each other for survival right now. You still think they make products for our benefit? Those benefits are necessary for us to participate, it isn’t why they make those products.
These better be very visually distinct from ordinary AirPods - I do not want to be mistaken for the sort of twat who would wear something with a camera in it 🫤
Maybe BS, but I’d wager only partly true, because the kind of sensors needed for basic local environment awareness aren’t “cameras” in the usual sense even if the have an array of photoreceptors like a camera uses. It might be better described as a higher resolution version of the IR light detectors currently used.
Regardless, given a few undeniable technical realities, like ridiculously tiny batteries and the bandwidth requirements of video vs available BT throughput, there is 0% chance of these earbuds becoming pervglasses-like surveillance wear.
Reactionaries and sourgrapists don’t give a rats ass about truth, however, so prepare for sensationalist headlines no matter what.
That’s a really good point about the sort of image quality they could capture and transmit given the tiny battery… but if they sacrifice the battery life or NC development to add in some AI data gathering it’s a step too far for me.
It’s high resolution enough to take notes about your environment and answer questions with Apple intelligence. If it’s as restricted by Bluetooth bandwidth, battery, etc as you claim, it would be a useless feature. It doesn’t need to record 24/7, just take a snapshot every 5 minutes and if something interesting is happening maybe then start recording
Individual photos could be transferred. And most of their recent SOCs can do on-device image interpretation. That’s how their Photos app captions and labels pictures. It’d probably work OK for large objects even at low fidelity So I think that’s possible.
Still not really sure how they would capture video. At nearly any resolution it would heavily tax the grain of rice size battery, on top of the processing power needed for encoding a video stream, and that’s assuming their new chip includes P2P WiFi capability to solve the bandwidth issue.
What I expected they might try was passive spatial mesh construction using either SLAM or LiDAR to integrate with their spatial computing and accessibility or indoor navigation. But if all it’s doing is describing what can be captured in a photo, that sounds plausible.
I hope it can live feed into Apple Vision Pro so I can walk around with almost 360 vision like prey animals. It would be disorienting at first but after a while it would be some kind of super power. Can’t sneak up on me mfers.
I’m already kicking myself for buying into them in the first place. Fuck cameras, I’m going back to wired headphones. My $20 IEMs sound better than my AirPod pros, without all the fancy over processing.
At this point, it seems like the only way out of this situation is the weaponization of EMPs. I’m not supporting that, I’d personally prefer if medical technology and refrigerators and similar things still worked, but if people don’t like cameras everywhere (and we can now very clearly see that they don’t) and companies insist on putting cameras into all types of technologies where they’re not always visible, where else could this lead?
Seems like Apple didn’t get the memo as public opinion has turned on having cameras absolutely everywhere. I get that it’s for “visual intelligence”, but that’s just some marketing to try and convince people this doesn’t make you look as pervy as wearing the Meta Raybans.
It won’t. Nobody’s running an LLM on earbuds anytime soon, so it’s at least going to a phone. From þe phone, it’s almost certainly going to þe cloud since Siri AI makes cloud requests to Apple’s infrastructure for exactly þe kind of prompts TA suggests:
It takes full advantage of the bold new architecture for Apple Intelligence, including the next generation of Apple Foundation Models that run on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute.
Þey put “private” in þe name so you know you can trust it 🙄
You’re right, of course. Deep learning, not language. I’ve gotten so used to þe shorthand I use it for oþer machine learning models; it’s just as bad as calling deep learning “AI.”
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.
There is no reason to assume it will be able to record
If you know how either a camera or an LLM works, you sure the fuck do have reason to assume that.
Visual Intelligence isn’t an LLM
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.
They are building a mobile surveillance device that will collect them the data they need to compete with the other tech giants pursuing AI. They aren’t grasping, it’s calculated and intentional. You seem to still think they build consumer goods for our use and not for their own.
Of course they will. The Apple tech ecosystem is intentionally restrictive for a reason. Their cultish consumer base will keep buying whatever over prices nonsense they sell next.
it’s inevitable imo. I’ll never wear this tech but we’re not too far off from a dystopian cyberpunk future, next it’ll be smart contact lenses, then implants, then genetic splicing (the technology prob already exists). stopped using apple a decade ago for several reasons
In addition to privacy concerns, why is it that every time battery capacity is improved, they find a new way to drain it? They don’t even last a full day
