The Flux Read

  Jason Aten installed Meta's new Muse AI agent on his iPhone and his Mac mini on September 8, the day it launched. During setup, he turned down every permission he could turn down. No access to Messages. No access to his calendar. Full Disk Access on the Mac stayed switched off, the way he keeps it for every app he doesn't fully trust yet. A few days later, Muse suggested he write a column about a conversation he'd just had with his podcast co-host, about the new iPhone. It went further than that. It referenced a deadline reminder his editor had sent him. Aten, a technology columnist at Inc., asked the obvious question. How did Muse know any of that. The explanation that turned out to be false Muse told him it was only seeing notification previews from his paired Mac, the kind of banner text that briefly flashes on screen when a message arrives. "It's the incoming notification stream only, not access to your texts," the agent said, according to Aten'...

Siri turned 15 years old this year, and for most of that decade and a half, it was mostly a tech punchline. The version Apple promised at WWDC 2024 finally went live, but the company that built the device didn't build the core intelligence layer. Google did. That detail is worth sitting with longer than the headlines credit it for. Apple, a company that spent a decade telling customers their data stays on-device and their silicon does the heavy lifting, just shipped its flagship AI feature running on a rival’s model, inside a rival’s cloud, powered by a third company’s hardware. What Actually Launched The new Siri arrives with iOS 27 as a structural rebuild rather than a feature layer on top of the old assistant. It supports more than twenty consecutive conversational turns, executes multi-step commands across native apps, and introduces a dedicated Siri app where conversation history syncs privately across devices. The underlying system architecture relies on a hybrid execution ...