Apple Newsroom, last week:

Apple today announced the launch of Digital ID, a new way for users to create an ID in Apple Wallet using information from their U.S. passport, and present it with the security and privacy of iPhone or Apple Watch. At launch, Digital ID acceptance will roll out first in beta at TSA checkpoints at more than 250 airports in the U.S. for in-person identity verification during domestic travel, with additional Digital ID acceptance use cases to come in the future.

Digital ID gives more people a way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet even if they do not have a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID. Digital ID is not a replacement for a physical passport, and cannot be used for international travel and border crossing in lieu of a U.S. passport.

I set this up over the weekend and it was about as easy and seamless as you could hope. More information from Apple here, and an overview of the feature, as implemented by Apple and Google (for Android) from The New York Times here (gift link).

Ryan Christoffel, reporting for 9to5Mac a month ago:

Meta has published a support doc that states its Messenger app for Mac is being discontinued. New users won’t be able to download the app at all, and existing users have about 60 more days of use before it stops working altogether. Why the change? Unfortunately, no reason has been given. But users are being pushed to the Facebook website for all their Messenger needs instead.

There’s a nearly identical support document for the native Messenger app for Windows too. They’re not even replacing them with web-app wrappers, like they just did with the Windows WhatsApp client. Just telling users to use the website.

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Jay Yagnik, VP of AI innovation and research, on Google’s The Keyword blog:

Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles:

• One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs on one seamless Google stack powered by our own custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). World-class privacy and security is integrated into this architecture with Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE). This design enables Google AI features to use our most capable and intelligent Gemini models in the cloud, with our high standards for privacy and the same in-house computing infrastructure you already rely on for Gmail and Search.
• No access: Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.

Sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which raises the question of whether this Google project is related to the Gurman scoop that Apple and Google are on the cusp of a deal for a white-label version of Google Gemini to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers to power the next-generation versions of Siri and Apple Intelligence.

I strongly suspect this is something Google has been working on for a while. Apple, I think it’s fair to say, places a higher priority on privacy than does Google, but Google does value privacy. But perhaps the deal with Apple accelerated the project within Google.

OpenAI:

To start a group chat tap the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate. You can invite others directly by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in. When you join or create your first group chat, you’ll be asked to set up a short profile with your name, username, and photo so everyone knows who’s in the conversation. Group chats can be found in a new clearly-labeled section of the sidebar for easy access. [...]

Group chats are separate from your private conversations. Your personal ChatGPT memory is not used in group chats, and ChatGPT does not create new memories from these conversations. We’re exploring offering more granular controls in the future so you can choose if and how ChatGPT uses memory with group chats.

Currently rolling out in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. [Update: Expanded worldwide just three days later.] Rate limits and advanced model usage depend on the group member to whom ChatGPT replies. Pretty clever, and I can imaging a lot of ways this would be useful, both for family/friends and for work collaboration. I like the idea that this is built into ChatGPT, not an AI bot in a regular messaging app. This way, you know with certainty which of your chats are being seen and read by an AI bot.

We’ve also taught ChatGPT new social behaviors for group chats. It follows the flow of the conversation and decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation. You can always mention “ChatGPT” in a message when you want it to respond. We’ve also given ChatGPT the ability to react to messages with emojis, and reference profile photos — so it can, for example, use group members’ photos when asked to create fun personalized images within that group conversation.

This is a really hard problem to solve. Wavelength, the late great private group messaging app whose team I advised from 2023 to 2024 (when the app shuttered), added AI chatbots (with customizable personalities) in June 2023. Wavelength’s AI bots only responded when mentioned explicitly.