Nilay Patel

What's more, his sources said that even more departures are expected over the coming months.

Gurman concluded, The continued departures underscore the instability within Apple's AI ranks at a time when it's racing to catch up with OpenAI and Google, both of which are advancing quickly in generative AI and search.

He noted that Apple had also been interviewing outside replacements for John Gianandrea, Apple's senior VP of AI and machine learning, who leads the entire AI organization.

Lastly today, a study which I found to be just a real bummer as an American citizen, Pew Research has published the results of a new survey showing that global public sentiment is souring on AI.

They interviewed people across 25 countries, and found that in general they are far more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence.

Overall, 34% of respondents said that they were more concerned than excited, while only 16% said that they were more excited than concerned.

42% said that they were equal parts excited and concerned.

Across all 25 countries, there was not a single one where excitement was the majority feeling about accelerated AI adoption.

I should note here that the big notable exception to countries that were included, there is no China here, and I would be very interested to see what those numbers look like.

Still, of the countries that were surveyed, only three had more than 20% of their people saying that they were more excited than concerned.

Nigeria was at 20%, Sweden and Korea had 22% each, and Israel was at 29%.

Israel and South Korea were in fact the only nations where the people who said they were mostly excited about AI outweighed the people who said they were mostly concerned.

The part that I said was disappointing to me was that right at the very top of the list for populations most concerned about AI was the US at 50%.

While technically we tied with Italy on that number, Italy had more people who were more concerned than excited than us, 12% compared to just the one-tenth of Americans who are more excited than concerned.

Now, it should be noted that this data is a little old at this point.

Two US surveys were conducted in March and June, while the international survey was conducted between January and April.

But given that we've seen the rise of protests around data center construction and a lot of negative news reporting on AI, I would be surprised if we had seen a major improvement in sentiment, and I wouldn't be surprised if we'd seen it actually get worse.

Now, what's crazy about this is that you have significant portions of these populations actually using these tools, and yet they still have this anxiety.

There is a lot more work to be done for those of us inside the AI industry, not only from a PR type of perspective, but in ensuring that people's concerns about their futures are actually addressed.

My general thesis is that AI is the recipient of more generalized anxiety and that everything is downstream from economic insecurity.