My hope is that Apple will continue research on privacy-protecting and privacy-enhancing machine learning, because out of all the big tech companies using machine learning, they may just be the only ones to do that. Some random research for privacy technologies may come out of Google, too, but they are much less likely to actually use them at scale, especially if they conflict with ad revenue.
Which is why I used "paint", not "said". Not that I expect a company to explicitly say in their big day that others were already doing it, of course.
But my impression from the presentation, as someone who had never heard of differential privacy before, was that this was brand new research from some professor, which they contracted to help them apply it to the real world. Definitely not "this is a technology that's used to achieve such and such, this is how it works".
