6 ms·

Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard f

Apple has always had its own hardware based silo to some extent (excellent products and design, fully integrated). Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them. The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.

zer00eyz 4y ago
> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
- gonehome 4y ago
  Siri still sucks?
  - shagie 4y ago
    Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
    - gonehome 4y ago
      That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
      - shagie 4y ago
        The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
        gonehome 4y ago
        Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking" I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is. Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.
        shagie 4y ago
        The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 Those were the intents that were set up. Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call. If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot. Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather. When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app. What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?
  - canadianfella 4y ago
    [dead]
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    "Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ... you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in eastern standard time, this is not the expected behavior).
bredren 4y ago
AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of any other product at Apple. However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge. The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1] I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur? [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
- pantulis 4y ago
  > I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.
eitland 4y ago
> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago: Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions. Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning. One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct. This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions. (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will regret that MSFT did so.
- bredren 4y ago
  I think apple made a choice a while back to yield software engineering workflows outside Swift to Microsoft. I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy. The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce. None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.
- ugh123 4y ago
  OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra
- trympet 4y ago
  According to MSFT [1], its a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment", not an acquisition. Do they have an exclusivity deal? [1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...

zer00eyz 4y ago

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"

gonehome 4y ago
Siri still sucks?
- shagie 4y ago
  Siri isn't supposed to be great - its a voice interface to a few standardized interfaces that applications can hook into. The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included). However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much. Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone. This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
  - gonehome 4y ago
    That feels like a retroactive explanation of the current status quo to me. I doubt Apple would agree "Siri isn't supposed to be great" - they just failed to live up to what they wanted. We'll see if that changes.
    - shagie 4y ago
      The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?" When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications. Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while). Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple. Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs. If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
      - gonehome 4y ago
        Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking" I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is. Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.
        shagie 4y ago
        The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 Those were the intents that were set up. Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call. If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot. Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather. When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app. What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- withinboredom 4y ago
  "Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ... you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in eastern standard time, this is not the expected behavior).

bredren 4y ago

AI in support of user interface has been downright awful. IIRC, Siri has the lowest customer satisfaction out of any other product at Apple. However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge. The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1] I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur? [1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...

pantulis 4y ago
> I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI. This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.

eitland 4y ago

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago: Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions. Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning. One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct. This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions. (Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Really surprised Apple didn't buy OpenAI; they will regret that MSFT did so.

bredren 4y ago
I think apple made a choice a while back to yield software engineering workflows outside Swift to Microsoft. I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy. The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce. None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.
ugh123 4y ago
OpenAI was already in bed with MSFT when they started working on Codex/Copilot together a year or so back. So the synergies were already there when OpenAI needed to scale up ChatGPT for the masses using Azure infra
trympet 4y ago
According to MSFT [1], its a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment", not an acquisition. Do they have an exclusivity deal? [1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...