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Maybe, but Apple doesn’t have a search to rival Google (or even an assistant, given the state of Siri). Focusing on privacy and on-device learning is great, bu

Maybe, but Apple doesn’t have a search to rival Google (or even an assistant, given the state of Siri). Focusing on privacy and on-device learning is great, but when the strength of these models is in consuming all the data they can hoover up your motive is at odds with your philosophy.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
I think this is wrong because you can always build a search engine - it’s not hard - and you can supplement the learned models with cryptographically secured private data to build a private personalized model. In fact this seems in all ways superior to any alternative, and strikes at the heart of the Google spy ware ad spam business model. And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri? I’d love to meet someone that uses it so I can verify this statement. But with the advent of Chatgpt Alexa, Siri, and Google whatever all look like freshman projects. The next generation of assistants have just begun, and I assure you, the state of the past has nothing to do with what comes next. OpenAI hit a giant reset button across an awful lot of stuff.
- coolspot 4y ago
  > And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri? Anything outperforms Siri. Google Assistant is head and shoulders above Alexa and Siri.
  - schrodinger 4y ago
    I have both and find that 90% of the time my commands are “remind me ___”, “wake me up at ___”, “what’s the weather today”, and “play ___ on Spotify”. For these, I can’t tell the difference between google and Siri in terms of quality (but Alexa was worse).
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      I was just setting reminders today and had Siri repeatedly fail to do what I want. The only use case I have for it is setting timers, which is does very well. I'd use it for much more if it was as good as ChatGPT.
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        This is entirely my point. They’re all crap at a fundamental level, none of them outperform any other. But the next generation, which will assuredly be backed by a LLM, will be shockingly powerful.
        abudabi123 4y ago
        The MKBHD personality is onto Monte Carlo testing in his device reviews. He has an intuition for good UIX. Google and Apple should pay people like MKBHD and his production crew a billion dollars every year to film achievable, desirable text, voice, camera A.I. assisted use-cases.
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        They don’t work like that though. Instead they spend $3b / year on hiring fungible cog SDE 2 job code 67483’s and look at gantt chart roadmaps produced by fungible cog PM 3 job code 74842’s for fungible cog SDM 7 job code 84747’s with the nominal assistance of centralized (I.e., marginalized) fungible cog UX 5 job code 35563’s then wonder why it’s perennially late and complete garbage. Except no one wonders that because fungible cogs don’t have wonder in their job responsibly matrix.
threeseed 4y ago
They do have a search engine though with Siri Suggestions. Which has a user base of ~1.5b+ people. We only see the tip of the iceberg so who knows what else it is capable of.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  “Hey siri, what is today’s date?” “Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network”
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    two minutes later "Hey Siri, what is today's date?" "That's sweet, but I think of you as a friend" "What? The date, Siri, what is the date?" "You're so sweet" "Sigh"
  - dmd 4y ago
    “hey siri, what’s the weather today?” “Now playing Eminem Love the way you lie featuring Rihanna”
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Hey siri, turn the TV off. Which TV? Bedroom or Living Room or Everywhere? (Only 1 of the 2 TVs is ever on) I won’t spam this thread anymore, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it improved.
      - illiarian 4y ago
        And AppleTV itself is hot garbage for this kind of stuff even though it's a veritable supercomputer that should be the hub for Siri and home automation. - Hey Siri, <do something that involves AppleTV in any capacity>. - I'm sorry, one of your devices is off
    - scarface74 4y ago
      And that has nothing to do with an LLM. That has to do with speech to text algorithms. It also doesn’t take advanced AI to do a simple intents based answers.
scarface74 4y ago
Apple gets $18B a year from Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices. Why would Apple build a search engine that would probably be inferior and not be able to monetize it?
- nojito 4y ago
  They already have a search engine? Just swipe down on any iPhone.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Yes and at one point someone wrote a web front end for it. It’s laughably bad.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    I had to disable several features of iOS search due to ridiculously long delay and lag.
015a 4y ago
They have every query their users enter into Spotlight. They have all the results it returns (who cares if they originated from Google, ok maybe they do, maybe not using it for anything is part of their deal with Google). They have your contacts, calendars, messages, email, music, workout history, tasks, real time location, which Siri already uses to e.g. recommend a destination when you get in your car to a degree of accuracy that straight spooks me sometimes. Apple has access to SUBSTANTIALLY more fine-grained personalized data than Google does. Full stop. That's a weird thing to assert in the tech crowd, but think about it deeply and you'll realize its true. Google has islands of services that they've done an extremely good job of building bridges between. They have some islands that Apple has nothing like (YouTube is the biggest one) (Search is a huge island, but only indefensible if the interfaces customers use to access it don't leak the queries and results; no one opens a browser and types "www.google.com" on mobile and even if they did, Apple controls the browser renderer, they could lift everything if they wanted to, they won't, I'm simply illustrating how much Apple should fuckin scare Google). But the waters between those islands are patrolled by Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, and there's sharks in there as well (uh, the metaphor is falling apart, the sharks are "Google's tumultuous history with privacy and user blowback if they overstep"). Apple is a continent. Many of their cities are ports that connect to some of Google's islands, but Google's product still has to be checked by customs. You're right that even given that power, hoovering it up is at-odds with Apple's philosophy. Or, is it? I think "hoovering it unencrypted to the cloud" definitely is; but that's the point OP was making: if we're extremely close, as a species, to solving "make AI work", one of the challenges for the next five years is inevitably going to be "make it more personal". Its awesome that I can ask ChatGPT to write a date comparison function. It'll also be awesome if I could ask Siri "when did sarah and I talk about getting a cat" or something. That requires personalized data to set the context. If Apple can swing at the fences and say "everything is on-device, nothing leaves, we can't see it, and now you can ask Siri that, and by the way there's new functionality built-in to iOS that apps can leverage to integrate with Siri's new LLM capabilities just like ChatGPT plugins"; that's an extremely compelling product. Extremely. And I know they would ingest that data, that they would do that, because they already do! Go ask Siri to call Sarah, or if you have any meetings tomorrow (assuming you're using Apple Calendar), and it will respond. I don't know where you're getting this take that they don't "hoover data"; they ingest everything from all their first party apps into Siri's `DATA MATRIX`. Its just, you know, 2010s era querying and data crunching. Don't get me wrong, Google's gonna do a lot of this too. But Google is playing from the position of "we have a model, we have the data, we just need to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year maintaining all these servers". Apple is playing from the position "our customers are paying us for the silicon to run this, we have the data, we just have to figure out the model". If its not obvious at this point: the models/algorithms/etc are not a moat. They're going to be commoditized with time. Publicly accessible data isn't a moat. Personal data is a moat, because people care about privacy. And cost effective training and inference silicon is a moat, because its Physical, and like literally One Company on the planet makes it, and they're in a big time situationship with Tim Cook.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I think this is wrong because you can always build a search engine - it’s not hard - and you can supplement the learned models with cryptographically secured private data to build a private personalized model. In fact this seems in all ways superior to any alternative, and strikes at the heart of the Google spy ware ad spam business model. And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri? I’d love to meet someone that uses it so I can verify this statement. But with the advent of Chatgpt Alexa, Siri, and Google whatever all look like freshman projects. The next generation of assistants have just begun, and I assure you, the state of the past has nothing to do with what comes next. OpenAI hit a giant reset button across an awful lot of stuff.

coolspot 4y ago
> And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri? Anything outperforms Siri. Google Assistant is head and shoulders above Alexa and Siri.
- schrodinger 4y ago
  I have both and find that 90% of the time my commands are “remind me ___”, “wake me up at ___”, “what’s the weather today”, and “play ___ on Spotify”. For these, I can’t tell the difference between google and Siri in terms of quality (but Alexa was worse).
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    I was just setting reminders today and had Siri repeatedly fail to do what I want. The only use case I have for it is setting timers, which is does very well. I'd use it for much more if it was as good as ChatGPT.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      This is entirely my point. They’re all crap at a fundamental level, none of them outperform any other. But the next generation, which will assuredly be backed by a LLM, will be shockingly powerful.
      - abudabi123 4y ago
        The MKBHD personality is onto Monte Carlo testing in his device reviews. He has an intuition for good UIX. Google and Apple should pay people like MKBHD and his production crew a billion dollars every year to film achievable, desirable text, voice, camera A.I. assisted use-cases.
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        They don’t work like that though. Instead they spend $3b / year on hiring fungible cog SDE 2 job code 67483’s and look at gantt chart roadmaps produced by fungible cog PM 3 job code 74842’s for fungible cog SDM 7 job code 84747’s with the nominal assistance of centralized (I.e., marginalized) fungible cog UX 5 job code 35563’s then wonder why it’s perennially late and complete garbage. Except no one wonders that because fungible cogs don’t have wonder in their job responsibly matrix.

threeseed 4y ago

They do have a search engine though with Siri Suggestions. Which has a user base of ~1.5b+ people. We only see the tip of the iceberg so who knows what else it is capable of.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
“Hey siri, what is today’s date?” “Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network”
- highwaylights 4y ago
  two minutes later "Hey Siri, what is today's date?" "That's sweet, but I think of you as a friend" "What? The date, Siri, what is the date?" "You're so sweet" "Sigh"
- dmd 4y ago
  “hey siri, what’s the weather today?” “Now playing Eminem Love the way you lie featuring Rihanna”
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Hey siri, turn the TV off. Which TV? Bedroom or Living Room or Everywhere? (Only 1 of the 2 TVs is ever on) I won’t spam this thread anymore, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it improved.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      And AppleTV itself is hot garbage for this kind of stuff even though it's a veritable supercomputer that should be the hub for Siri and home automation. - Hey Siri, <do something that involves AppleTV in any capacity>. - I'm sorry, one of your devices is off
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And that has nothing to do with an LLM. That has to do with speech to text algorithms. It also doesn’t take advanced AI to do a simple intents based answers.

scarface74 4y ago

Apple gets $18B a year from Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices. Why would Apple build a search engine that would probably be inferior and not be able to monetize it?

nojito 4y ago
They already have a search engine? Just swipe down on any iPhone.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes and at one point someone wrote a web front end for it. It’s laughably bad.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  I had to disable several features of iOS search due to ridiculously long delay and lag.

015a 4y ago

They have every query their users enter into Spotlight. They have all the results it returns (who cares if they originated from Google, ok maybe they do, maybe not using it for anything is part of their deal with Google). They have your contacts, calendars, messages, email, music, workout history, tasks, real time location, which Siri already uses to e.g. recommend a destination when you get in your car to a degree of accuracy that straight spooks me sometimes. Apple has access to SUBSTANTIALLY more fine-grained personalized data than Google does. Full stop. That's a weird thing to assert in the tech crowd, but think about it deeply and you'll realize its true. Google has islands of services that they've done an extremely good job of building bridges between. They have some islands that Apple has nothing like (YouTube is the biggest one) (Search is a huge island, but only indefensible if the interfaces customers use to access it don't leak the queries and results; no one opens a browser and types "www.google.com" on mobile and even if they did, Apple controls the browser renderer, they could lift everything if they wanted to, they won't, I'm simply illustrating how much Apple should fuckin scare Google). But the waters between those islands are patrolled by Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, and there's sharks in there as well (uh, the metaphor is falling apart, the sharks are "Google's tumultuous history with privacy and user blowback if they overstep"). Apple is a continent. Many of their cities are ports that connect to some of Google's islands, but Google's product still has to be checked by customs. You're right that even given that power, hoovering it up is at-odds with Apple's philosophy. Or, is it? I think "hoovering it unencrypted to the cloud" definitely is; but that's the point OP was making: if we're extremely close, as a species, to solving "make AI work", one of the challenges for the next five years is inevitably going to be "make it more personal". Its awesome that I can ask ChatGPT to write a date comparison function. It'll also be awesome if I could ask Siri "when did sarah and I talk about getting a cat" or something. That requires personalized data to set the context. If Apple can swing at the fences and say "everything is on-device, nothing leaves, we can't see it, and now you can ask Siri that, and by the way there's new functionality built-in to iOS that apps can leverage to integrate with Siri's new LLM capabilities just like ChatGPT plugins"; that's an extremely compelling product. Extremely. And I know they would ingest that data, that they would do that, because they already do! Go ask Siri to call Sarah, or if you have any meetings tomorrow (assuming you're using Apple Calendar), and it will respond. I don't know where you're getting this take that they don't "hoover data"; they ingest everything from all their first party apps into Siri's `DATA MATRIX`. Its just, you know, 2010s era querying and data crunching. Don't get me wrong, Google's gonna do a lot of this too. But Google is playing from the position of "we have a model, we have the data, we just need to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year maintaining all these servers". Apple is playing from the position "our customers are paying us for the silicon to run this, we have the data, we just have to figure out the model". If its not obvious at this point: the models/algorithms/etc are not a moat. They're going to be commoditized with time. Publicly accessible data isn't a moat. Personal data is a moat, because people care about privacy. And cost effective training and inference silicon is a moat, because its Physical, and like literally One Company on the planet makes it, and they're in a big time situationship with Tim Cook.