11 ms·

Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and everything about it is snappy. I have no doubt that it is ready for enormous amount of background pr

Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and everything about it is snappy. I have no doubt that it is ready for enormous amount of background processing. Heavy background work is the only way to use the processing power in that little computer.

samwillis 3y ago
Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents, browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local, no cloud, complete privacy. "Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."
- _xnmw 3y ago
  This is already available with Rewind.ai + their GPT plugin and I've already asked such questions and got good answers.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Thats not what’s being discussed though, which is Siri having these abilities built in
  - samwillis 3y ago
    Rewind.ai looks awesome, but only like 10% of what I'm thinking Apple could do.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network” or playing a random song from Apple Music. Just last night, we were entertaining our toddler with animal sounds. It worked with “Hey Siri, what does a goat sound like?”, then we were able to do horse, cow, sheep, boar, and it somehow got tripped up on pig, for which it responded with the Wikipedia entry and told us to look at the phone for more info.
  - iknowstuff 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I thought the lack of ability to execute on current “easy” queries would indicate something about ability to execute something as complicated as figuring out the restaurant you ate at and making a reservation. At least anytime in the next few years.
      - mason55 3y ago
        Siri today is built on what’s essentially completely different concepts from something like ChatGPT. There are demos of using ChatGPT to turn normal English into Alexa commands and it’s pretty flawless. If you assume Apple can pretty easily leverage LLM tech on Siri and do it locally via silicon in the M3 or M4, it’s only a matter of chip lead time before Siri has multiple orders of magnitude improvement.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        That would be a pleasant surprise!
        rschoultz 3y ago
        That experience likely isn’t transferable to Siri, that has deeper problems. People, me included, are reporting their problems with Siri, e.g. setting it to transcribing what they and Siri says as text on the screen, and then are able to show that given input as “Please add milk to the shopping list” results in Siri responding “I do not understand what speaker you refer to.”, in writing. Likely problems like these could be overcome, but preparing better input would probably not address the root cause of the problems with Siri.
      - fwlr 3y ago
        I don’t think it does. This isn’t a hypothetical Siri v2 with some upgrades; it’s a hypothetical LLM chatbot speaking with Siri’s voice. I recall one of the first demonstrations of Bing’s ability was someone asking it to book him a concert where he wouldn’t need a jacket. It searched the web for concert locations, searched the web weather information, picked a location that fit the constraint and gave the booking link for that specific ticket. If you imagine an Apple LLM that has local rather than web search, it seems obvious that this exact ability that LLMs have to follow complicated requests and “figure things out” would be perfectly suited to reading your emails and figuring out which restaurant you mean. With ApplePay integration it could also go ahead and book for you.
- blitzar 3y ago
  "Playing Our Last Summer by ABBA on Apple Music"
- addandsubtract 3y ago
  Fat chance Apple will alow us to do this locally. More like, upgrade to Apple Cloud Plus to get these features. But yeah, I've also dreamt of what my Apple hardware could do.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Apple already does all existing AI stuff locally. The main one being categorizing images in your Photos library.
  - microtonal 3y ago
    Why not? They do on-device training of face recognition: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-people-photos https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-peopl...
  - insane_dreamer 3y ago
    Actually Apple is much more device-first than cloud-first
- throw384624 3y ago
  I would love if Apple created a personal iCloud device too. Let me sync my information to something local. I know there's Nextcloud, but it's not as seamless as iCloud.
  - tough 3y ago
    We should get the European Union to force Apple to offer an Icloud Local server thingy
    - scarface74 3y ago
      Yes and we should also have EU regulators at every design meeting for every company. They did such a good job with the GDPR making the user experience better on the web
      - another2another 3y ago
        Yes, alas they didn't leave room for a 'cookie preferences' cookie, so that whenever I choose the option 'reject all', it's of course going to ask me again, every time I visit the website. saying that, their intentions were good, I'm always horrifically amazed at the number of cookies used whenever I see the preferences popup. I honestly had no idea how many tracking cookies were used by the average website.
- nicbou 3y ago
  I love Steve Jobs' "bicycle for the mind" metaphor, and what you describe is the best possible example of this concept. A computer that does that would enable us to do so much more. This is the sort of AI I want; a true personal assistant, not a bullshit generator.
  - y04nn 3y ago
    It appears that we are tantalizingly close to have the perfect voice assistant. But for some inexplicable reason, it does not exist yet. Siri was introduced over a decade ago, and it seems that its development has not progressed as anticipated. Meanwhile, language models have made significant advancements. I am uncertain as to what is preventing Apple, a company with boundless resources, from enhancing Siri. Perhaps it is the absence of competition and the duopoly maintained by Apple and Google, both of whom seem reluctant to engage in a competitive battle within this domain.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      It is probably a people problem. The people who really understood Siri have probably left, the managers left running it are scored primarily on not making any mistakes and staying off the headlines. Any engineers who understand what it would take to upgrade it aren't given the resources and spend their days on maintenance tasks that nobody really sees.
      - slowmovintarget 3y ago
        It's more likely a perverse incentive problem. Voice activated "assistants" weren't viewed as assistance for end users. They were universally viewed as one of two things: A way of treating the consumer as a product, or a feature check-box. That Siri went from useful to far less useful had more to do with the aim to push products at you rather than actually accomplishing the task you set for Siri. If Apple actually delivers an assistant that works locally, doesn't make me the product, and generally makes it easier to accomplish my tasks, then that's a product worth paying for. When anyone asks "who benefits from 'AI'?" the answer is almost invariably "the people running the AI." Microsoft and OpenAI get more user data, and subscriptions. Google gets another vehicle for attention-injection. But if I run Vicuna or Alpaca (or some eventual equivalent) on my hardware, I can ensure I get what I need, and that there's much less hijacking of my intentions. So Microsoft, if you're listening: I don't want Bing Chat search, I want Cortana Local.
- bredren 3y ago
  > All local, no cloud, complete privacy. This is already felt in use of Stable Diffusion, where M2 is fully capable offline. Anything that can be done to reduce the need to “dial out” for processing protects the individual. It erodes the ability of business and governmental organizations to use knowledge of otherwise private matters to target and influence. The potential of moving a HQ LLM like GPT to the edge to answer everyday questions reminds me of my move from Google to DDG as my default search engine. Except it’s even a bigger deal than that. It reduces private data exhaust from search to zero, making going to the net a backup plan instead of a necessity. Apple delivering this on device is a major threat to OpenAI, which will have to provide some LLM model with training that Apple can’t or won’t. Savvy users will begin to leer at having to produce queries over the wire, feeding valuable data (proven by ShareGPT) Even then, Apple will likely chose to or be forced to open up on device AI to allow user contributed apps like LORAs which would ask the question why does OpenAI need to exist? Also fascinating the potential to do this at the Server level for enterprise. If Apple produced a stack for enterprise training it could replace generalized data compute needs, shifting IT back to local or intranet.
- mattl 3y ago
  Sounds like Knowledge Navigator https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0
  - detourdog 3y ago
    My senior thesis was influenced by that.
- sroussey 3y ago
  I’m working on something very much like this!
- tomcam 3y ago
  Apparently, you are not an actual user of Siri, because I get jack shit out of her. speech to text is infinitely worse than the first week Siri was released.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Siri has felt like abandonware for years. My hope is something like a ChatGPT model is its replacement soon.
- precompute 3y ago
  >Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents, browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local, no cloud, complete privacy. That sounds absolutely horrifying if you remove the "all local" part. And that part's a pipe dream anyway. Plus, when using a model you'd basically become subservient / limited to the type of data in the model, which would necessarily abide by Apple's TOS, so a couple of hundred million people would be the Apple TOS but in human form. I don't understand why apple fanboys don't get this. Apple is pretty shoddy when privacy is concerned. Are these apple employees making these posts?
hammock 3y ago
Do you think it would be good/capable for audio or video editing?
- detourdog 3y ago
  I think so. It is stunningly fast. It may be the biggest boost I have seen. The last big boost I saw was the move to SSD.
Maursault 3y ago
> Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and everything about it is snappy. Really?! I didn't think anyone here would fall for that. Mac Mini 12-core M2, 19-core GPU, 32GB, 10Gbit, 8TB storage? $4500 Mac Studio 20-core M1, 48-core GPU, 64GB, 10Gbit, 1TB storage is $4000. 128GB of RAM is $800 more but either Studio RAM configuration obviously spanks the M2 mini. It's sacrificing Apple's expensive storage, but with Thunderbolt 3 it's pretty academic to find 8TB or more of NVMe storage, probably 32GB of NVMe RAID[1], for less than Apple's charge of $2200 above cost of 1TB. [1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2
- detourdog 3y ago
  I specced the smallest SSD. I use netwomr homes. The mini is a stop gap waiting for the pro. Drive size Indont really consider a performance item anymore. I spent just over $2,000. Mac mini With the following configuration: Apple M2 Pro with 12‑core CPU, 19-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine 32GB unified memory 512GB SSD storage Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, two USB‑A ports, headphone jack 10 Gigabit Ethernet Im satauisfied.
  - Maursault 3y ago
    Not awful, but for $2K you could have had 16-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 48GB unified memory, 512K SSD storage, Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI ports, four USB-A ports, two headphone jacks, two Gigabit Ethernet.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Yes. I wanted the 10Gbt Ethernet. My purchasing question is when is the right time to buy a great monitor. In the CRT days the monitor lasted the longest and buying the best one could afford worked for me.
      - detourdog 3y ago
        I just went back to compare the Mini with the Studio again. Despite your advice I would buy the Mini again for these reasons: I'm on a newer generation chip that has a lower power draw. Meets my network speed minimum. All for the price of the entry level Studio. This box is basically an experiment to see how much processing power I need. I have a very specific project that will require the benchmarking of Apple's machine learning frameworks. I want to see how much of a machine learning load this Mini can handle. Once I have benchmarks maybe the Pro will exist and I will be in good shape to shop and understand what I'm buying. I think a Mini of any spec is a great value. The studio has a place but I'm hoping the Pro ends up being like an old Sun E450. This Mini experiment is to help me frame the hardware power vs. the software loads.

samwillis 3y ago

Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents, browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local, no cloud, complete privacy. "Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our meeting next week."

_xnmw 3y ago
This is already available with Rewind.ai + their GPT plugin and I've already asked such questions and got good answers.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Thats not what’s being discussed though, which is Siri having these abilities built in
- samwillis 3y ago
  Rewind.ai looks awesome, but only like 10% of what I'm thinking Apple could do.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as “Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network” or playing a random song from Apple Music. Just last night, we were entertaining our toddler with animal sounds. It worked with “Hey Siri, what does a goat sound like?”, then we were able to do horse, cow, sheep, boar, and it somehow got tripped up on pig, for which it responded with the Wikipedia entry and told us to look at the phone for more info.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I thought the lack of ability to execute on current “easy” queries would indicate something about ability to execute something as complicated as figuring out the restaurant you ate at and making a reservation. At least anytime in the next few years.
    - mason55 3y ago
      Siri today is built on what’s essentially completely different concepts from something like ChatGPT. There are demos of using ChatGPT to turn normal English into Alexa commands and it’s pretty flawless. If you assume Apple can pretty easily leverage LLM tech on Siri and do it locally via silicon in the M3 or M4, it’s only a matter of chip lead time before Siri has multiple orders of magnitude improvement.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        That would be a pleasant surprise!
      - rschoultz 3y ago
        That experience likely isn’t transferable to Siri, that has deeper problems. People, me included, are reporting their problems with Siri, e.g. setting it to transcribing what they and Siri says as text on the screen, and then are able to show that given input as “Please add milk to the shopping list” results in Siri responding “I do not understand what speaker you refer to.”, in writing. Likely problems like these could be overcome, but preparing better input would probably not address the root cause of the problems with Siri.
    - fwlr 3y ago
      I don’t think it does. This isn’t a hypothetical Siri v2 with some upgrades; it’s a hypothetical LLM chatbot speaking with Siri’s voice. I recall one of the first demonstrations of Bing’s ability was someone asking it to book him a concert where he wouldn’t need a jacket. It searched the web for concert locations, searched the web weather information, picked a location that fit the constraint and gave the booking link for that specific ticket. If you imagine an Apple LLM that has local rather than web search, it seems obvious that this exact ability that LLMs have to follow complicated requests and “figure things out” would be perfectly suited to reading your emails and figuring out which restaurant you mean. With ApplePay integration it could also go ahead and book for you.
blitzar 3y ago
"Playing Our Last Summer by ABBA on Apple Music"
addandsubtract 3y ago
Fat chance Apple will alow us to do this locally. More like, upgrade to Apple Cloud Plus to get these features. But yeah, I've also dreamt of what my Apple hardware could do.
- fastball 3y ago
  Apple already does all existing AI stuff locally. The main one being categorizing images in your Photos library.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Why not? They do on-device training of face recognition: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-people-photos https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-peopl...
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  Actually Apple is much more device-first than cloud-first
throw384624 3y ago
I would love if Apple created a personal iCloud device too. Let me sync my information to something local. I know there's Nextcloud, but it's not as seamless as iCloud.
- tough 3y ago
  We should get the European Union to force Apple to offer an Icloud Local server thingy
  - scarface74 3y ago
    Yes and we should also have EU regulators at every design meeting for every company. They did such a good job with the GDPR making the user experience better on the web
    - another2another 3y ago
      Yes, alas they didn't leave room for a 'cookie preferences' cookie, so that whenever I choose the option 'reject all', it's of course going to ask me again, every time I visit the website. saying that, their intentions were good, I'm always horrifically amazed at the number of cookies used whenever I see the preferences popup. I honestly had no idea how many tracking cookies were used by the average website.
nicbou 3y ago
I love Steve Jobs' "bicycle for the mind" metaphor, and what you describe is the best possible example of this concept. A computer that does that would enable us to do so much more. This is the sort of AI I want; a true personal assistant, not a bullshit generator.
- y04nn 3y ago
  It appears that we are tantalizingly close to have the perfect voice assistant. But for some inexplicable reason, it does not exist yet. Siri was introduced over a decade ago, and it seems that its development has not progressed as anticipated. Meanwhile, language models have made significant advancements. I am uncertain as to what is preventing Apple, a company with boundless resources, from enhancing Siri. Perhaps it is the absence of competition and the duopoly maintained by Apple and Google, both of whom seem reluctant to engage in a competitive battle within this domain.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    It is probably a people problem. The people who really understood Siri have probably left, the managers left running it are scored primarily on not making any mistakes and staying off the headlines. Any engineers who understand what it would take to upgrade it aren't given the resources and spend their days on maintenance tasks that nobody really sees.
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      It's more likely a perverse incentive problem. Voice activated "assistants" weren't viewed as assistance for end users. They were universally viewed as one of two things: A way of treating the consumer as a product, or a feature check-box. That Siri went from useful to far less useful had more to do with the aim to push products at you rather than actually accomplishing the task you set for Siri. If Apple actually delivers an assistant that works locally, doesn't make me the product, and generally makes it easier to accomplish my tasks, then that's a product worth paying for. When anyone asks "who benefits from 'AI'?" the answer is almost invariably "the people running the AI." Microsoft and OpenAI get more user data, and subscriptions. Google gets another vehicle for attention-injection. But if I run Vicuna or Alpaca (or some eventual equivalent) on my hardware, I can ensure I get what I need, and that there's much less hijacking of my intentions. So Microsoft, if you're listening: I don't want Bing Chat search, I want Cortana Local.
bredren 3y ago
> All local, no cloud, complete privacy. This is already felt in use of Stable Diffusion, where M2 is fully capable offline. Anything that can be done to reduce the need to “dial out” for processing protects the individual. It erodes the ability of business and governmental organizations to use knowledge of otherwise private matters to target and influence. The potential of moving a HQ LLM like GPT to the edge to answer everyday questions reminds me of my move from Google to DDG as my default search engine. Except it’s even a bigger deal than that. It reduces private data exhaust from search to zero, making going to the net a backup plan instead of a necessity. Apple delivering this on device is a major threat to OpenAI, which will have to provide some LLM model with training that Apple can’t or won’t. Savvy users will begin to leer at having to produce queries over the wire, feeding valuable data (proven by ShareGPT) Even then, Apple will likely chose to or be forced to open up on device AI to allow user contributed apps like LORAs which would ask the question why does OpenAI need to exist? Also fascinating the potential to do this at the Server level for enterprise. If Apple produced a stack for enterprise training it could replace generalized data compute needs, shifting IT back to local or intranet.
mattl 3y ago
Sounds like Knowledge Navigator https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0
- detourdog 3y ago
  My senior thesis was influenced by that.
sroussey 3y ago
I’m working on something very much like this!
tomcam 3y ago
Apparently, you are not an actual user of Siri, because I get jack shit out of her. speech to text is infinitely worse than the first week Siri was released.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Siri has felt like abandonware for years. My hope is something like a ChatGPT model is its replacement soon.
precompute 3y ago
>Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents, browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local, no cloud, complete privacy. That sounds absolutely horrifying if you remove the "all local" part. And that part's a pipe dream anyway. Plus, when using a model you'd basically become subservient / limited to the type of data in the model, which would necessarily abide by Apple's TOS, so a couple of hundred million people would be the Apple TOS but in human form. I don't understand why apple fanboys don't get this. Apple is pretty shoddy when privacy is concerned. Are these apple employees making these posts?

hammock 3y ago

Do you think it would be good/capable for audio or video editing?

detourdog 3y ago
I think so. It is stunningly fast. It may be the biggest boost I have seen. The last big boost I saw was the move to SSD.

Maursault 3y ago

> Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and everything about it is snappy. Really?! I didn't think anyone here would fall for that. Mac Mini 12-core M2, 19-core GPU, 32GB, 10Gbit, 8TB storage? $4500 Mac Studio 20-core M1, 48-core GPU, 64GB, 10Gbit, 1TB storage is $4000. 128GB of RAM is $800 more but either Studio RAM configuration obviously spanks the M2 mini. It's sacrificing Apple's expensive storage, but with Thunderbolt 3 it's pretty academic to find 8TB or more of NVMe storage, probably 32GB of NVMe RAID[1], for less than Apple's charge of $2200 above cost of 1TB. [1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2 https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

detourdog 3y ago
I specced the smallest SSD. I use netwomr homes. The mini is a stop gap waiting for the pro. Drive size Indont really consider a performance item anymore. I spent just over $2,000. Mac mini With the following configuration: Apple M2 Pro with 12‑core CPU, 19-core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine 32GB unified memory 512GB SSD storage Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, two USB‑A ports, headphone jack 10 Gigabit Ethernet Im satauisfied.
- Maursault 3y ago
  Not awful, but for $2K you could have had 16-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 48GB unified memory, 512K SSD storage, Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI ports, four USB-A ports, two headphone jacks, two Gigabit Ethernet.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Yes. I wanted the 10Gbt Ethernet. My purchasing question is when is the right time to buy a great monitor. In the CRT days the monitor lasted the longest and buying the best one could afford worked for me.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      I just went back to compare the Mini with the Studio again. Despite your advice I would buy the Mini again for these reasons: I'm on a newer generation chip that has a lower power draw. Meets my network speed minimum. All for the price of the entry level Studio. This box is basically an experiment to see how much processing power I need. I have a very specific project that will require the benchmarking of Apple's machine learning frameworks. I want to see how much of a machine learning load this Mini can handle. Once I have benchmarks maybe the Pro will exist and I will be in good shape to shop and understand what I'm buying. I think a Mini of any spec is a great value. The studio has a place but I'm hoping the Pro ends up being like an old Sun E450. This Mini experiment is to help me frame the hardware power vs. the software loads.