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Meanwhile Apple is stubbornly insisting on its own ways, and awkwardly silent during this whole AI revolution. I gave up using Siri years ago due to its glaring

Meanwhile Apple is stubbornly insisting on its own ways, and awkwardly silent during this whole AI revolution. I gave up using Siri years ago due to its glaring stupidity compared with Google Assistant and Alexa. While Apple keeps making money from overpriced hardware, the competitors are working on actually being pioneers in AI. It makes me sad to see so much computational power in my iPhone and iPad getting wasted on silly subpar iOS apps.

huslage 3y ago
Apple has not been silent. The whole iOS 17 release has AI stuff sprinkled all through it. They just aren't speaking the same language as everyone else. They are also hiring generative AI folks like crazy for things like Siri. They want to own the on-device space and are well on the way to revolutionizing their operating systems and hardware to do it.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  That seems right. Apple leads out with "We're doing feature X, Y, and Z" and downplays the particular technology behind those features. Nobody really cares if X, Y, and Z are powered by AI, as long as they're awesome. Contrast that with the rest of the industry who lead out with "We're doing AI!" and then they connect it to this and that feature. I'd argue that consumers care about having great features, not about what particular technology powers it. My phone could run on unicorn poop, and I don't care as long as it does what I want it to do.
pazimzadeh 3y ago
Yeah...Apple doesn't tease products before they announce them.
code51 3y ago
I slowly started to think Apple knows there will be a golden hour to jump on a mature, economic LLM. Until then, they are probably watching without a massive investment into LLMs if it's not drastically changing their products.
samwillis 3y ago
Apple are never first, sometimes they are quite late, but when they do launch their version of a product it is polished and fixes many issues with all other implications. I have no doubt that Apple are working on local LLMs and combining them with Siri, it's only a matter of time. I expect we will see something next year, probably tied to the next iteration of hardware - they do want to sell hardware after all. Apple have indicated that are working on this stuff, subtly. They avoided saying "AI", instead going for "ML", "encoder/decoder models" and "transformer models". The spell check on the next iOS is based on a transformer model. It's packed with image models for extraction, lighting and image correction. iOS is littered with ML stuff, that have "Nural cores" in their silicone. This stuff is coming from them, when it's ready. What I expect they will launch with a "LLM Siri" will blow our minds, it will be an all encompassing personal assistant. It will have linkage of all our documents, email, messages, movements, browser history, all locally securely on our devises. Not in the cloud. It will be so close to appearing like AGI that some people will clams it is.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Apple are never first, sometimes they are quite late, but when they do launch their version of a product it is polished Apple maps would have a laugh at that
  - drevil-v2 3y ago
    Apple Maps, as it is today, is so much better than Google Maps. The UI is way more polished than Google Maps. The Google UI looks like it is designed by committee - it is so ugly and dense. I find it really offensive. The Apple Maps has better directions for my city at least. The Google one re-directs me through side streets and weird turns into traffic crossing lanes at the last minute.
    - baby 3y ago
      I agree, the only thing that's still better is google maps reviews for restaurants, just because of the sheer amount of users compared to yelp (worldwide). But I really dislike google maps reviews UI
pavlov 3y ago
Apple has been pretty good about quietly integrating AI-based image processing into iOS. All text within photos is being automatically recognized and is fully searchable. That has saved my ass on occasion when some piece of information was in a photo. The AI background removal feature in Photos is cool too — just drag from a foreground element, and it usually gets it right. But despite this kind of flawless feature integration work, clearly Apple as a company has some issues with applying generative models on a more fundamental scale. They look a bit stuck in their own loop of trying to replicate past success with an upcoming $3,500 device that’s all about ever fancier glass and aluminum hardware.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>awkwardly silent during this whole AI revolution They weren't silent about AI child porn scanning on-device so we know they definitely have the capability for AI on device.
CTDOCodebases 3y ago
This is what I don't understand. The power of LLMs is that they can allow a human to interact with a computer using natural language. Imagine just asking Siri to order you something and Siri finds the cheapest legit supplier and just orders it from them. It would remove the first hop needed to go to Amazon and unlike Alexa Siri is always with you. Google and Apple could do to Amazon what they did to Facebook.
callalex 3y ago
Have you considered that LLMs in their current form just…aren’t very good or useful? That may be why Apple isn’t using them yet.
- balder1991 3y ago
  This is my guess too. They’re using it on their iOS 17 keyboard for better text prediction though.
- appplication 3y ago
  Despite all the hype, and being genuinely intriguing, this is the truth. They can do some neat tricks, but overall utility is low. Model hallucination in particular is a problem. I don’t see Apple rolling out any model that has the potential to lie to you.
Me1000 3y ago
They just haven’t been loud about it. But they have specialized silicon for running neural nets (which they, admittedly have been quiet about outside of “adopt CoreML”). They have CoreML. And if you browse places like r/localllama you very frequently find people recommending Mac Studios as a great machine for a hobbyists interested in local inference and training. They even had a subtle jab at nvidia in their last keynote talking about how much memory they support on on their latest M2 machines. Qualcomm is announcing hardware that won’t be available until (at least) next week. That’s just not Apple’s way, and I think it’s a mistake to say they’re ignoring what’s going on.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Apple ported Stable Diffusion to Metal almost immediately. And they are making tremendous investments in Metal development. Also, there are native apps utilizing both Stable Diffusion and Llama... And they are buried under a tremendous mountain of other AppStore junk. The large gap between Apple's demos and backend development and actual deployed ML apps is very unfortunate and sad, but its not uncommon either.

huslage 3y ago

Apple has not been silent. The whole iOS 17 release has AI stuff sprinkled all through it. They just aren't speaking the same language as everyone else. They are also hiring generative AI folks like crazy for things like Siri. They want to own the on-device space and are well on the way to revolutionizing their operating systems and hardware to do it.

ryandrake 3y ago
That seems right. Apple leads out with "We're doing feature X, Y, and Z" and downplays the particular technology behind those features. Nobody really cares if X, Y, and Z are powered by AI, as long as they're awesome. Contrast that with the rest of the industry who lead out with "We're doing AI!" and then they connect it to this and that feature. I'd argue that consumers care about having great features, not about what particular technology powers it. My phone could run on unicorn poop, and I don't care as long as it does what I want it to do.

pazimzadeh 3y ago

Yeah...Apple doesn't tease products before they announce them.

code51 3y ago

I slowly started to think Apple knows there will be a golden hour to jump on a mature, economic LLM. Until then, they are probably watching without a massive investment into LLMs if it's not drastically changing their products.

samwillis 3y ago

Apple are never first, sometimes they are quite late, but when they do launch their version of a product it is polished and fixes many issues with all other implications. I have no doubt that Apple are working on local LLMs and combining them with Siri, it's only a matter of time. I expect we will see something next year, probably tied to the next iteration of hardware - they do want to sell hardware after all. Apple have indicated that are working on this stuff, subtly. They avoided saying "AI", instead going for "ML", "encoder/decoder models" and "transformer models". The spell check on the next iOS is based on a transformer model. It's packed with image models for extraction, lighting and image correction. iOS is littered with ML stuff, that have "Nural cores" in their silicone. This stuff is coming from them, when it's ready. What I expect they will launch with a "LLM Siri" will blow our minds, it will be an all encompassing personal assistant. It will have linkage of all our documents, email, messages, movements, browser history, all locally securely on our devises. Not in the cloud. It will be so close to appearing like AGI that some people will clams it is.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Apple are never first, sometimes they are quite late, but when they do launch their version of a product it is polished Apple maps would have a laugh at that
- drevil-v2 3y ago
  Apple Maps, as it is today, is so much better than Google Maps. The UI is way more polished than Google Maps. The Google UI looks like it is designed by committee - it is so ugly and dense. I find it really offensive. The Apple Maps has better directions for my city at least. The Google one re-directs me through side streets and weird turns into traffic crossing lanes at the last minute.
  - baby 3y ago
    I agree, the only thing that's still better is google maps reviews for restaurants, just because of the sheer amount of users compared to yelp (worldwide). But I really dislike google maps reviews UI

pavlov 3y ago

Apple has been pretty good about quietly integrating AI-based image processing into iOS. All text within photos is being automatically recognized and is fully searchable. That has saved my ass on occasion when some piece of information was in a photo. The AI background removal feature in Photos is cool too — just drag from a foreground element, and it usually gets it right. But despite this kind of flawless feature integration work, clearly Apple as a company has some issues with applying generative models on a more fundamental scale. They look a bit stuck in their own loop of trying to replicate past success with an upcoming $3,500 device that’s all about ever fancier glass and aluminum hardware.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>awkwardly silent during this whole AI revolution They weren't silent about AI child porn scanning on-device so we know they definitely have the capability for AI on device.

CTDOCodebases 3y ago

This is what I don't understand. The power of LLMs is that they can allow a human to interact with a computer using natural language. Imagine just asking Siri to order you something and Siri finds the cheapest legit supplier and just orders it from them. It would remove the first hop needed to go to Amazon and unlike Alexa Siri is always with you. Google and Apple could do to Amazon what they did to Facebook.

callalex 3y ago

Have you considered that LLMs in their current form just…aren’t very good or useful? That may be why Apple isn’t using them yet.

balder1991 3y ago
This is my guess too. They’re using it on their iOS 17 keyboard for better text prediction though.
appplication 3y ago
Despite all the hype, and being genuinely intriguing, this is the truth. They can do some neat tricks, but overall utility is low. Model hallucination in particular is a problem. I don’t see Apple rolling out any model that has the potential to lie to you.

Me1000 3y ago

They just haven’t been loud about it. But they have specialized silicon for running neural nets (which they, admittedly have been quiet about outside of “adopt CoreML”). They have CoreML. And if you browse places like r/localllama you very frequently find people recommending Mac Studios as a great machine for a hobbyists interested in local inference and training. They even had a subtle jab at nvidia in their last keynote talking about how much memory they support on on their latest M2 machines. Qualcomm is announcing hardware that won’t be available until (at least) next week. That’s just not Apple’s way, and I think it’s a mistake to say they’re ignoring what’s going on.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Apple ported Stable Diffusion to Metal almost immediately. And they are making tremendous investments in Metal development. Also, there are native apps utilizing both Stable Diffusion and Llama... And they are buried under a tremendous mountain of other AppStore junk. The large gap between Apple's demos and backend development and actual deployed ML apps is very unfortunate and sad, but its not uncommon either.