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I am absolutely baffled that Apple (and others) haven't updated their smart assistants with a competitive LLM. With Apple's privacy shtick and their mobile GPU
by flippy_flops 3y ago
I am absolutely baffled that Apple (and others) haven't updated their smart assistants with a competitive LLM. With Apple's privacy shtick and their mobile GPU efficiency, I was convinced we'd see something today. What am I missing?
- justapassenger 3y agoIt takes a while to roll out fundamental changes to things at that scale.
- newaccount74 3y agoI think Apple missed the boat on LLMs and was surprised by the success of ChatGPT. They are no doubt working on an LLM-based Siri now, but they don't rush things, and they don't preannounce things, so we'll only hear about it once it is ready. And they are probably going to use a different term for marketing it rather than using a generic term like LLM.
- kemayo 3y agoYeah, it seems plausible that they'll do it eventually, but it'll be "the new improved Siri, powered by the Neural Engine and transformer models".
- Workaccount2 3y agoSiri, now powered by Speech Synthesis Engine™.
- 9dev 3y agoNot sexy enough. My money’s on „Apple Voice“
- lolinder 3y agoI don't think they missed the boat, I think they recognize that LLMs aren't Apple-ready yet. They don't roll out half-baked products, and they won't be comfortable placing the big disclaimers that ChatGPT relies on. They'll incorporate LLMs if and when they can guarantee that what Siri says will be consistently accurate and extremely difficult to abuse.
- ryaneager 3y agoI agree, a quote I heard from a former Apple employee from the onboarding materials: “Apple doesn’t do things first, we do things right.”
- arrowsmith 3y agoOr in the case of the Touch Bar: they did it first and they did it wrong.
- flippy_flops 3y agoGenerally agree, but Siri is out and is awful
- jonplackett 3y agoSiri is the very definition of a half-baked product. Perhaps even quarter baked. and has been sitting there in the turned-off-oven for YEARS.
- filleokus 3y agoAgree that Siri isn't very good, and have been quite stagnant. It was released in 2011, that's 12 years ago!? Sure it's probably better now, but not 12 years of development better? But, at the same time. ChatGPT and the likes have a very different failure mode, that feels even less Appley. Like saying actual fake stuff, or saying it understand that you want to turn the AC on when your son leaves school coming home - but then just not doing it, or doing something completely different. With current Siri the failings are at least very obvious…
- dumpHero2 3y agoApple has consistently missed the boat on every major technical advancement, when compared to android. But when they do catch up, the quality is unmatched! Hoping the same with LLMs. I am sure they’re already working on it.
- alwillis 3y agoThere were zero rumors about LLM from Apple being announced today. It wouldn't be the time and the place for such an announcement. Such a feature would be included with iOS 18 and that's not going to be talked about until next June's WWDC 2024.
- jameshart 3y agoWhen they talked about Siri on-device on Apple Watch 9 they briefly said Siri had a ‘new transformer model’ and talked about improved dictation accuracy. Honestly was half expecting more along those lines as part of the new chip announcement for the iPhone 15 Pro, but apparently not.
- skepticATX 3y agoReliability, probably? Apple is not going to allow for hallucinations.
- zukzuk 3y agoSiri in its current form is constantly "hallucinating" all sorts of stuff as it is. "Hey Siri, turn off the lights in the kitchen." -- "Sure, now playing a continuous stream of U2 on all of your speakers!"
- ryandrake 3y agoLOL as an iPhone user whose only music on the phone is That One Free U2 Album That We Never Wanted, I laughed too hard at that one!
- letwhile 3y agoBecause they can't control it not talking extremist stuff, and that would be used by media and normies for months
- brap 3y agoI think the last thing people want is a voice assistant that babbles on and on forever when asked a simple question. I really hope that when they release something, the responses will be 5% of the endless stream of words ChatGPT & others produce.
- flippy_flops 3y agoAgree - fwiw, I added "ChatGPT should keep answers brief and direct." as part of my Custom instructions and it's a massive improvement.
- brap 3y agoI usually say things like “please be extremely succinct. Response should be one sentence at most”. “Sure! I will try to be succinct. [4 paragraphs]”
- XTHK 3y agoI will remind you that most every parent and child both want this, albeit for totally different reasons.
- threeseed 3y agoFrom rumours [1] it is being worked on. Apple isn't the sort of company to rush something out just to be competitive. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-conversational-ai-spending/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-conversational-ai...
- paxys 3y agoNot going to happen until Apple can fully control the bounds of the output generated by the LLM (which no one is capable of doing right now). A handful of instances of it spouting...unfriendly stuff is enough to dent Apple's reputation, and so they aren't going to take the risk.
- vrnvu 3y agoThere is a rumor that Apple is working on an "embedded" "SiriGPT". Imagine "ChatGPT" but on device, no API calls, no extra latency. And all apps on your device can use this "SiriGPT" instantly to enrich the user experience.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoLLM? Everyone has an LLM. They'll announce a PLM (personal language model) in a year and act like they were first.
- seydor 3y agoit will be more profitable if they sell the Siri entry point to the one who bothers to do the research , the same way they sell the search box to google.
- Aleklart 3y agoMay be Apple care about privacy?
- knodi123 3y agoSiri has been less performant than OK Google for something like 5 years, in my estimation.
- twobitshifter 3y agoYou can set up a Siri Shortcut linked to chatgpt and fire away your questions.
- quantisan 3y agoApple's own LLM and major Siri update is supposed to be coming in iOS 18 next year. So says the rumour, https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/ios-18-siri-improvements/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/ios-18-siri-improvement...
- sircastor 3y agoLLMs can't guarantee factuality. They're great for the conversational component, but they're a seriously bad and responding with reliably factual information. More important that its ability to deal with complexity would be an assistant's ability to respond to a request correctly.
- anonporridge 3y agoNothing and no one can guarantee factuality. That's a red herring.
- sircastor 3y agoThat's abusing a turn-of-phrase to provide a counter-argument. Of course no one can guarantee universal factuality. But relative to information we're seeking from an assistant (schedules, email data, messages, music preferences) it is very easy to obtain highly accurate data. But LLMs don't work like that. The conceptual model behind LLMs utilizes frequency to generate a reasonable response to a query. But that's a bad fit when you're looking for data accuracy that isn't represented by the model. If your model says most dental appointments occur on the 15th and responds so but my appointment is on the 17th, it's not only useless to me it's detrimental.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoYou underestimate how long it takes to create the marketing materials.
- mr_toad 3y agoIf I ask Siri what the weather is going to be I want a deterministic response, not some hallucinated answer based on some weather blog from 2020.