8 ms·

Apple and Google avoid naming ChatGPT as their 'app of the year'

76 points by my12parsecs 3y ago

infotainment 3y ago
It does feel like a bit of a snub — my guess is they did so because they see ChatGPT as a direct competitor, and don’t want to draw attention away from their own current or upcoming generative AI efforts.
- pulse7 3y ago
  In this case they should rename their "the best apps and games of 2023" to "apps and games we would like you to use"...
  - irjustin 3y ago
    It was never anything else anyway
  - oleganza 3y ago
    After everything that happened over 2016-2023 don't people realise there is no such thing as "neutral source of information"? Even the neutral POV policy of wikipedia is constantly worked around by various actors by marking "bad" sources as biased or unverified, while "good" sources canonical and neutral.
    - josephg 3y ago
      > After everything that happened over 2016-2023 don't people realise there is no such thing as "neutral source of information"? A little bias is inevitable. But there's no reason to cynically throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can still strive for fairness and balance. We should still complain when we see blatantly biased source, and seek out good journalism. We'll just never fully achieve it. But thats ok. We can try anyway.
Euphorbium 3y ago
What does the app do that web interface does not?
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  Voice conversations I think. The voice is the most realistic I've ever heard, I spent over an hour on two occasions chatting with it.
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  What does the AllTrails app do that web interface does not?
  - rappatic 3y ago
    GPS navigation and route tracking, perhaps the most important features of a hiking app,
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      Not really award worthy in 2023 though.
- rnotaro 3y ago
  If I remember properly, voice2voice is only available natively on the mobile application. I remember seeing here that his default system prompt is also optimized for oral conversations.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > I remember seeing here that his default system prompt is also optimized for oral conversations. Voice2voice is great, but I find the way chatgpt constructs responses in oral conversations to be very soulless. It feels like I'm talking to the personification of a bland corporation. I'm not sure if it feels worse through voice because it sounds close to human, or if its the system prompt. I'd love to find a way to fix it. Does anyone have any suggestions of a good system prompt to add to make the AI loosen up a bit?
hartator 3y ago
Is it technically though? I still struggle to find any use to it in my daily life. It is a cool demo, but no one wants to read AI generated text from other people.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  I regularly use it for menial tasks and it has almost completely replaced searching documentations of major libraries for me. As a senior developer, it's a productivity gold mine if you learn how to use it correctly. But I wouldn't recommend it to any junior dev, because you need lots of experience to see when it starts hallucinating.
  - hartator 3y ago
    > I regularly use it for menial tasks Like random formal letter to AI? Maybe it is a societal problem more than a technical one if we all hate writing and reading these. I don’t get the search documentation part. It has obvious blind spots on many things and hallucinate on others.
    - sigmoid10 3y ago
      >Like random formal letter to AI? No, I'm talking about things like writing SQL queries (even complex ones), CMake files, Docker configs or plotting stuff in Python. Of course, if you're not already an expert in these things, you'll have a hard time distinguishing useful replies from hallucinations - that's why I said it's mostly for senior devs. Without expert knowledge, you will likely not be able to benefit from it in its current state. But if you have that and know how to write efficient queries, it can easily up your productivity by a factor of 10 (i.e. going back and forth for 6 minutes with GPT4 to make it get your requirements can save you an hour of work looking through documentations).
      - josephg 3y ago
        10x seems like a stretch, but I agree. I have a chatgpt window open most of my workday now too. "Hey chatgpt - help me write this mathematical equation in latex. Hey chatgpt - give me an example nodejs program that reads a line-delimited JSON file without loading the whole thing in memory first". "Hey chatgpt - What are the popular & good python libraries for drawing an SVG scatter plot of some data? Give me some example code for each library."
barkerja 3y ago
I might be in the minority here, but I agree with their decision. If you're judging purely on the app, it's not surprising. The app itself is about as basic as they come. On the Apple side, AllTrails won, and it's deserving of that win. It's made some incredible updates this past year with some topnotch design. Flighty would have been another very deserving win.
passwordoops 3y ago
I agree with people saying the app wasn't "all that"... But even it was the greatest thing since the iPhone, I don't see Apple nor Google giving them anything. If MSFT were still in the smart phone game however...
h1fra 3y ago
This article feels a bit disingenuous. They have no proof of that, and to be fair the ChatGPT is fairly basic, it has millions of users but that's it. I tend to think those awards are probably not "what is the most popular" but "what is the best showcase for our platform".
danpalmer 3y ago
This is a whole lot of nothing. These awards are and always have been a way of showcasing great apps on app platforms. They are not "what's the best thing in the world this year that has an app". ChatGPT is a boring app. It doesn't have a ton of platform integrations, it doesn't show off the capabilities of the platforms, it doesn't push any boundaries on what an app can be. The product might be great, but that's not the point. This is my personal opinion based on years of following Apple's awards, I don't have any inside info in my role about this and this is not my employer's opinion.
- blueboo 3y ago
  I think a strong argument can be made in the other way. I went running the other day and had a long conversation with ChatGPT. That sort of experience is absolutely pushing boundaries...but I can see that they aren't the boundaries that Apple wants to celebrate at this moment. Apple has set a pattern of rewarding beautiful, self-contained, cohesive, through-designed, snackable experiences. A technology that challenges the notion of a smartphone itself is basically out-of-bounds.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    If anything, ChatGPT even without platform integrations, make Apple/Google/Amazon look bad because the quality is so much higher than their assistants. It also doesn't showcase any of the platforms in particular, it doesn't try to be the "$platform killer app" of anything. I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      > I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms. I agree, but I think the crux of my point is that this is because ChatGPT the app doesn't stand out from a platform perspective, rather than because advertising ChatGPT would go against the platform goals. Essentially I have no real reason to question the integrity of the awards processes here, because they seem to be awarded for the same reasons as they always are, and that ChatGPT just doesn't tick the boxes they're looking for. I'm not naive enough to think some exec hasn't been happy with the convenience of this, but it seems a little conspiracy-theory like to assume malice here.
gardenhedge 3y ago
I chuckled reading the ones they picked. ChatGPT is clearly the app of the year without a doubt
llm_nerd 3y ago
This article seems to be conflating a lot of things. Saying that they avoided naming it like it was the given choice is quite the flawed assumption. The ChatGPT app itself was a very thin veneer over an online service. It utilizes almost no facilities of the smartphone client, has no local AI or unique intelligence of the device. Indeed, OpenAI left the field open and before they came out with their own there were a myriad of competing facades that were effectively interchangeable. I don't see why that would earn app of the year. I wouldn't even put it in the general conversation.
bravetraveler 3y ago
This feels appropriate Things that give my phone mobile-centric improvements winning instead of a website wrapper

76 points by my12parsecs 3y ago

It does feel like a bit of a snub — my guess is they did so because they see ChatGPT as a direct competitor, and don’t want to draw attention away from their own current or upcoming generative AI efforts.

pulse7 3y ago
In this case they should rename their "the best apps and games of 2023" to "apps and games we would like you to use"...
- irjustin 3y ago
  It was never anything else anyway
- oleganza 3y ago
  After everything that happened over 2016-2023 don't people realise there is no such thing as "neutral source of information"? Even the neutral POV policy of wikipedia is constantly worked around by various actors by marking "bad" sources as biased or unverified, while "good" sources canonical and neutral.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > After everything that happened over 2016-2023 don't people realise there is no such thing as "neutral source of information"? A little bias is inevitable. But there's no reason to cynically throw the baby out with the bathwater. We can still strive for fairness and balance. We should still complain when we see blatantly biased source, and seek out good journalism. We'll just never fully achieve it. But thats ok. We can try anyway.

Euphorbium 3y ago

What does the app do that web interface does not?

WXLCKNO 3y ago
Voice conversations I think. The voice is the most realistic I've ever heard, I spent over an hour on two occasions chatting with it.
knallfrosch 3y ago
What does the AllTrails app do that web interface does not?
- rappatic 3y ago
  GPS navigation and route tracking, perhaps the most important features of a hiking app,
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Not really award worthy in 2023 though.
rnotaro 3y ago
If I remember properly, voice2voice is only available natively on the mobile application. I remember seeing here that his default system prompt is also optimized for oral conversations.
- josephg 3y ago
  > I remember seeing here that his default system prompt is also optimized for oral conversations. Voice2voice is great, but I find the way chatgpt constructs responses in oral conversations to be very soulless. It feels like I'm talking to the personification of a bland corporation. I'm not sure if it feels worse through voice because it sounds close to human, or if its the system prompt. I'd love to find a way to fix it. Does anyone have any suggestions of a good system prompt to add to make the AI loosen up a bit?

hartator 3y ago

Is it technically though? I still struggle to find any use to it in my daily life. It is a cool demo, but no one wants to read AI generated text from other people.

sigmoid10 3y ago
I regularly use it for menial tasks and it has almost completely replaced searching documentations of major libraries for me. As a senior developer, it's a productivity gold mine if you learn how to use it correctly. But I wouldn't recommend it to any junior dev, because you need lots of experience to see when it starts hallucinating.
- hartator 3y ago
  > I regularly use it for menial tasks Like random formal letter to AI? Maybe it is a societal problem more than a technical one if we all hate writing and reading these. I don’t get the search documentation part. It has obvious blind spots on many things and hallucinate on others.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    >Like random formal letter to AI? No, I'm talking about things like writing SQL queries (even complex ones), CMake files, Docker configs or plotting stuff in Python. Of course, if you're not already an expert in these things, you'll have a hard time distinguishing useful replies from hallucinations - that's why I said it's mostly for senior devs. Without expert knowledge, you will likely not be able to benefit from it in its current state. But if you have that and know how to write efficient queries, it can easily up your productivity by a factor of 10 (i.e. going back and forth for 6 minutes with GPT4 to make it get your requirements can save you an hour of work looking through documentations).
    - josephg 3y ago
      10x seems like a stretch, but I agree. I have a chatgpt window open most of my workday now too. "Hey chatgpt - help me write this mathematical equation in latex. Hey chatgpt - give me an example nodejs program that reads a line-delimited JSON file without loading the whole thing in memory first". "Hey chatgpt - What are the popular & good python libraries for drawing an SVG scatter plot of some data? Give me some example code for each library."

barkerja 3y ago

I might be in the minority here, but I agree with their decision. If you're judging purely on the app, it's not surprising. The app itself is about as basic as they come. On the Apple side, AllTrails won, and it's deserving of that win. It's made some incredible updates this past year with some topnotch design. Flighty would have been another very deserving win.

passwordoops 3y ago

I agree with people saying the app wasn't "all that"... But even it was the greatest thing since the iPhone, I don't see Apple nor Google giving them anything. If MSFT were still in the smart phone game however...

h1fra 3y ago

This article feels a bit disingenuous. They have no proof of that, and to be fair the ChatGPT is fairly basic, it has millions of users but that's it. I tend to think those awards are probably not "what is the most popular" but "what is the best showcase for our platform".

danpalmer 3y ago

This is a whole lot of nothing. These awards are and always have been a way of showcasing great apps on app platforms. They are not "what's the best thing in the world this year that has an app". ChatGPT is a boring app. It doesn't have a ton of platform integrations, it doesn't show off the capabilities of the platforms, it doesn't push any boundaries on what an app can be. The product might be great, but that's not the point. This is my personal opinion based on years of following Apple's awards, I don't have any inside info in my role about this and this is not my employer's opinion.

blueboo 3y ago
I think a strong argument can be made in the other way. I went running the other day and had a long conversation with ChatGPT. That sort of experience is absolutely pushing boundaries...but I can see that they aren't the boundaries that Apple wants to celebrate at this moment. Apple has set a pattern of rewarding beautiful, self-contained, cohesive, through-designed, snackable experiences. A technology that challenges the notion of a smartphone itself is basically out-of-bounds.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  If anything, ChatGPT even without platform integrations, make Apple/Google/Amazon look bad because the quality is so much higher than their assistants. It also doesn't showcase any of the platforms in particular, it doesn't try to be the "$platform killer app" of anything. I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    > I think it's understandable that these platforms aren't giving ChatGPT any awards. It is not helping to make the platform stand out against other platforms. I agree, but I think the crux of my point is that this is because ChatGPT the app doesn't stand out from a platform perspective, rather than because advertising ChatGPT would go against the platform goals. Essentially I have no real reason to question the integrity of the awards processes here, because they seem to be awarded for the same reasons as they always are, and that ChatGPT just doesn't tick the boxes they're looking for. I'm not naive enough to think some exec hasn't been happy with the convenience of this, but it seems a little conspiracy-theory like to assume malice here.

gardenhedge 3y ago

I chuckled reading the ones they picked. ChatGPT is clearly the app of the year without a doubt

llm_nerd 3y ago

This article seems to be conflating a lot of things. Saying that they avoided naming it like it was the given choice is quite the flawed assumption. The ChatGPT app itself was a very thin veneer over an online service. It utilizes almost no facilities of the smartphone client, has no local AI or unique intelligence of the device. Indeed, OpenAI left the field open and before they came out with their own there were a myriad of competing facades that were effectively interchangeable. I don't see why that would earn app of the year. I wouldn't even put it in the general conversation.

bravetraveler 3y ago

This feels appropriate Things that give my phone mobile-centric improvements winning instead of a website wrapper