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I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. For the past decade Apple’s product lineu

I tried it for the first time last night and I was not too impressed. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same (faster, lighter, etc), while they invested heavily in spatial computing (flop) and autonomous vehicles (scrapped). All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Instead, OpenAI came along and ate their lunch and Apple was caught completely flat-footed. And now they’re way behind. It’s shocking to me how bad the above bets and non-investments have played out for Apple. Tim Cook needs to ride off into the sunset. It’s been a good ride. He ran the business well. They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets.

replyifuagree 2y ago
Yep, Tim Cook is a pretty amazing at operations. Creative leader of creatives though, he just isn't that.
snowwrestler 2y ago
I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.
- archeantus 2y ago
  You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher. My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
  - nmfisher 2y ago
    Apple is also not in the business of losing money. It's much easier to make something new and shiny when you can run it at a loss and your investors are happy for you to light piles of money on fire year after year. That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).
    - FabHK 2y ago
      On-device also preserves privacy. I think that's the main reason Apple prefers it, not the cost of servers.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Not really, for those of us that rather speak our native languages.
    - thiht 2y ago
      FWIW I use ChatGPT’s voice feature in French and it works extremely well
      - m_fayer 2y ago
        Interestingly, for my elderly Russian-speaking mom’s benefit, I had an English conversation with it and asked it to reply only in Russian. It complied, and spoke and reasoned no worse than usual.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Not yet. Voice assistants will massively benefit from LLM integration which will benefit OpenAI for sure. It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
  - ManuelKiessling 2y ago
    I think there is an important distinction to make. Siri is actually two things — there are voice informers (“Please explain how photosynthesis works”) and voice assistants (“Remind me to call Dave when I reach my work location”). The former is really straightforward to implement with an LLM — it’s basically what an LLM is. The latter is a whole different story.
    - kaba0 2y ago
      I mean, the latter is basically OpenAI’s assistant, that has some APIs it can autonomously call. The open problem here is making it on-device, and privacy preserving. Though I’m optimistic about this, as Apple has bought up a huge number of AI startups in the last couple of years, so they are probably onto something.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      It's not really. I've done the latter. You just prompt it with "If I'm asking you to call someone, please output only "<CALL>" and the name of the person". Then capture that keyword. It works fine like that.
bugbuddy 2y ago
The Age of Diminishing Return for Digital Innovations began right after the smartphone and it has only become more pronounced since. My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.
- archeantus 2y ago
  I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function. So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    > So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content). An all knowing ever listening assistant strapped to your wrist, completely connected to all of your accounts financial, medical, social media, monitoring your vitals, measuring your acceleration, deceleration, steps, altitude, and gps position, bundling it up, and then selling it to whoever wants it for pennies on the dollar.
    - apantel 2y ago
      This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden. The good news is that it’s a software solution, not hardware. Open source can only win in software. So it has a chance. Open source, self-hosted, all-knowing assistant connected to the Internet, that doesn’t leak data to companies, and that filters out all their ads, messaging, and CTA’s. Tech-savvy people will be able to have one of these pretty soon even if big tech wins the broader market.
crooked-v 2y ago
> All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.
matrix87 2y ago
> They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets. ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020
jdlshore 2y ago
> For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.
- yerwenber 2y ago
  > And now they’re way behind. I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
- archeantus 2y ago
  See “faster, lighter, etc” :D
- nickburns 2y ago
  if by "complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup" you mean took their own chip production in-house, i agree. most revolutionary thing Apple has done since the iPhone.
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Not sure how credible Snazzy Lab's claims are, but supposedly Apple Silicon might be hitting diminishing returns, at least for now- Apple's Silicon Magic Is Over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo
  - kingkongjaffa 2y ago
    They still power the best and most battery efficient laptops on the market, despite diminishing returns.
    - arvinsim 2y ago
      Whoever is in that market is already served by the current offerings. I doubt anyone would be scrambling to get the M4 if that it is just mote of the same.
samatman 2y ago
The last decade has included the AirPods and the Watch. They sold more AirPods than there are people in the United States.
- bingbingbing777 2y ago
  Yes, Apple sells products globally.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  A couple of iPhone accessories is hardly innovation.
FireBeyond 2y ago
The gushing of the Apple faithful was eye rolling. > Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!” I mean, oof.
ijidak 2y ago
Tim Cook is Apple's Ballmer. Great with the numbers, bad with innovation. They need a Nadella -- e.g. someone who follows and navigates trends with great skill. Cook knows he needs to innovate, but he doesn't know how. I honestly think he follows the rumors moreso than the rumors follow him. Media: Is Apple going to do a smartwatch? Cook: Hey guys, we should do a smartwatch. Media: Is Apple going to do a car? Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car. Media: Is Apple going to do a headset? Etc. etc. The smartwatch worked out. But honestly, I feel that was moreso accidental low-hanging fruit. Like Ballmer, Cook has done an amazing job maximizing shareholder value by good old financial execution. But, in an industry like tech, you can only live off of old products for so long.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > Media: Is Apple going to do a car? > Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car. It was Jobs’ idea, not Tim’s.
audunw 2y ago
OpenAI isn’t really a competitor to Siri. It’s a competitor to Google Search. And Apple has never been in the search market. OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services. Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants. Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …” Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.
- archeantus 2y ago
  It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.

replyifuagree 2y ago

Yep, Tim Cook is a pretty amazing at operations. Creative leader of creatives though, he just isn't that.

snowwrestler 2y ago

I’m confused. Which of Apple’s lunch is OpenAI eating? OpenAI does not offer a voice assistant that competes with Siri. Google and Amazon do, and their usage is way down as well; voice assistants in general have lost consumer preference.

archeantus 2y ago
You must not have tried the voice feature in the ChatGPT app yet. Try it out, it’s amazing. It pairs the power and functionality of a conversational voice assistant with all the power of ChatGPT and LLMs. Obviously the integration isn’t as convenient as Siri’s yet, but the utility is infinitely higher. My point is that it seems pretty clear that the future is in the space that OpenAI is right now. And that isn’t a bet that Apple was investing in very heavily.
- nmfisher 2y ago
  Apple is also not in the business of losing money. It's much easier to make something new and shiny when you can run it at a loss and your investors are happy for you to light piles of money on fire year after year. That's also probably why most AI research published by Apple is about on-device inference. It's expensive to run inference servers at scale. Apple is a hardware company, so it makes sense they want to focus on what you can do on a local device (or more accurately, how they can sell you a new piece of hardware).
  - FabHK 2y ago
    On-device also preserves privacy. I think that's the main reason Apple prefers it, not the cost of servers.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Not really, for those of us that rather speak our native languages.
  - thiht 2y ago
    FWIW I use ChatGPT’s voice feature in French and it works extremely well
    - m_fayer 2y ago
      Interestingly, for my elderly Russian-speaking mom’s benefit, I had an English conversation with it and asked it to reply only in Russian. It complied, and spoke and reasoned no worse than usual.
wkat4242 2y ago
Not yet. Voice assistants will massively benefit from LLM integration which will benefit OpenAI for sure. It's just that nobody has built one yet, I'm surprised because it's a very suitable application. But I think the cost is much higher than the current scripted models, which means there must be a payment model attached. Right now all the major voice assistants are free and I have a feeling they're all waiting to see who makes the first paid LLM-based product, and how the market reacts.
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  I think there is an important distinction to make. Siri is actually two things — there are voice informers (“Please explain how photosynthesis works”) and voice assistants (“Remind me to call Dave when I reach my work location”). The former is really straightforward to implement with an LLM — it’s basically what an LLM is. The latter is a whole different story.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    I mean, the latter is basically OpenAI’s assistant, that has some APIs it can autonomously call. The open problem here is making it on-device, and privacy preserving. Though I’m optimistic about this, as Apple has bought up a huge number of AI startups in the last couple of years, so they are probably onto something.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    It's not really. I've done the latter. You just prompt it with "If I'm asking you to call someone, please output only "<CALL>" and the name of the person". Then capture that keyword. It works fine like that.

bugbuddy 2y ago

The Age of Diminishing Return for Digital Innovations began right after the smartphone and it has only become more pronounced since. My layperson’s prediction for the next big thing is cheaper and cheaper techs. I believe that there will be a race to the bottom. Both hardware and software will become commodity. Even all these new AI technologies will become commodities. The true Cyberpunk take is that technology is boring and commonplace.

archeantus 2y ago
I can see that happening. My vision for the future is that voice assistants and LLMs will converge into something as useful and powerful as “Computer” in Star Trek. And that this assistant that will know you and all of your accounts/online profiles, will only need a microphone and an internet connection to function. So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content).
- randmeerkat 2y ago
  > So the Apple Watch, for example, could be everything you need to carry around because the voice assistant can literally do everything you can possible think of (besides consume social media and YouTube content). An all knowing ever listening assistant strapped to your wrist, completely connected to all of your accounts financial, medical, social media, monitoring your vitals, measuring your acceleration, deceleration, steps, altitude, and gps position, bundling it up, and then selling it to whoever wants it for pennies on the dollar.
  - apantel 2y ago
    This is going to be an absolutely enormous market, and it would be really good if an open source option wins it, instead of another big tech walled garden. The good news is that it’s a software solution, not hardware. Open source can only win in software. So it has a chance. Open source, self-hosted, all-knowing assistant connected to the Internet, that doesn’t leak data to companies, and that filters out all their ads, messaging, and CTA’s. Tech-savvy people will be able to have one of these pretty soon even if big tech wins the broader market.

crooked-v 2y ago

> All while totally neglecting the industry they pioneered (Siri) and should have been perfecting. Going by the rumors, there should be some interesting announcements at WWDC that may explain where all their effort has been going instead of improving the current version of Siri.

matrix87 2y ago

> They need an innovative CEO at the helm that can make better bets. ARM chips maybe? How the hell do you space something like that out? That's like the only thing of consequence that any of these companies have achieved since 2020

jdlshore 2y ago

> For the past decade Apple’s product lineup has pretty much remained the same You seem to have forgotten the M1 Mac, which was released in 2020. It was followed by the complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup, all to critical and popular acclaim.

yerwenber 2y ago
> And now they’re way behind. I’d say “way” is a stretch, and the technologies that largely are making it such could be argued were popularized by ggml which was written originally for the M1 platform.
archeantus 2y ago
See “faster, lighter, etc” :D
nickburns 2y ago
if by "complete overhaul and revitalization of the Mac lineup" you mean took their own chip production in-house, i agree. most revolutionary thing Apple has done since the iPhone.
Apocryphon 2y ago
Not sure how credible Snazzy Lab's claims are, but supposedly Apple Silicon might be hitting diminishing returns, at least for now- Apple's Silicon Magic Is Over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOlXmv9EiPo
- kingkongjaffa 2y ago
  They still power the best and most battery efficient laptops on the market, despite diminishing returns.
  - arvinsim 2y ago
    Whoever is in that market is already served by the current offerings. I doubt anyone would be scrambling to get the M4 if that it is just mote of the same.

samatman 2y ago

The last decade has included the AirPods and the Watch. They sold more AirPods than there are people in the United States.

bingbingbing777 2y ago
Yes, Apple sells products globally.
asadotzler 2y ago
A couple of iPhone accessories is hardly innovation.

FireBeyond 2y ago

The gushing of the Apple faithful was eye rolling. > Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!” I mean, oof.

ijidak 2y ago

Tim Cook is Apple's Ballmer. Great with the numbers, bad with innovation. They need a Nadella -- e.g. someone who follows and navigates trends with great skill. Cook knows he needs to innovate, but he doesn't know how. I honestly think he follows the rumors moreso than the rumors follow him. Media: Is Apple going to do a smartwatch? Cook: Hey guys, we should do a smartwatch. Media: Is Apple going to do a car? Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car. Media: Is Apple going to do a headset? Etc. etc. The smartwatch worked out. But honestly, I feel that was moreso accidental low-hanging fruit. Like Ballmer, Cook has done an amazing job maximizing shareholder value by good old financial execution. But, in an industry like tech, you can only live off of old products for so long.

andsoitis 2y ago
> Media: Is Apple going to do a car? > Cook: Hey, guys. Maybe we should do a car. It was Jobs’ idea, not Tim’s.

audunw 2y ago

OpenAI isn’t really a competitor to Siri. It’s a competitor to Google Search. And Apple has never been in the search market. OpenAI doesn’t work without internet. Siri does. OpenAI can’t do anything on your phone. Siri can. They’re fundamentally different services. Yes, whatever Apple does with Siri next will be LLM based and will compete with other on-device LLM assistants. But I expect that to be a fairly different market from the cloud-based LLM assistants. Hell, the next Siri might just forward questions to a third party cloud based LLM assistant for answers to complex questions. Like it does with google now and did with wolfram alpha at one point Though I expect Apple is also waiting for the quality of LLMl AIs to be good enough. Even ChatGPT 4 isn’t really good enough to be trusted. They’re way too confident when they should be answering “I don’t know” or “I’m unsure but I’m guessing the answer is: …” Like, what Microsoft is doing is absolutely reckless. It’s insane to integrate an AI assistant that constantly and confidently lies to you into the OS.

archeantus 2y ago
It’s not a competitor to Siri…yet. But it’s pretty easy to see the two converging in the near future. The best way to make sure that your voice assistant is used and useful is to back it with an LLM that literally does and knows everything. That’s the future OpenAI is chasing, and the one Apple should be chasing. I’m hopeful that this year brings some quick advancements in this area. But judging by the fact that it’s a year behind OpenAI in the timing, it’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t behind right now.