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The biggest lesson of the last two years is this: There's so much INERTIA in this industry, way more inertia than what most people believed. Let me explain: In

The biggest lesson of the last two years is this: There's so much INERTIA in this industry, way more inertia than what most people believed. Let me explain: In the good old GPT-3 era, we already had iOS Shortcuts that could receive voice commands from the user, send it to GPT-3 API, and show/speak the results. I had it on my Apple Watch. It was just one tap away. This made me and many enthusiasts optimistic about receiving official support of such features on the iPhone and Apple Watch. Fast forward two years later, and the AI penetration landscape doesn't look good. Apple just started thinking about "doing something" about "this AI thing" (which they don't call AI btw, but that's Apple being Apple). Google has a redundant Gemini app on stock Android which overlaps with Google Assistant capabilities (so Google Assistant is not actually equipped with large LMs yet), Alexa is still the same Alexa, and Microsoft Copilot is half-baked in terms of UI/UX (I still don't know why Microsoft can't build decent user apps). The lesson is clear: There is so much inertia in this industry that our jobs will be safe for the foreseeable future. Everyone was afraid of AI-generated content polluting the web. Well, here we are, and aside from some ridiculously obvious content which is generated by AI, the web is still the same web we knew in 2022. It's ridiculous how long ordinary users have to wait for this AI stuff to become officially available on their handheld devices by these companies. Like I said, I and many people were enjoying LLMs on iDevices way before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT and its app companion, and way way before Apple even introduces its own version. Speaking of Apple's LLM features, do you think they will be bundled with the rest of Apple One service package? Business-wise, it makes sense for Apple to charge people for iLLM/Siri Pro/ or whatever they call it.

kredd 2y ago
I agree about the jobs, but not about the web part. Any image or blob of text have absolutely lost its meaning. Every comment has an undertone of “is it written by a human?” question surrounding it. It wasn’t really the case 5 years ago, and as it became ubiquitous, even my friends who are not in tech-adjacent fields feel the same way. Benefit of the doubt that one is a human behind a comment has been shifted, so now you have to prove you’re not actually an LLM-bot. Unfortunately it’s only going to get worse. Just like how digital art has zero significance nowadays (hay-days of 2008 deviantART, when some digital art was considered impressive, is gone), so will a lot of other things. My only hope is, it will boost something else that we don’t know yet, or maybe we’ll go back to prioritizing the reality.
surfpel 2y ago
What you’re missing is that Apple doesn’t build products or services just to offer random new things, like Google or Microsoft do. Offerings have to be refined and fit within their product vision. I would be surprised if they released a ChatGPT style chat bot. Likely it will just improve the quality of Siri and search, among other things. I wouldn’t be surprised if Siri has already been benefiting from recent developments. You’re also implying that they’re moving slowly because they’re a lumbering behemoth, but really they’re just being cautious with an immature and potentially volatile technology. Think about it: GPT-DAN, free flights and cars being offered by ai chat bots… at Apple scale that would be disastrous.

kredd 2y ago

I agree about the jobs, but not about the web part. Any image or blob of text have absolutely lost its meaning. Every comment has an undertone of “is it written by a human?” question surrounding it. It wasn’t really the case 5 years ago, and as it became ubiquitous, even my friends who are not in tech-adjacent fields feel the same way. Benefit of the doubt that one is a human behind a comment has been shifted, so now you have to prove you’re not actually an LLM-bot. Unfortunately it’s only going to get worse. Just like how digital art has zero significance nowadays (hay-days of 2008 deviantART, when some digital art was considered impressive, is gone), so will a lot of other things. My only hope is, it will boost something else that we don’t know yet, or maybe we’ll go back to prioritizing the reality.

surfpel 2y ago

What you’re missing is that Apple doesn’t build products or services just to offer random new things, like Google or Microsoft do. Offerings have to be refined and fit within their product vision. I would be surprised if they released a ChatGPT style chat bot. Likely it will just improve the quality of Siri and search, among other things. I wouldn’t be surprised if Siri has already been benefiting from recent developments. You’re also implying that they’re moving slowly because they’re a lumbering behemoth, but really they’re just being cautious with an immature and potentially volatile technology. Think about it: GPT-DAN, free flights and cars being offered by ai chat bots… at Apple scale that would be disastrous.