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Apple WWDC Event Will Show Whether It Can Be a Force in AI Industry
- weikju 2y agoI'm more interested to see if Apple can make something useful out of this AI mess... And if Apple hasn't just become another trend-chaser.
- speedylight 2y agoThey will be if they were smart enough to exclude everyone who worked on Siri from their new AI projects.
- cjk2 2y agoI don't get the hate for Siri. If you know the constraints it's extremely useful and reliable.
- gnicholas 2y agoI use the Overcast app for listening to podcasts. Sometimes when I say "play Overcast" it will play, other times it will not. When it doesn't play, it will either say it doesn't understand, or it will say I need to unlock my iPhone. Or it will start a free trial of Apple Music and start playing songs by some band called Overcast. This is crazy. The app is extremely popular, and the command is very simple. I have also tried using different syntax ("tell the app Overcast to play", "play the Overcast app"), and have not been able to find anything that reliably works. It is similarly unreliable with navigation and calling restaurants. If I tell it to call Restaurant X in Palo Alto, it will tell me that it couldn't find that in my Contacts. No shit — I'm not asking about my Contacts. I have to literally tell it to search for the restaurant in Palo Alto, then listen to it tell me about the restaurant (how many stars, how far in which direction, that it can navigate or call), then tell it to call. There's no reason it shouldn't be a simple "call X in town Y". IME this used to work, but has been increasingly broken.
- cjk2 2y agoAh I just use it to control music when driving and adding stuff to the shopping list. I find any other tasks require a human. Not because of Siri as such but because the problem is deeply concerned with context and semantics.
- gnicholas 2y agoWhat command do you use to add things to a shopping list? I think Siri used to be more reliable, but as it has grown to be less closed-universe, it has (somewhat understandably) become worse at doing tasks that it used to be able to handle very reliably.
- warcher 2y agoI think the frustration comes around the constraints. It’s great for reminders and timers, and those meaningfully improve my life. It sometimes can successfully make a call. It interrupts me in the most obnoxious way at least once a week. But it seems almost willfully stupid when compared to its potential.
- emsy 2y agoI’m increasingly bearish on Apple. I have the impression that they basically make toys for adult these days (no, not that kind of toys). My initial amazement for the Vision was immediately dampened by the fact that it was released by Apple and realizing they get to decide what I’m allowed to run on it (you know, like on a kids device). I’m sure their AI will follow the same pattern: locked down and neutered to the effect of being a gimmick.
- verticalscaler 2y agohttps://archive.is/GeGwm https://archive.is/GeGwm THE CHATGPT EFFECT When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, everything changed. Federighi, the software chief, became a convert that Christmas break after he began playing around with the Microsoft-owned GitHub AI coding tool called Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI’s technology, said people familiar with his experience. After that moment, across Federighi’s software-engineering organization, employees were tasked with coming up with new ways of incorporating generative AI into products and given resources to pursue these projects, said former executives and engineers. At internal meetings, Federighi said that he had come to appreciate generative AI technology and that it would be incorporated into all aspects of Apple’s software. Craig played with CoPilot => "AI all the things!". Same as Google, just throw spaghetti at the wall. I dread the upcoming iOS updates it will be a clippy-everywhere nightmare.
- jamesy0ung 2y agoApple products usually have a decent level of polish, I hope it’ll be done in a useful way.
- verticalscaler 2y agoIt isn't difficult to predict at this point: It will be added as a minor gimmick to every app and mostly rolled back next version as the hype dies down and the embarrassing half assed implementations are mocked. I wouldn't even be surprised if they add it to the calculator app at first. Next version they'll keep the vaguely plausible integrations that people actually use. Which will be very few. Some of this will be justified internally as experimentation and data collection. This used to be called taste. In actuality it is because they don't want to be perceived by the markets as "falling behind". We gotta do something, this is a thing, and therefore.. arm flail All the incentives at play point squarely at enshitification.
- cjk2 2y agoI suspect similar. None of the AI stuff they have is particularly fantastic at the moment. I mean it's mostly used to suggest things which I am not interested and mix up cows and horses in Photos. Working with OpenAI is interesting. That means they can cast their proposition off or replace it later. Even they know it's a massive risk.
- yareal 2y agoDoes it need to be a force in the AI industry? Are we confident the ai industry is healthy and sustainable? I'm certainly not. Could Apple continue to just make good, desirable hardware and decent os decisions that many people like?
- rswail 2y agoThey have the largest installed base of AI engines in every iPhone, iPad, Apple silicon Mac. If they can't do anything useful with AI, no one can. Hopefully more than just identifying faces in photos. Siri needs an upgrade, it could become much more "conversational" and take advantage of the local processing instead of sending everything off to Apple servers to be processed.
- rvz 2y agoThis. Apple can gradually add AI capabilities in their products as they do not need to sell it urgently unlike the rest of the tech companies out there screaming about it to the roof tops. Like I said before, Apple will likely announce a hybrid AI solution for Siri for both online and offline capabilities. I expect them to eventually use a local LLM to race everyone to $0.
- bugbuddy 2y agoSo you are saying I should sell Nvidia?
- rvz 2y agoThere is a different reason to sell Nvidia and it also affects Apple as well and it is a geo-political issue with the US and China over Taiwan. Won't be surprised to see a scare in the AI industry and a wider disruption over chip manufacturing as tensions escalate. At least Apple is de-risking their chip manufacturing outside of China. [0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-leaving-china-diversifying-supply-chains-apple-tsmc-mazda-2023-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-leaving-china-dive...
- chucke1992 2y agothe thing is that the challenge to monetize AI. if AI won't allow apple to sell more devices - it won't work out.
- sottol 2y ago
- gnicholas 2y agoEven if they can't do anything better than other companies, if they can do it in a way that avoids having my questions sent to the cloud, I'll be much more likely to use it. I don't mind if it's a generation behind (and will increasingly feel this way as things progress), if the tradeoff is rock-solid privacy.
- sampa 2y agojust like it showed with Vision in VR industry?
- cjk2 2y agoThe AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom. I suspect Apple are the most likely organisation to be able to change this as they have a track record of taking existing technology and making it useful and demonstrating it effectively. If they can't do this or it's a disaster I expect it will by proxy reflect badly across the entire industry. This will be an interesting year.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago>The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else. would you imagine that less than a century later, we would have devices with more computing power than a million of those in our pockets? when AI industry stops obsessing over lobotomizing their models into being useless for anything except basic bitch customer support, content moderation and mediocre stack overflow substitute, there will be tons and tons of applications for generative AI. my own industry - gamedev - is within less than a decade from dialogue and audio being generated on the fly, with human writers doing maybe 10% of the work and voice actors just providing a few samples. of course, that will not happen until LLMs are allowed to produce anything but soulless garbage that strictly adheres to FAGMAN sensibilities.
- cjk2 2y agoNot really. Your point is hyperbole. Personal computing was a paradigm shift. This is a relatively minor change in a small subset of it.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
- aurareturn 2y agoI think of the most interesting aspects of Apple and AI is the fact that they will use OpenAI's models. I used to think that OpenAI would like to compete with Apple one day by changing the entire OS into a giant LLM. We got a hint of this when ChatGPT was big on its 3rd party apps and Function Calling. They may still have that goal but it's not realistic in 2024. But in the mean time, they have to compete with Google because Google can/will integrate their LLM models directly into Android - which means billions of people worldwide will use Google's LLMs. OpenAI needed a way to compete. It makes a ton of sense then that OpenAI would partner with Apple to distribute their models into billions of devices instantaneously. Apple also needs OpenAI because they're probably many years behind. For Apple, I assume they will get OpenAI's models directly instead of calling OpenAI's API which runs on Azure. Apple will likely need to build its own AI infrastructure to inference OpenAI's models for its billions of devices and they'll likely to market it with privacy features that ChatGPT don't bother with right now. I suspect that Apple will integrate smaller LLM models that can run on a tiny iPhone SoC NPU and make them free. Then they'll charge for Apple Intelligence Pro that does most of the inference in the cloud. One of my questions for Apple, if my speculation is correct, is how are they going to launch a service that inferences a model as large as GPT4 for their billions of devices worldwide? They didn't invest in server NPUs like Google did with their TPUs. They can't buy nearly enough Nvidia GPUs because they're supply constrained. They can't possibly use M2 Ultras because it's suboptimal for AI inferencing and very expensive to manufacture (134 billion transistors & glue 2x Max dies together). Perhaps Apple will only launch the service in the US first and charge a subscription for the GPT4-backed AI features. I don't see any other way Apple could scale so quickly. I did not think the Apple/OpenAI marriage would happen but it makes a lot of sense for both companies after some thought.
- lawgimenez 2y agoI’m sort of enjoying Gemini on Android Studio, it’s really helpful and I’m the most AI skeptical person. I’m half expecting for some AI on Xcode too but, you know it’s Xcode. It’s like the worst IDE in the history.
- maxehmookau 2y agoI genuinely disagree with the premise. Bolting generative AI on to its existing offering isn't in Apple's playbook. If they can genuinely improve their products by the use of these tools, then I expect to see something pretty special. But I doubt you'll see a drop-in Siri replacement using ChatGPT. Apple watched Google try essentially that and get ridiculed.
- theshrike79 2y agoI'll make a prediction: Apple will not mention "AI" during the event. The only time "AI" is uttered is when they're referencing OpenAI the company.
- astromd 2y agoYou’re already wrong. They’ve mentioned the word AI many times in the lead up to the event.
- theshrike79 2y agoI did specifically say “during the event” So far they’ve talked about machine learning like they do, not a single mention of AI
- aldanor 2y agoThey were smart enough to invent a new term, Apple Intelligence. You know, AI
- theshrike79 2y agoIt's referring to the whole platform of partially on device, partially in their private cloud -thing. During the presentation itself, they talked about machine learning, not "AI".
- astromd 2y agoApple doesn’t need to be a force in the AI industry. It needs to integrate the concepts into devices to make them more useful for everyday people.