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Apple seems to be betting that something polished which is “less than state of the art” will sell better than something less polished and more advanced. Techni
by Closi 2y ago
Apple seems to be betting that something polished which is “less than state of the art” will sell better than something less polished and more advanced.
Technical capability is rarely more important than product market fit.
- sigmoid10 2y agoThe problem here is that for current AI systems, the state of the art is the one that has ironed out the most kinks. I.e. what you would expect from a polished product. That is basically ChatGPT with it's monstrous API that does tons of god knows what behind the scenes in addition to feeding text to an LLM, most of which was figured out by trial and error from user reports. There's no doubt that a modern LLM based Siri would be a much better product than the old one, but if they're not careful, they will fall into the same trap they did the last time introducing an assistant.
- tomashubelbauer 2y agoPrivacy is a part of the equation and while Apple could gather all the context off my phone's local data and give ChatGPT the whole thing to really give it the best shot and providing a useful and helpful answer, this would not be a polished product on all axes, mainly the responsiveness and privacy ones. The tradeoff of using local models for less than SoTA inferrence but with unbeatable privacy and latency seems right to me for Apple and what Apple customers want and expect.
- Closi 2y agoI think this is still a tech-centric view rather than a product-oriented view. E.g. Apple generating emojis using a diffusion model is clearly less SOTA than other image models, but could be a really neat feature from a product/user perspective. Would a better diffusion model help? Maybe, but it probably changes the product less than all the UI and tight integration work they will have done. If I was to guess, I would guess many more emoji's will get created through this feature than images generated in Microsoft's 'Image Creator' in Paint (I could be wrong - just my gut feel).
- viraptor 2y agoWhatsApp has integrated AI generated stickers almost a year ago. (https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/15/23832635/whatsapp-ai-generated-stickers-test-android-beta https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/15/23832635/whatsapp-ai-gene...) I'm not sure how much they're used globally, but there are people crazy about stickers and the quality of what I got was really decent already. There were already external apps available for this purpose for a while, so yeah, the interest is there.
- fennecbutt 2y agoMicrosoft SwiftKey has also been doing this for quite a while (not quite that long) as well.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoThe best AI experience right now isn't just using SOTA models, but using them in a way that plays to their strengths and avoids their weaknesses (hallucination, limited reasoning, etc). The way to minimize hallucination is to use LLMs to manipulate text (translate, summarize, query, reword, etc) rather than generate it out of thin air, and arguably Apple are doing this by integrating LLM use into the product and therefore controlling it's application, rather than just providing a chat interface that people are wont to use an hallucinating "search engine"/oracle.
- andruby 2y agoIndeed. And that has always been Apple’s forte.