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Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives
- nuz 2y agoLots of anti AI narrative in the news lately. Not to be cynical but I'd hate to suspect it partially has to do with it threatening their business model.
- retrocryptid 2y agoOr maybe it's because LLMs don't live up to the hype.
- bearjaws 2y agoWe've had Sama doing a world tour saying its going to displace so many jobs people will try to kill him. We have a hardware company pretending that just adding more TOPS is going to get us to AGI. We have AGI benchmarks that don't even test for AGI (how can you be 50% AGI...) At some point it has to deliver insane value, and that point is soon because the numbers aren't adding up. People are realizing it's good at like 30 of the 3000 things its proposed to do.
- nemo44x 2y agoIt's just the hype cycle - happens for everything. We are going over the top part of it now.
- swatcoder 2y agoAlternate take: companies are starting to productize the technology breakthrough of 2023 and the products that are coming out range from underwhelming to worrisome, which doesn't deliver on the breakthrough's hype. While part of the 2023 hype cycle was built on doomer fantasies of a massive and proximate labor disruption, I don't see a lot of people in the news industry feeling like their "business model is threatened" by Recall and Apple Intelligence, or even by ChatGPT and Copilot. I don't think that's what's driving the coverage.
- pjc50 2y agoUnlimited pseudo-articles with no connection to reality are certainly a threat to news, but not one we should be celebrating.
- revskill 2y agoAI is a marmketing strategy.
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- throwup238 2y agohttps://archive.ph/X5Uoq https://archive.ph/X5Uoq
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- whywhywhywhy 2y agoI felt invoking the original Macintosh tagline "For The Rest of Us" to describe what feels like a hastily shoved together selection of OpenAI API calls and some aesthetically tasteless diffusion models particularly strange. Not to mention the reveal was extremely strange and almost felt like they were not releasing anything at all for the first 15 minutes before they showed it in action, almost felt very self conscious. I feel that level of tagline should have only been invoked when they truly manage to ship something on even the baseline of their competitors today in a (wishfully) local and secure way.
- retrocryptid 2y agoIt's as if apple had a pair of visionary co-founders who are no longer with the company and the people left are excellent at getting things done but don't have an intuitive understanding of what people want.
- zombiwoof 2y agoCorrect but I would argue after Siri hasn’t improved in 15 years they can’t even execute to get things done Hence the WwDC was no live demos and all “future promised” features we have seen everywhere else already
- retrocryptid 2y agoI don't know why apple passed on kuato (the next version of Siri from SRI.) I think it was around the time Jobs was getting seriously ill.
- fh9302 2y agoApple Intelligence doesn't use OpenAI at all. Siri and writing tools can tap into ChatGPT to compose text, e.g. create a story but that requires approval from the user. Claiming that all Apple did was "hastily shoved together selection of OpenAI API calls" is a misrepresentation of what Apple showed.
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- nottorp 2y agoBy the way, where's the killer app for the Vision Pro? :)
- bluSCALE4 2y agoPiano Vision is probably in the works.
- nottorp 2y agoOoo pretty: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/18/apple-vision-cheaper-halts-work-pro-model-headset/ https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/18/apple-vision-cheaper-halts-wo... "Report: Apple halts work on Vision Pro, aims to release cheaper Vision headset next year"
- agilob 2y agoApple should be simply more honest and say "we want more of your money" https://i.redd.it/ykx39wqq427d1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/ykx39wqq427d1.jpeg
- tflol 2y agoOr "we know this isn't practical but we need to get this shit on our resumes while it's still relevant"
- thebruce87m 2y agoThat’s implicit for any for-profit company.
- neilv 2y agoRight now, the main consumer uses of LLMs and generative AI seem to be for cheating at homework and their jobs, when quality is not a high priority.
- greenpizza13 2y agoIt's hard to know if this take is meant to be taken seriously... it's so detached from at least how people on HN use LLMs. "Cheating at homework." Is a calculator cheating? Was using encyclopedias cheating? What about wikipedia? What about Wolfram Alpha? This mentality that one must do all work originally or it's cheating is not how learning works / should work. We should teach kids how to leverage all the tools they can to find the right answer and use critical thinking to be confident the answer is right. If we discourage learning to use these tools we'll actually make kids more likely to just trust the tools at their word when they do go sneakily use them. "... and their jobs." I'm a software engineer and AI has made the process of debugging issues and implementing common patterns so much faster and less error prone. It's because I'm a highly skilled engineer who knows what to look for (same as when we browse stack overflow) and how to identify good and bad patterns. It's not laziness, and the work must be high quality, and now I have a tool which helps me get more done in less time without sacrificing quality.
- neilv 2y agoI said "consumer", not HN niche. Pedagogy is not about marketing spin of cheating as "tools at their disposal". There are often reasons for having learning exercises, and reasons when introducing tools to that. When you go to the gym, you don't use a forklift for the free weights, and you don't slap a motor on the stationary bike.
- AlexandrB 2y ago> Is a calculator cheating? Yes if the point of the exercise is to improve your mental arithmetic skills. It's a bit arbitrary but it's not complicated. This is the same way that steroids is cheating - the competition is defined such that PED are considered cheating, so using them is cheating.
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- thepasswordis 2y agoIt certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to the economy? AGI? It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Yes incremental (in this case a large increment!) improvements in the way we interact with machines. But humans stay winning.
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- tmpz22 2y agoIf it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?
- pjc50 2y agoNot like you have a choice? Reputation for those two is kind of irrelevant.
- cogman10 2y agoHow did big tech walk back crypto, ML, Web 2.0? They really don't need to walk back anything. If the features are too expensive to support and ultimately unused, then they'll just quietly kill them off. Otherwise, it'll just be another feature in the feature lists. Not something that really buys anything but also not something making them a lot of money.
- dag11 2y agoI'm struggling to think of any mainstream big tech products that incorporated crypto at all. Besides some financial apps adding an additional tab for it.
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- elpakal 2y agoHmm. That would be like asking them to explain why you need fast code—you could easily argue you don't, but it _can_ make your experience a lot better. There's a weird rush to market right now where there are a lot of examples of these LLMs being wrong which do not help, but don't forget, AI has been around for a long time (ever googled something?).
- retrocryptid 2y agoI know Apple is relevant because they have a lot of money. But when was the last time their products were relevant? 2008 w/ the iPhone? 2010 with the iPad? 2002 w/ the iPod? MacBooks in 1998? Most of my family uses iPhones and it's painful to watch them struggle with basic tasks. My mom tries to find out how to access gmail instead of me.com. My brother downloads yet another app to add metadata to pictures. No one at work seems to know how to upload pictures as JPEGs (I think they default to AVIFs now. Not a problem, but it was a super-secret change to the defaults, and easy to support on the server, but we didn't hear about it until our users started complaining. I know there are people who positively love their iPhone and the status it apparently confers in their friends group. But I've never understood why a device from a secretive developer-hostile company is supposed to be some amazing tool. It's a miniature computer with built-in wireless network and a poorly integrated phone app. It's innovation seemed to me to be how well they were able to convince Verizon to finance the phone so users wouldn't have sticker-shock. So "apple intelligence" is just repackaging other people's stuff in a way that their users can digest? That's not a surprise. I'm just waiting for my family to start yammering on about how Steve Jobs just added AI to their phones and no one else has such features even though Steve Jobs is dead and LLMs have been a thing for YEARS.
- mrkramer 2y agoApple is iPhone company but they accumulated so much cash and talent that they can take a swing at anything they want.
- retrocryptid 2y agoExcept cars and second gen vr headsets.
- pjc50 2y ago> So "apple intelligence" is just repackaging other people's stuff in a way that their users can digest? HN really underestimates how important this is to billions of consumers. Having said that, last year someone I knew went from following every Apple event to buying a Nothing phone (Android), because Apple were offering nothing new for unreasonable prices. The iPhone diminishing returns era is here. Even the US might fix the "wrong colour in chat" problem.
- notmine1337 2y ago> Microsoft’s new Recall feature keeps track of everything you’ve done on your device so you can find things again easily? Yes, we can do that, too. Aged like milk...
- xyzzy4747 2y ago"Nobody can explain why we need the internet in our lives" Soon people might figure out you technically need nothing except a lean-to for cover from the elements and some basic food.
- righthand 2y agoThis is facetious, the magic of the internet was instantly realized but perhaps not immediately embraced full on. The magic of LLMs is still being felt out from the tech it’s based on. Send signals between machines is a lot bigger and different than dump everything into a statistical model.
- jlarocco 2y agoHas anybody really said that about the internet, though? I've never heard it. Even immediately after the .com bubble burst it was still obvious the web had a ton of potential for communication, knowledge sharing, etc. The only thing AI seems good at is pumping out low quality "content", and there was already too much of that before.
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- ltbarcly3 2y agoYada-yada-yada, we don't need a lot of things, depending on how you define 'need'. It is an interesting philosophical question, but when analyzing what products a company decides to bring to market it is completely irrelevant. You can't make money fulfilling 'needs' unless there is also demand, but you can certainly make money fulfilling demand regardless of what some newspaper decides you 'need'. (I would imagine the next FT headline will be 'Starbucks can't explain why people need coffee', after all why spend $4 and wait in line when you can just take $0.01 caffeine pill.)
- erulabs 2y agoone could say that what the market is is simply the lack of newspapers having the ability to decide what people do and don’t need
- righthand 2y agoAll people are doing and can think to do is just dump all their data and company secrets into a third party LLM because that’s all you can do with an LLM in order to discuss said data with no one. At best an LLM should be a reasoning engine but everyone wants a “do my work for me” engine. There are some small ways can enhance your life but consider this, we already had type aheads, document templates and generators. Adding an heir of randomness into these things might make them flashier but not necessarily more useful. When OpenAI starts announcing products from all the data people dumped into their models, no one will be laughing. Enjoy the sherlocking while it happens to your company.
- seydor 2y agoWhy don't we have more robots now? We ve supposedly been waiting for decades for computer vision and navigation to be solved, and now it is. I can think of quite a few things that i want robots to do right now. I don't want more touchscreens
- nharada 2y ago1. It’s not solved 2. Actuation and sensing
- python_pele 2y ago3. cost
- AlexandrB 2y agoYup, I don't think there's a mass market for humanoid robots that cost as much as a high-end car - at least not yet. If you have that kind of money, you can just hire a person and it's a lot easier to get a person to do things how you want.
- vhiremath4 2y agoThere is currently a proliferation of robotics companies of all shapes and sizes. Lots of capital is being deployed into robotics. My best guess is give it 3-5 years before we start to see and accept that there will be many more robot friends among us both in industry and our personal lives.
- notaustinpowers 2y agoBecause we don't need AI in our lives as everyday consumers. For business uses, it makes some sense (code completion, proof reading, rewriting, etc). This isn't a product for consumers, this is a product for shareholders. Apple's stock would have dipped dramatically if they held WWDC this year with zero mention of any AI products. They're duty isn't to us as consumers, it's to shareholders to protect and grow their investment. They just have to play the same game as the rest of the industry. They don't have to explain why consumers need it, that's not the point. The point is that they can't look like they're falling behind.
- zombiwoof 2y agoAI “for the rest of us” Ie we can’t even use AI to come up with a new and creative tag line. We will reuse one from 20 years ago That’s how cool we are
- rty32 2y agoI have been using a Samsung S24 series phone for a few months, with "circle to search" and Gemini-powered Google Assistant. I have used circle to search about three times, and disabled Google Assistant. I know that a "power user" can get much more out of these tools than me, but I still can't imagine what people would use that for, especially on a phone. People use their phones taking calls, watching TikTok, sending messages, not getting answers. "Turn on the light" thing works well enough in the old assistant. Which makes me wonder whether all those things Apple advertised make much different in that ecosystem. (btw it seems that the Samsung/Google AI stuff never got as much coverage as Apple's thing?)
- BoardsOfCanada 2y agoI'm absolutely sick of AI being shoved into everything, AI generated images, AIs falling in love with someone from the New York Times and so on, but as a glorified search/shortcut finder in my phone it actually makes sense, to me at least.
- havaloc 2y agoMost of the AI stuff is flashy, sure, but the summarization features they showed on iOS, especially for email and notifications, happening solely on device, are the killer feature.
- jyunwai 2y agoThe commentary focuses on the image generation and image editing features, but it doesn't mention the planned features for text manipulation and text summary. These will arguably be the most useful features for day-to-day device usage. The ability to easily (and privately) double-check emails for typos and grammar mistakes before sending them out will genuinely be helpful (who hasn't sent a late-night message with a typo?). And if the quality of the text summaries is high, easy summary creation will also be useful for many people.
- choeger 2y ago"AI" (or rather language models) will change the world. But in a very different way. They aren't (and won't become) AGI. They aren't (and won't) replace software engineers (but maybe help them to write better software, or more realistically churn out even more bad software). And they aren't and won't become ultra-wise oracles that can solve any task you throw at them. But they are an interface between the real world and computing, because everything in the real world revolves around human language. Here are a few things that are actually solved by now, even if we did not yet fully recognize it: 1. automatic human-human translations 2. collection and annotation of all kinds of real-world data (with the help of image recognition, of course) 3. human-machine communication (not decision-making, mind you.) The most crucial aspect is that other human-machine interfaces will become less relevant. In particular web pages and mobile apps. They might stay as an attempt to capture attention, but they will become less and less relevant for actual usage. Here are a few services that might get by without a web browser or app soon: 1. online banking 2. delivery services (and others like Uber) 3. small business that basically only need to manage appointments online (doctors, lawyers, car shops)
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- danaris 2y ago"Solved"—so long as you don't mind that unclear and difficult-to-measure percentage of nearly-guaranteed errors—errors which the LLM can never detect or acknowledge, because that would require a level of introspection of which they are fundamentally incapable.
- pjc50 2y ago> Here are a few services that might get by without a web browser or app soon: > 1. online banking ??! You've got a system of unpredictable reliability and you're going to let it handle money? Online banking has always been extremely conservative, sometimes for good reason.
- beretguy 2y agoSome banking still runs on COBOL, probably.
- nlawalker 2y agoNot in its current state, when it doesn't do anything on its own and you have to ask it a question to interact with it. Once it becomes capable enough to act as an agent and starts asking you questions (unprompted by you) to confirm its actions, it'll slowly become a requirement to participate in society and remain productive enough to be taken seriously, like smartphones are today.
- ein0p 2y agoWe the HN readers do not need it, but for 90% of the rest of the world's population the interaction model with computers today for tasks more complex than Instagram is akin to casting magical spells, and it's been like that for decades. Imagine they could just tell the computer what to do in a completely natural, possibly even broken English, and it'd do it. That's the longer term promise of AI, and that's where it'll inevitably go.
- mg 2y agoAI is already so woven into my life. I use it all the time and wouldn't want to go back. For example I made a bookmarklet that summarizes articles linked from HN. So the way I have skimmed this article is by reading this: Apple's new AI offering, Apple Intelligence, seems unoriginal and derivative compared to competitors. Apple is partnering with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT, but the integration appears halfhearted. The article questions if Apple's approach can truly unlock the potential of generative AI. The prompt I use is: Make up to three short bullet points about what the following page is about. Under no circumstances make any of the bullet points longer than 40 words. The page: And then I append the text content of the page. It is a very crude approach. Not sure how well it really covers the most important points. But I already like these summaries to decide if I dive deeper. And over time the summaries will only get better. I think AI will be part of most UIs in a few years.
- talldayo 2y agoHonest question; is there anything in that summary you just posted that a normal human couldn't infer from just reading the title?
- kirth_gersen 2y agoThe jagged edge of LLMs' capabilities makes it really hard to explain what it's good at, and therefore what it's good for. It can be genius level at one thing and then extremely foolish at a seemingly related task in ways that are hard to intuit. It is still early days and AI is improving at a startling pace. So, eventually even the floor of competency will rise above the threshold of "average human". That's my guess anyways. Asking what AI is good for is kind of like asking what a toddler is good for. The question itself is premature.
- alangibson 2y agoIf AGI isn't created in the next 5 years, then the smart money is going to lose interest in this like they did Crypto and self driving cars. There are serious discussions about multi-100B USD compute clusters and building multi-GW power generation. If we could replace all artists plus half of mathematicians and scientists tomorrow, it still wouldn't be worth the investment. Nothing short of summoning the Computer God will justify that.
- codedokode 2y agoAI should do useful work. Using it for chatbots is the worst application. Nobody needs to chat with robots.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"Relief that Apple is finally bringing generative AI to its devices added more than $260bn to its stock market value this week. Over the next few years, Apple AI could fuel a massive hardware upgrade cycle. It will only work on a very small number of existing devices, so most customers will have to buy a new and more powerful iPhone, iPad or Mac to see Apple Intelligence." Any tactic the so-called "tech" company can use to get people to buy new computers. When the old ones are still working fine. https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=732027381763&w=c_PUW-0p05qB4AxMg03aZBQX2peDTqO5 https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=732027381763&w=c_PUW-0p05q...