4 ms·

We'll see where we end up 5 years from now, but I think we may see Apple in a very nice position with AI by having tight integration with their platform, they'l

We'll see where we end up 5 years from now, but I think we may see Apple in a very nice position with AI by having tight integration with their platform, they'll never be first in AI so they won't have the expectation to lead the market, and their on-device first strategy may help keep costs from inflating wildly out of control if high-compute features fizzle out. As with all AI so far, still lacking to see the "why". Microsoft came out hard, but still don't see why other than generating potentially very wrong information or goofy looking pictures.

bink 2y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with you but this sounds a lot like what many people were saying about voice assistants not so long ago.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  That they're expensive to run and don't produce useful results?
- matwood 2y ago
  The bar is low with Siri, but it's much better in the AI betas. We'll see if this is a peak or the start of real improvement.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Well Apple is doing OK and Amazon lost their hat even though Apple was “way behind” in smart speakers. AI could turn out the same. You need good training data, but the biggest set out there (Internet) was quickly polluted to hell by AI and now it’s far less valuable for training. I’m skeptical of its long term value for the average user.
- dom96 2y ago
  What were people saying about voice assistants?
  - bink 2y ago
    That once Apple entered the market they would dominate it. Which, maybe they do, but they are far from good at it.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  And… they were kind of right? See the history of Amazon Alexa; it hasn’t actually gone very well for Amazon.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
I would settle for a local model to extract tables from PDFs. MS Co-Pilot is really disappointing in its utility and integration. Power Automate offers an Adobe connector that purports to do so but my data loss prevention policies forbid me to connect to third parties. GPT4o does a great job of taking a PDF and giving me exactly the contents in a csv of my specification, but again, can't do this with customer data. I'm looking at what is possible with llama3 as an azure service but it looks very complex to set up, I think I need to have a "data verse" and a network configuration to allow serverless compute to connect to my files. That will be nice tho when I can have the results of the PDF extraction insert rows into my excel files. I don't use Salesforce but I'm jealous of people who have a platform that they can actually integrate AI with their customer data.
- bcrl 2y ago
  Even Amazon's Textract API has issues with common invoices I've received. It Would Be Nice(tm) if this were a solved problem, but it isn't yet. Several other SaaS build on top of Textract and claim to do better, but the costs were unreasonable for the quantities of invoices I was processing compared to munging the raw data from Textract.
  - thegabriele 2y ago
    What others SaaS? Thanks
    - bcrl 2y ago
      Sadly, I did not keep the notes on what I had found when I did the research. What turned me off of those services was that my out of pocket expense was going to be thousands of dollars to process around 1600 invoices. With AWS Textract the OCRed invoices cost under $20. I also tried the various open source OCR tools, but the error rate was way too high. Obivious faults like l or I in place of 1 in the middle of numbers. AWS Textract was pretty good with numbers, although it did stutter on the dates in a few invoices. For most of the invoices I was able to self-check the results as account balances and totals from month to month had to match. That made the end results from messy scripts extracting to CSV reasonably trustworthy.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
The vast majority of AI spend will be enterprise. That's not really Apple's forte. My crystal ball isn't working, but I wouldn't bet on Apple.
legohead 2y ago
AI has been a huge help in my daily life both work and home. I use it do debug, diagnose, search for information, write code, answer numerous questions I get from my kids, etc. "AI can be wrong" - like that hasn't been a problem with humans since forever... Like with any information, you have to be diligent. I teach my kids this also.
- da02 2y ago
  Which AI tools do you use to debug? search for information?
  - volkk 2y ago
    search for information? -- perplexity is good for this debug -- cursor.sh for coding/debugging with your codebase as context. also just raw inputting into claude is pretty effective.
- pennybanks 2y ago
  think about the scope and relativity. with the amount these companies have totally committed to this idea and technology. in terms of consumer use for it to just search for info, and write code is a total failure. i mean by their words really. we are basically told it will be integrated in dang near everything and uses electricity
- passwordoops 2y ago
  Is it helpful to the point of a $30-$50 a month subscription? And at a larger scale, is this help in general worth the energy and water expenditure needed? Edit: to be clear the second point is not against the individual, but questioning whether the modest gains in convenience for all users are worth the environmental and infrastructure cost
- Thaxll 2y ago
  Old people used to call that "googling".
  - 2y ago
01100011 2y ago
The "why" for AI right now is because everyone else is doing it and you can't risk not having a critical pillar needed to compete. I think AI is a loser for everyone but Nvidia for a while because of this. Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc will all be forced to spend billions to attempt AI but it will be years before it is good enough to generate significant profits. Even then, there may only be 1-2 winners, like Google was with traditional search.
- pennybanks 2y ago
  amd is looking real nice right now as well.
- scarmig 2y ago
  There's also an interesting dynamic: costs scale exponentially (in a handwavey way) with quality. If you're willing to stay a half generation behind, you can create models a whole lot cheaper than the frontier labs. So Meta can always put significant price pressure on Google/OAI/Anthropic for relatively cheap. The only way I see AI making anyone trillions is if someone cracks the nut of true AGI and somehow manages to keep it under wraps.
  - xracy 2y ago
    Here's a question... Does AGI actually change anything about how any of these companies make money? What makes someone trillions of dollars from AGI?
    - _boffin_ 2y ago
      > What makes someone trillions of dollars from AGI? solving many million dollar problems.
      - xracy 2y ago
        I don't think this question is as obvious as everyone else clearly thinks it is. But like here's the progression: 1. How does AI currently make money? (the answer is it doesn't, but like what's the world we think exists where a chat bot is monetizeable?) 2. What does AGI need to look like where it can actually solve many million dollar problems? 3. What million dollar problems does it solve? If the answers to this are as easy as they sound, then the responses to this should be easy to churn out, but instead everyone has shortcut that AGI == $$$, without showing the logic path. a response could look like: AGI solves P != NP -> $1M AGI solves customer service -> $100B AGI solves ??? -> $1B I'm making up ideas and numbers here, but this doesn't seem like that weird of an assumption to test given how everyone on here just takes it as gospel.
akira2501 2y ago
> help keep costs from inflating wildly out of control Aren't the majority of costs in feeding and training the model? If they hope to present a product that has access to pertinent and timely information I'm not sure how they're going to drastically reduce their costs on queries alone. > still lacking to see the "why" The "why" for AI should be blindingly obvious. The fact that this is an open question suggests that these simplistic large language models are still several orders of magnitude away from what that endpoint would be. This is a tiny stepping stone on a very long journey. It was foolish and insane to invest in it at the level Microsoft did.
arebop 2y ago
Now that AI means LLM specifically I guess you are right, but if you'd told me 20 years ago that we'd have cars driving themselves around major cities by now, I'd have been pretty impressed. I heard about the self-flying helicopter at CMU and robots playing soccer, but really finishing the science and engineering to have computers mundanely outperforming humans at safe city driving is remarkable. Except of course to current industry observers & wall street analysts, who are asking "will this ML mumbo jumbo ever amount to anything practical? Or is lane keeping with human vigilance and alarm-setting the pinnacle?"
- dom96 2y ago
  > but if you'd told me 20 years ago that we'd have cars driving themselves around major cities by now, I'd have been pretty impressed. Do we have this?
  - Fauntleroy 2y ago
    Waymo cars drive through San Francisco constantly, and without major issues.
    - dom96 2y ago
      Aren't they kind of "cheating" since they require the whole town to be mapped ahead of time?
      - ozim 2y ago
        I would say even with mapping still impressive. Bunch of stuff in maths/sciense I solved with lookup tables and it doesn’t take away that rest of solution is still complex.
wongarsu 2y ago
> As with all AI so far, still lacking to see the "why" Microsoft poured god-knows-how-many billions into Bing with barely anything to show for it. They hover just below 4% market share. AI is their one chance to actually upset the Google monopoly. But only if they manage to pull it off before Google, hence all their mediocre rushed-to-market AI stuff. Of course the real money with current AI is elsewhere. But replacing first-line customer support with AI isn't the kind of story you will see promoted by PR departments.
thefz 2y ago
So as usual, Microsoft is innovating while Apple just sells what everybody else has already tested (maybe even claiming the fatherhood of he idea). Nothing new.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  So, exactly the reverse of 20 years ago?

bink 2y ago

I don't necessarily disagree with you but this sounds a lot like what many people were saying about voice assistants not so long ago.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
That they're expensive to run and don't produce useful results?
matwood 2y ago
The bar is low with Siri, but it's much better in the AI betas. We'll see if this is a peak or the start of real improvement.
MBCook 2y ago
Well Apple is doing OK and Amazon lost their hat even though Apple was “way behind” in smart speakers. AI could turn out the same. You need good training data, but the biggest set out there (Internet) was quickly polluted to hell by AI and now it’s far less valuable for training. I’m skeptical of its long term value for the average user.
dom96 2y ago
What were people saying about voice assistants?
- bink 2y ago
  That once Apple entered the market they would dominate it. Which, maybe they do, but they are far from good at it.
rsynnott 2y ago
And… they were kind of right? See the history of Amazon Alexa; it hasn’t actually gone very well for Amazon.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

I would settle for a local model to extract tables from PDFs. MS Co-Pilot is really disappointing in its utility and integration. Power Automate offers an Adobe connector that purports to do so but my data loss prevention policies forbid me to connect to third parties. GPT4o does a great job of taking a PDF and giving me exactly the contents in a csv of my specification, but again, can't do this with customer data. I'm looking at what is possible with llama3 as an azure service but it looks very complex to set up, I think I need to have a "data verse" and a network configuration to allow serverless compute to connect to my files. That will be nice tho when I can have the results of the PDF extraction insert rows into my excel files. I don't use Salesforce but I'm jealous of people who have a platform that they can actually integrate AI with their customer data.

bcrl 2y ago
Even Amazon's Textract API has issues with common invoices I've received. It Would Be Nice(tm) if this were a solved problem, but it isn't yet. Several other SaaS build on top of Textract and claim to do better, but the costs were unreasonable for the quantities of invoices I was processing compared to munging the raw data from Textract.
- thegabriele 2y ago
  What others SaaS? Thanks
  - bcrl 2y ago
    Sadly, I did not keep the notes on what I had found when I did the research. What turned me off of those services was that my out of pocket expense was going to be thousands of dollars to process around 1600 invoices. With AWS Textract the OCRed invoices cost under $20. I also tried the various open source OCR tools, but the error rate was way too high. Obivious faults like l or I in place of 1 in the middle of numbers. AWS Textract was pretty good with numbers, although it did stutter on the dates in a few invoices. For most of the invoices I was able to self-check the results as account balances and totals from month to month had to match. That made the end results from messy scripts extracting to CSV reasonably trustworthy.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

The vast majority of AI spend will be enterprise. That's not really Apple's forte. My crystal ball isn't working, but I wouldn't bet on Apple.

legohead 2y ago

AI has been a huge help in my daily life both work and home. I use it do debug, diagnose, search for information, write code, answer numerous questions I get from my kids, etc. "AI can be wrong" - like that hasn't been a problem with humans since forever... Like with any information, you have to be diligent. I teach my kids this also.

da02 2y ago
Which AI tools do you use to debug? search for information?
- volkk 2y ago
  search for information? -- perplexity is good for this debug -- cursor.sh for coding/debugging with your codebase as context. also just raw inputting into claude is pretty effective.
pennybanks 2y ago
think about the scope and relativity. with the amount these companies have totally committed to this idea and technology. in terms of consumer use for it to just search for info, and write code is a total failure. i mean by their words really. we are basically told it will be integrated in dang near everything and uses electricity
passwordoops 2y ago
Is it helpful to the point of a $30-$50 a month subscription? And at a larger scale, is this help in general worth the energy and water expenditure needed? Edit: to be clear the second point is not against the individual, but questioning whether the modest gains in convenience for all users are worth the environmental and infrastructure cost
Thaxll 2y ago
Old people used to call that "googling".
- 2y ago

01100011 2y ago

The "why" for AI right now is because everyone else is doing it and you can't risk not having a critical pillar needed to compete. I think AI is a loser for everyone but Nvidia for a while because of this. Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc will all be forced to spend billions to attempt AI but it will be years before it is good enough to generate significant profits. Even then, there may only be 1-2 winners, like Google was with traditional search.

pennybanks 2y ago
amd is looking real nice right now as well.
scarmig 2y ago
There's also an interesting dynamic: costs scale exponentially (in a handwavey way) with quality. If you're willing to stay a half generation behind, you can create models a whole lot cheaper than the frontier labs. So Meta can always put significant price pressure on Google/OAI/Anthropic for relatively cheap. The only way I see AI making anyone trillions is if someone cracks the nut of true AGI and somehow manages to keep it under wraps.
- xracy 2y ago
  Here's a question... Does AGI actually change anything about how any of these companies make money? What makes someone trillions of dollars from AGI?
  - _boffin_ 2y ago
    > What makes someone trillions of dollars from AGI? solving many million dollar problems.
    - xracy 2y ago
      I don't think this question is as obvious as everyone else clearly thinks it is. But like here's the progression: 1. How does AI currently make money? (the answer is it doesn't, but like what's the world we think exists where a chat bot is monetizeable?) 2. What does AGI need to look like where it can actually solve many million dollar problems? 3. What million dollar problems does it solve? If the answers to this are as easy as they sound, then the responses to this should be easy to churn out, but instead everyone has shortcut that AGI == $$$, without showing the logic path. a response could look like: AGI solves P != NP -> $1M AGI solves customer service -> $100B AGI solves ??? -> $1B I'm making up ideas and numbers here, but this doesn't seem like that weird of an assumption to test given how everyone on here just takes it as gospel.

akira2501 2y ago

> help keep costs from inflating wildly out of control Aren't the majority of costs in feeding and training the model? If they hope to present a product that has access to pertinent and timely information I'm not sure how they're going to drastically reduce their costs on queries alone. > still lacking to see the "why" The "why" for AI should be blindingly obvious. The fact that this is an open question suggests that these simplistic large language models are still several orders of magnitude away from what that endpoint would be. This is a tiny stepping stone on a very long journey. It was foolish and insane to invest in it at the level Microsoft did.

arebop 2y ago

Now that AI means LLM specifically I guess you are right, but if you'd told me 20 years ago that we'd have cars driving themselves around major cities by now, I'd have been pretty impressed. I heard about the self-flying helicopter at CMU and robots playing soccer, but really finishing the science and engineering to have computers mundanely outperforming humans at safe city driving is remarkable. Except of course to current industry observers & wall street analysts, who are asking "will this ML mumbo jumbo ever amount to anything practical? Or is lane keeping with human vigilance and alarm-setting the pinnacle?"

dom96 2y ago
> but if you'd told me 20 years ago that we'd have cars driving themselves around major cities by now, I'd have been pretty impressed. Do we have this?
- Fauntleroy 2y ago
  Waymo cars drive through San Francisco constantly, and without major issues.
  - dom96 2y ago
    Aren't they kind of "cheating" since they require the whole town to be mapped ahead of time?
    - ozim 2y ago
      I would say even with mapping still impressive. Bunch of stuff in maths/sciense I solved with lookup tables and it doesn’t take away that rest of solution is still complex.

wongarsu 2y ago

> As with all AI so far, still lacking to see the "why" Microsoft poured god-knows-how-many billions into Bing with barely anything to show for it. They hover just below 4% market share. AI is their one chance to actually upset the Google monopoly. But only if they manage to pull it off before Google, hence all their mediocre rushed-to-market AI stuff. Of course the real money with current AI is elsewhere. But replacing first-line customer support with AI isn't the kind of story you will see promoted by PR departments.

thefz 2y ago

So as usual, Microsoft is innovating while Apple just sells what everybody else has already tested (maybe even claiming the fatherhood of he idea). Nothing new.

rcarmo 2y ago
So, exactly the reverse of 20 years ago?