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Apple squandered the Holy Grail

• bitpush 2y ago
  Apple was always going to fail this, and even more so going forward. LLM are built on data, and copious amounts of it. Apple has been on a decade long marketing campaign to make data radio active. It has now permeated the culture so much so that, Apple CANNOT build a proprietary, world-class AI product without compromising on their outspoken positions. It is a losing battle because the more apple wants to do it, the users are gonna punish them and meanwhile, other companies (ChatGPT, anthropic) are gonna extract maximum value.
  • wmf 2y ago
    LLMs are mostly trained on public data while Apple's privacy stance applies to private data. There's no conflict between them. (Meta can probably train on private data but OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be doing OK without it as far as we know.)
    • shuckles 2y ago
      No, Apple’s privacy stance is about giving users control over data in ways they understand. Posting on Reddit or Arxiv is not a blank check to have your words be reused for LLM training, even if it’s technically public.
      • jitl 2y ago
        Apple’s slogan is “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone”. I think “I published a paper” or “I posted on Reddit” are clearly out of scope - those things are happening in public.
    • astrange 2y ago
      All the LLM advances these days are from synthetic or explicitly created data too. You need public data mostly because it contains facts about the world, or because it's easier to talk about a book when it's "read" the book. But for a known topic area (as opposed to open Q&A) it's not critical since you can go and create or license it.
• october8140 2y ago
  It’s ok to just say you don’t like Apple Intelligence.
  • ripped_britches 2y ago
    Article definitely has a lot more depth of meaning that this gives credit for
  • browningstreet 2y ago
    Author isn’t being reductive.
  • jimmydoe 2y ago
    Author has strong opinion of where GenAI should be used vs not, eg they doesn’t like the feature to remove a person from a photo. That’s respectable but I see many people may feel differently.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      There's a big difference between features that journalists should never use vs. consumers cleaning up their vacation snaps.
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Apple has started going downhill from the time they released Vision Pro. So that means all of the big tech companies are going down: Facebook, Google, Apple. Only Microsoft remains strong though for how much longer remains to be seen. A great time for startups.
  • dismalaf 2y ago
    Is Microsoft that strong? They've got a stranglehold on medium to large businesses but that's about it. Very few people actually want to use their products, they just think they have to... But yes, it's a great time for startups. I'd argue it always is and always has been.
    • ripped_britches 2y ago
      > that’s about it Just 3 trillion or so dollars, that’s about it
      • dismalaf 2y ago
        All the companies the parent was talking about have similarly massive valuations, yet none seem to have unassailable positions. Which is what the whole thread seems to be about (Apple squandering an opportunity and naturally others who are doing the same), not their current market cap.
        • adamc 2y ago
          There are a very large number of steam games that were written for Windows. There are similarly large numbers of commercial products with value for particular companies. Could they be emulated? Sure. Maybe not 100% (see Linux), but mostly yes. But then you have to make that work, ensure that the emulations keep working, etc. That is the real wall around Windows. Office has similar walls -- large numbers of spreadsheets, for example, many of which are critical and which do complex things. There are lots of programs that can read Excel spreadsheets, but perfect compatibility is difficult. And there are lots of people who know these products -- re-educating them is a secondary wall, because it represents a lot of work for the customers.
• musesum 2y ago
  Apple also squandered maps ... until they didn't.
  • ragazzina 2y ago
    Or Siri.. no wait.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Though, in fairness, I don't find any of the voice assistants very useful. Siri is probably not quite as good as Alexa though. I mostly care more about Siri because I use CarPlay when driving.
  • nxobject 2y ago
    I agree. I think we believe that Apple's days of long-term skunkworks development is over... I don't think it's as dramatic as, say, the years since the PA Semi acquisition, or the "secret" Intel port, but they do some long-term planning. (Apple Originals, their production house, is also an example. A huge bank of original prestige TV, subsidized by iPhones... they're just still finding a way to market it.)
  • knowaveragejoe 2y ago
    Years ago I remember a detailed comparison of Apple and Google maps, showing a lot of flaws with Apple Maps around contrast, lack of detail, misleading iconography, and other issues. Has it improved that much? Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?
    • astrange 2y ago
      That's Justin O'Beirne's site. It has mostly improved but he wasn't really that negative on it. He just used to work there so he was being extra critical since he knew them. On the contrary he often seemed undeservedly uncritical when he talked about Google, like going "wow this is so detailed, they must be super geniuses who did this with computers" about something like POI locations they'd actually done by hiring a ton of contractors to do by hand.
• AlexandrB 2y ago
  I don't get the "Math Notes" example. Why does this need AI? Isn't this just Calca[1] but with extra steps? [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calca/id635757879 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calca/id635757879
  • bigiain 2y ago
    Why does this need AI? Isn't this just dividing by two, which you can easily do in your head? (I get that not everybody bothers doing vaguely complex mental arithmetic, but dividing by two? Come on!)
    • jitl 2y ago
      The point is algebra system, it’s quite good for unit conversion, budgeting, etc - lots of things a spreadsheet does great but seems a bit overkill for. Algebra big improvement over basic arithmetic calculator power.
  • krackers 2y ago
    Also seen in Soulver.
    • wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Soulver is text entry not drawn
      • krackers 2y ago
        But this still doesn't need AI, unless we're calling OCR "AI" now
        • fragmede 2y ago
          How else do you get the O and 0's correct? Building a handwriting recognizer is one of the first things you learn to do in AI-writing class.
• ripped_britches 2y ago
  > The core of why ChatGPT works as a product isn't the AI. It's the experience of each word being typed one at a time by the AI and saving your conversations with the AI for later. Really loved this article overall, but I have to super-disagree here. The core of ChatGPT is you can have a conversation with a computer program. Take away saving history and you can still have a conversation with a computer program (see ephemeral chats). Take away typing one word at a time and you still have a conversation with a computer program (see non-streaming API / batch API). But major props for writing this live on a twitch stream, benefit of the doubt there my friend.
  • badgersnake 2y ago
    Yep you can tell it that it gave you the wrong answer and it will apologise and give you a different wrong answer.
  • xena 2y ago
    Article author here. Thanks! I've found writing on stream to be really hard, but it's getting easier with practice. One of the more frustrating parts is trying to get the pure thought nuance out onto the page in a way that reflects the nuance as it is in my head. I think I'm getting closer to it, but who knows.
  • trash_cat 2y ago
    I agree with the premise that it is not the text stream or the coversation history that makes the ChatGPT useful - It is multifaceted. It's an interface, and also a intelligence at your disposal. Even if you took some abilities away from ChatGPT, such as spitting out real world facts, it could still be used for summarizing text.
  • hb-robo 2y ago
    These models are stochastic though, so saving conversations with elaborate context so they're actually useful in the domain you need them to be useful in is a fundamental feature. The alternative to that is saving a document to copy-paste in as a "startup prompt" of things it needs to know contextually, which is kind of silly.
• vachina 2y ago
  Apple shipped “Apple Intelligence” before Apple even invented the term. Before the AI craze you could search Photos on iOS based on content and metadata. You could lift subjects off photos with a long tap and copy them, recognize faces and make montages based on inferred relationship with them. And all of this is done on-prem, on your device. These are very subtle, nice features. Apple had to put a name on all these otherwise there would be no marketing material.
  • nxobject 2y ago
    Yes, Apple does a lot of feature-related marketing these days, which changes their naming priorities. I remember reading it was a post-Jobs transition thing, where the key message about products transitioned away from vibes and overarching slogans ("shuffle", "the internet comuter"), to features ("iPhone X", "iPhone XS", "iPhone XR", "iPhone XS Pro (??)"). I'm sure that a lot of the old-guard exec team knows it's a loss... I'm sure how they feel about it or why.
  • wtmt 2y ago
    This is true. Craig Federighi and others have said in the past that they’ve added machine learning based features for a long time in the OS (with examples). It’s just that generative AI took off very quickly and now some people are imagining that it’s the only (or major) AI.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Aspects of AI normalize over time. There was a time when the route finding in digital maps would have been considered almost magic.
  • WillAdams 2y ago
    They also (poorly) implemented address recognition in their app --- c.f., an application which had this at its core: https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ https://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ (and the source of which is available)
  • layer8 2y ago
    They have now released half-baked features they only released to fill “Apple Intelligence” with something, and that they likely wouldn’t have released in the current state otherwise.
• saagarjha 2y ago
  > If this OS were shipped to consumers, you would have a nearly unhackable system that would make it basically impossible to tinker with. I mean you can hack it the same way you would hack any other Darwin platform
  • xena 2y ago
    I more meant untinkerable than unhackable. Oops, oh well.
• 015a 2y ago
  I think it is concerning that every single Apple Intelligence feature they've shipped thus far has been not just mediocre; but bad. Being last to the party is a very normal Apple thing; quality and Doing The Right Thing takes time. Announcing something then taking months to ship it is very not-Apple, but it has happened a few times. That thing they finally ship being bad is, geeze, horribly un-Apple. One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. So I generally do have hope for Apple Intelligence. At the end of the day, there are some disparate competing utilities in this class on the Samsung and Google phones, but no one is shipping something that is obviously game-changing and in first place; they all kinda suck, they're all tech demos, and it'll inevitably take many years to get this technology honed in to something that is truly useful to consumers.
  • wtmt 2y ago
    > One of the few examples I can think of however is Apple Maps. And it did get better; a lot better, some say better than Google Maps nowadays. This depends on where (which country) you live. For all the ways Apple has been vocal about the Indian market and local production, Apple Maps literally sucks even in major cities in India. Google Maps is decades ahead and gets updated very quickly. Apple Maps cannot even find regular addresses or places. Apple has its share of incompetencies and willful blind spots, and that shows up in specific areas often related to its services (Apple Intelligence is also a service). The organization and its people are not built for handling these effectively or quickly. That said, I have more hope in Apple Intelligence improving quicker (at least in English, while competitors are already ahead in other languages, including several Indian languages) than I have in Apple Maps improving in India.
    • AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Google maps also sucked in India until a couple of engineers flew there to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of mapping/routing and spent a bunch of time implementing regionalized fixes for them. Apple expresses some very clear preferences in what regions they support well in Apple maps, which exclude most "difficult" areas.
• r00fus 2y ago
  There is also the possibility that LLM models (which is what Apple Intelligence is leveraging mainly) are overblown and honestly a local minima for AI.
• apricot13 2y ago
  I feel like they have a plan, get the backend up to scratch to appease the tech people and they're leaving the ways to interact with it purposely vague and incomplete for those non-tech folk. They don't want to scare any part of their audience away from future uses of Apple intelligence. Their audience is tech and non-tech folk alike. If the tech folk say it's safe and the non-tech folk get comfortable with the basic AI features then they're onto a winner. How many people's parents/grand parents have iPhones because they're simpler for them to understand who are also scared or don't understand this 'AI thing'. I think Apple have been quite savvy in introducing it slowly and are probably watching the metrics like a hawk! I suspect image playground is so creepy in an attempt to mark the images as clearly AI generated when they get posted to social media?
• daft_pink 2y ago
  Their problem is that they are just behind now, because they released too early. They haven’t finished iOS 18 yet. They are still working on it, which likely means that iOS 19 isn’t going to get much attention either, because they should be working on iOS 19 now, not still developing iOS 18. They have set themselves up for a loser in the next year or two, because they can’t double their resources to catch back up to a normal release schedule.
• yalogin 2y ago
  They just built a trusted/secure backend to push compute to and it luckily coincided with the AI craze. They just packaged their backend as apple intelligence and exploited the situation. It doesnt look like they have anything worthwhile to showcase that backend though. They will get there eventually, this is apple after all
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
• VectorLock 2y ago
  I find it super interesting that Apple is x-raying the PCBs for their compute nodes. Guess they took Supermicro inserting malicious devices into their servers very seriously.
  • jsheard 2y ago
    * allegedly inserting malicious devices according to a report that was never substantiated
    • VectorLock 2y ago
      I, personally, am convinced it has and is happening.
      • xena 2y ago
        It's really amusing to me that people are willing to believe it happened/is happening without proof to back it up.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          The whole episode is fascinating to me in that Bloomberg is a reasonable quality news organization and something obviously convinced editors there to stand their ground in spite of no obvious (presented) evidence. I agree though that absolutely no proof has come to light which makes me seriously question the whole thing.
        • VectorLock 2y ago
          There is abundant evidence that these type of hardware inserts exist and are being deployed. Why do you think it isn't happening?
          • CamperBob2 2y ago
            The specific Bloomberg report you're talking about never had a shred of evidence behind it. It was a blatant attempt to influence trade policy, or possibly just to manipulate the price of SMCI. At the time, at least, Bloomberg "journalists" were paid to move the market: https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensation-2013-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...
• armada651 2y ago
  > Word processors like MacWrite absolutely transformed the ways that everyone used computers. MacWrite was released 5 years after WordPerfect, which itself is predated by WordStar. I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things. Apple refines what others have attempted before, that's what they're good at. Part of the reason people are disappointed with Apple these days is because of this fantasy image of Apple as an inventor.
  • Clamchop 2y ago
    Author does say word processors "like" MacWrite, so falls short of saying it was the first at anything (and it wasn't), but WordPerfect and WordStar are interesting choices for comparison. Of the three, only MacWrite is a GUI-based WYSIWYG word processor that would be immediately familiar to modern audiences. (WordPerfect wouldn't get GUI until 1991.)
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Yeah, this. I mean, look, WordStar was a huge step up from a typewriter. It (and programs like it) made it possible for people like me to write. WordStar let you get the words right. WordPerfect let you do "you asked for it, you got it" layout, which was a step up. But MacWrite and programs like it let you do WYSIWYG layout, which was huge. It was like going from typewriter to WordStar, but for layout and appearance. (The words are still more important, but the presentation also matters.)
      • Kon-Peki 2y ago
        I always wonder how many people actually used typewriters before talking about them in comparison to word processors. By the late 1970s or early 1980s, typewriters had electronic memory. They had error correction "tape" so you could erase mistakes. You could set them to center or right justify text. You could create tables of justified text. Early word processing software was amazing because it gave you more memory to work with, and didn't force you to keep so much of what you previously wrote in your head. But it was only a large step forward compared to typewriters of the time. WYSIWYG blew all of that out of the water.
• mrcwinn 2y ago
  This post makes the point that the foundations of Apple Intelligence are really well designed. I think anytime you make the right underlying technology choices, there is always hope for the product. It's also worth noting that Apple traditionally is not a first mover and looks for "inspiration" from smaller competitors. In this case, there is no comp to reference. There is no startup mobile OS innovating in integrated AI. That, and the supposedly rushed timetable, probably explains a lot.
  • tokinonagare 2y ago
    I wish the same. That being said, given how useless Apple Intelligence is, how it isn't deployed in the EU and how it's gatekept by newer hardware, it's still very easy to ignore it. It's even easier on Mac where new versions doesn't bring anything worth upgrading for a non Apple-only developper (still running Sonoma).
    • dangus 2y ago
      But the point is that the foundation gives it hope to be a class-leading product in the future. The lengths Apple went to build a secure and private system will make it stand out and help it hold up to regulatory scrutiny. Doing this now is better than doing it later. In, let's say, 3 years, the features are more legitimately useful, the gatekeeping on new hardware will be a non-issue. In 3 years the majority of Apple's users will have an iPhone 15 Pro/iPhone 16 or newer. They are probably already mostly on M1 or newer Macs. On the other hand, I totally agree that it's pretty useless as it stands right now. I also think that if their launch strategy is to have an amazing WWDC and then deliver 5-10% of the features in September, that's going to turn Apple into just another company that promises the moon and delivers gimmicks.
      • oezi 2y ago
        On the contrary, in three years we will be used to AI which requires much newer tech than available today. The current tech will be obsolete. We have seen that play out with all the previous AI chips (mostly Google). The software and its requirements are moving faster than devices can be shipped and accumulate significant marketshare. This is not to say thay Google and Apple haven't or won't be able to ship some minor models such as voice recognition or translation, but for frontier level AI the local chips just won't suffice.
• infecto 2y ago
  I am hoping the foundation they built will lead to greater things. So far it definitely has fallen flat compared to their demos. All I wanted was a way to talk/text to siri in a natural way to get things done. It's better but far from perfect. I want to be able to easily create calendar events and interact with other native iOS APIs.
  • furyofantares 2y ago
    They could be doing a lot better but it's a bit of a cursed problem. Natural language as input doesn't give you any information about where the boundaries are or what's possible. Meanwhile natural language can express anything, most of which any current implementation won't be able to do. So the user gets a blank canvas and all the associated problems with learning what to do, except it's worse because many things they think up will fail. And the main tool we have to guide the user through this fraught path is LLM output. Oof. I am hopeful that Apple will demonstrate their expertise in using some traditional UI to help alleviate some of these problems.
  • Someone 2y ago
    > It's better but far from perfect. I’m not aware of any competition that’s perfect. I guess you meant to say the competition is better. I think it is, but that doesn’t mean their product isn’t a huge improvement. A simple example is text search in Photos.app. It probably misses text in some photos, but it helps me find quite a few photos. Similarly, face recognition in Photos.app is far from perfect, but way better than not having that feature. > I want to be able to easily create calendar events and interact with other native iOS APIs It’s not in Apple’s DNA to release a product here that mostly works. Chances are they’re working on something like that but don’t find it good enough to release it yet. What surprises me, though, is that they released the “get an AI summary of this web page” feature. That definitely produces some results that are very bad.
    • infecto 2y ago
      Not talking about the competition. They failed to deliver what they had in demos. Clearly they were hoping to get it right in the last minute but seems far from the truth. All I wanted was a better Siri that played really well with native iOS apps. We dont have that yet and I am not sure if its purely a lack of power with on device models or if apple completely missed the mark in implementation.
• est31 2y ago
  I think part of this issue is that people expect a lot from Apple. They exposed the technology to many people who aren't early adopter types, but more "mainstream" types. With an entirely new product and brand, the tolerance for bugs is higher, but here the expectation is that of other Apple products. In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still raise the bar for competitors, so Apple is less in danger of being disrupted. Also, there is plenty of AI driven features that people do not talk about, but those "just work" so you don't see them as well.
  • enragedcacti 2y ago
    > In the end, even if the features aren't perfect, they still raise the bar for competitors Honestly I'm not sure that they do. Everything I've seen with notification summaries for instance has given me the feelings of "wow I guess I'm really not missing much". LLMs as an answer engine has a big benefit that it feels fast and fluid even when its wrong (and many won't bother verifying) but with notification summaries most users in messaging contexts will eventually go back to the conversation and see the responses in full detail. Mistakes in that context are identifiable by mainstream users as having made the product worse.
• officeplant 2y ago
  Sometimes I wish I could check an alternative universe where Apple refused to acknowledge AI slop and just doubled down on privacy and protections of the user. It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend and let everyone else burn money until the hype dies down.
  • zimpenfish 2y ago
    > It almost feels like they could have just ignored the trend I wish they had but on the other hand, can you imagine how many think pieces there'd be about how Apple was stagnating and how they were "such, like, a 20th Century Company(tm)" and you'd probably get activist investors bleating about how Apple were leaving money on the table and and and etc.
    • coldtea 2y ago
      So? They had been getting 10 such pieces a day when Jobs run things too...
  • chairhairair 2y ago
    Several large companies could benefit from ignoring GenAI. Unfortunately, "benefit" would only mean "save money and produce better products for customers" instead of "make stock price go up". Instead, all of these companies are effectively forced to play hype ball.
  • mjburgess 2y ago
    To be honest, apple's approach to AI seems pretty close to this recommendation. I don't see much more than "here's a few nice features to some apps" -- vs., MS's "now all our machines must be AI capable so that we can scan 1000s of screeshots of your device"
    • adamc 2y ago
      As someone who has gone back and forth between Windows and Mac OS... if Apple would stop trying to force me to log-in to use features I don't need, they would have a more compelling case. Windows is indeed a horrific data mining operation, but Apple's own endless push to enmesh me in their ecosystem is about as irritating. And Windows has WSL, which has value to me at work. (And outside of work, Apple punted on games, which means I will always buy a Windows or Linux computer.)
• cratermoon 2y ago
  I could pick on quite of few nits here but I'm going to focus on one in particular that I'm very familiar with as a photographer and mass media studies student. > I want the data coming off of the sensor to be the data that makes up the image. I want to avoid as much processing as possible and I want the photo to be a reflection of reality as it is, not reality as it should have been. Sure, sometimes I'll do some color correction or cropping in post, but that doesn't change the content of the image, only its presentation. First nit: the iPhone camera, and all digital cameras, are deeply influenced by computational photography techniques. What this means is that you essentially never get the raw pixel values, although there are exceptions. The image you get is already significantly manipulated. Second nit: color correction, color in general, dynamic range, focus, depth of field, and more are all manipulations made by default, even long before digital cameras when film was king. There is no "correct" image version of what our eyes see, there is only pleasing to the photographer and the audience. An example: the negative for Ansel Adams' well known "Moonrise Over Hernandez , New Mexico" looks like, at first glance, something a professional would trash for lacking detail. Here's contact print vs the version most of use will probably recognize: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a356d4136ec94/1620499484148-PJP8X728J79GWLZGEVYD/beforeafterMoonOverHernandez.jpeg?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35... Here are four different versions Adams printed over the course of 3 decades: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a356d4136ec94/1620499552352-R7VDU80OD5YWT2QWMN3F/moonrise-printings.jpeg?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f5fe5ca8d6a35... I will mention, but won't even get into a topic that will surely bait HN commentors: Kodak designed and standardized its color film to represent Caucasian skin tones. It wasn't until chocolate and furniture makers complained that everything looked like the same gross mud in their expensively-produced product catalogs that Kodak took a look at rendering dark brown/red/yellow tones more pleasingly. Notice I said "more pleasingly", not "correctly".
  • sbuk 2y ago
    That quote intrigued me too. Surely RAW (which can be produced with an iPhone [and others...]) is what the author is looking for. Case of not RTFM'ing?
    • 2y ago
• LeicaLatte 2y ago
  The biggest problem I have with Apple Intelligence is battery life. Since Apple has no software chops in building LLM models, I expect them to throw hardware solutions for the battery life problem. But the demands of intelligence and the general trajectory means no amount of hardware - storage, RAM or battery size would be enough to generate the high fidelity experiences or solutions that fans and customers have come to expect from the company.
  • Hilift 2y ago
    Power consumption is the defining characteristic of AI. The power consumption by the US had recently plateaued at 4,000 billion kilowatt hours 2000 through 2023. That will likely accelerate by 20% or more with 2024/2025 data. It's probably one of the few guardrails. Electricity is about five times more expensive in the UK than the US. So the US is the natural home for the models and other regions are not.
    • hb-robo 2y ago
      I'm kind of skeptical the US grid can even handle this industry growth if it becomes the only realistic place these models are ran. A lot of the infrastructure is pretty wobbly. And forget the tax benefits and cheap land from Texas, their private grid is liable to bust at any time.
    • kstrauser 2y ago
      > Power consumption is the defining characteristic of AI. I'm not so convinced. I've been playing with running Ollama + llama3.1 8B on my 2023 M2 MacBook Air with 24GB of RAM, and I don't notice much difference in battery life with or without it. I'm not querying it continually with a shell script in a loop or anything like that, but neither am I shy about throwing all kinds of prompts at it. My laptop keeps chugging away on battery. Training AI may be ferociously resource intensive, but I haven't seen that querying those models is especially bad. I'd think that a model that Apple had tailored specifically to run well on its hardware would be relatively "light".
• jacobsimon 2y ago
  Hah I’ve been having the same issue as the author with those scammy “package delay” texts getting summarized in my notifications. Didn’t realize how widespread that type of spam was until now. Why hasn’t someone implemented better spam detection at Apple like we have for email? It would be nice if they could classify texts as spam, promotions, etc and organize them the way Gmail does.
  • xena 2y ago
    My guess: that requires bigger models than can run on local hardware, and the appetite for sending emails out to a server for classification is negative zero.
    • enragedcacti 2y ago
      The spam filtering for texts in Google Messages is run on device and in my experience works pretty well
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      SpamBayes worked great as an Outlook plugin back in the day.
• KennyBlanken 2y ago
  > Hell, the iPhone is a fully capable cinema camera these days No, it's not. The sensor in an iPhone is AI/ML'd up the ass to hide all the noise because it has 1µm sensor wells. A Panasonic video-oriented mirrorless micro 4/3rds (so not even anywhere near 35mm) like the GH5 is 3-4x that. A Sony Alpha 7 III? six times the sensor well size. I don't care how many megabits of video bandwidth you throw at it or how fancy you think "raw" shooting is, or how fancy your sensor technology is; nobody these days has anything that is even close to 2x better than anyone else. The top sensor from all the major players are pushing the limits of physics, and have been for a long time. No amount of AI/ML shit will give you depth of field and bokeh that looks as nice as a big sensor and a fast lens with nice shutter leaf shape.
• jjkaczor 2y ago
  Well - while Apple has made rough starts in the past (Maps on iOS devices comes to mind) - they do have a solid track record. Having used "smart devices" since the Apple Newton 2.0 days, followed by Windows Mobile, a very brief Android excursion (Motorola Milestone - early enough Android that I was often frustrated trying to copy/paste text between apps), then another side-pivot into Windows Phone for awhile (mainly because the development was incredibly easy - and Microsoft gave me a free one), I have been in the iOS mobile phone ecosystem ever since the iPhone 6. And - the software has gotten increasingly better over time - I wouldn't have (for me) alot of content/subscribers on TikTok, if iMovie on my phone did not exist - attempting to edit videos using OpenShot was taking forever (While I have Davinci Resolve installed, it seems "daunting" for someone who doesn't want to be a professional videographer/editor). But then I tried iMovie "Magic Movie" on my phone and ... "it just works". Still not great for long-form YouTube style content, but for quick things, slice-of-life videos - it does the job rather well. ... I expect that Apple will improve these AI offerings dramatically over the next couple of years as people upgrade their devices.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Y'all know I'm a fast, if error prone, writer. I still enjoy using AI writing assistants to help me with the occasional phrase that's awkward, grammar detail ("it's lower g in 'god' if I am talking about Thor or Huxian right?") and choice of words ("I need a word for agriculture that starts with C...") LLMs make different mistakes than I do so I've thought about using one as a copy editor but I've had terrible experiences with copy editors: I've hired more than one when I was writing marketing copy who injected more errors than they fixed. (A friend of mine wrote an article for The New York Times that got terribly mangled and barely made sense after the editors made it read like an NYT article.)
• lenerdenator 2y ago
  "Apple Intelligence failed" "Apple Intelligence" is less than a year old. Give it some time, for chripe's sakes.
  • brcmthrowaway 2y ago
    How about Vision Pro, did that fail?
    • lenerdenator 2y ago
      Yeah, it happens. As far as Apple Intelligence goes, I've liked the features in my Apple products so far. It doesn't feel like it "goes too far".
• llm_nerd 2y ago
  I'm going to admit that I just skimmed past 90% of this article. Being dismissive of AI is currently easy content, so there's too much noise in the space. Having said that, I actually paid attention to the image playground criticism. Image playground is literally a playground. It is meant to make fun, low-effort images for friends and family, largely for social type interactions. "It uses a placid corporate artstyle and communicates nothing." It's a hot taco holding a beer. What is it SUPPOSED to communicate? Looks like a pretty great image to me. But of course this piece was leading into the anti- angle, so suddenly it's "horrifying". I guess I didn't get the special training to understand what was wrong with a clearly lighthearted, fun image. Similar asinine, overly-jaded complaints about the cartoonish, memoji style portrait generation. I think the image is actually pretty hilarious. Actually used image playground to make my social media image, and I care not what this guy thinks about it, or that it is "soulless" (as if a cartoonish representation is supposed to be soulful?)
  • enragedcacti 2y ago
    > as if a cartoonish representation is supposed to be soulful? That is basically the entire point of a cartoon, so yeah
  • xena 2y ago
    It's an AI generated taco smoking beer, I don't think it really needs defense. If I were to create such an illustration for my blog from scratch, I'd probably use that to communicate abusurdism in a light-hearted manner. I'd also probably make the hand-hooves consistent or at least plausibly cartoon-logic. At the very least it would mean: * The taco holding the beer glass to its lips and sipping on it to smoke it * Consistent eye shapes (likely the eyes would be closed to smoke the beer) * Better bokeh for the elements in the background (if that is the stylistic choice I'd go for) * Have the smoke coming out of the beer, not out of the taco "taco smoking beer" * Stylize the image such that it has individual flair, there's something about the Apple Intelligence artstyle that just has an unperson corporate vibe that I don't like. * The levity comes from "hey tacos don't have faces, hooves, arms, or legs and you can't smoke a beer", this would be used to communicate absurdism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism, specifically by means of the taco smoking a beer whilst holding it in its hooves Maybe I've just been exposed to way more AI imagery than you, but guacamole does not look like that in the image. There's more fever dream images that I have locally, but I didn't want to saturate my article with them and haven't fully implemented "image gallery" support yet. And yes, a cartoon is normally meant to communicate something, quite literally the definition of soulful. Look at this for example: https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3ldgzieehjc2l https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3ldgzieehjc2... When I made it, I was trying to communicate a lo-fi peaceful vibe accentuated through traditional artstyles. In a more finished piece I'd probably recreate this through watercolor in Procreate and apply a bokeh effect (emulating the depth of field for a subject with forward light being looked at from an 85mm portrait lens at about f/2.8). The point of art is to communicate something. If a work does not communicate something, it is categorically not art.
• ghostly_s 2y ago
  "Apple Intelligence failed?" The far-reaching project that just had its initial release like 60 days ago? Why would anyone read beyond a first sentence like that?
  • xena 2y ago
    The purpose of a thesis statement is generally to establish a conclusion and then over the rest of the article, the goal is to build up evidence to support that conclusion.
    • wat10000 2y ago
      There has to be some plausible path to actually doing so. Unless this person is writing in the future, there isn’t.
    • bowsamic 2y ago
      The thing is for a product to fail means the failure is widely accepted, like how Stadia failed or how AirPower failed. The verb "to fail" is simply wrong in the case of a product when you really intend "to be bad". It can't be established yet if Apple Intelligence has failed.
  • adamc 2y ago
    Because it's true. When you ship a product and people look at it and go "meh", the product launch failed. There is literally no value in launching products people don't find value in.
    • bowsamic 2y ago
      Is there any actual empirical evidence that this is the case?
• fredsted 2y ago
  It's what Apple does. The first version of a product often sucks somehow, but is generally usable. They're masters at iterating.
  • srmatto 2y ago
    I agree. Case in point is that the author jumped in at the iPhone 7 which is a lot closer to current era iPhones than the original iPhone and had been refined over that many generations. My first iPhone was the 5s, my first Apple Watch was the 6. I tend to hang back and wait a few generations before adopting a new product from Apple. I suspect Apple Intelligence will be a lot better 1-2 years from now.
  • bitpush 2y ago
    This is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. Case in point, HomePod sucked so much they never became useful. It was discontinued
    • sbuk 2y ago
      Which one was discontinued? This one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod Or this one: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod-mini https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-homepod/homepod-mini I find them better than the multiple Echoes we have. Though they don't do as much, what HomePods do do is generally better than Amazon's attempts. Can't comment on Google's equivalent.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• adamc 2y ago
  I was an early user of Macs; the first computer I owned was a Mac Plus. I didn't own a PC until the 1990s. Most of the intro to this is credulous hooey. Macs weren't "bicycles for the mind" in some magic way that was different from PCs. What the early ones had was 1) a better and much more standardized interface, and 2) task switching that worked. As for the AI tools, image generation might occasionally be useful for a D&D game, but otherwise nothing on offer at the moment has much value. And the value of image generation (for me) is pretty small.
• lo_fye 2y ago
  "Clean Up is best explained by this famous photo editing example . . . This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish it happened, not as it actually happened." FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do. Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using Photoshop does. Definitions of What a Photo Is: Apple - "Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated." - John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering @ Apple Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop." - Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of Customer Experience @ Samsung Google - "It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond." - Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google Definitions via https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-compare-apple-google-and-samsungs-definitions-of-a-photo https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-compare-app...
  • arkensaw 2y ago
    I hate that we have spent the last 20 or so advancing digital cameras to the point where a everyone has an amazing DSLR in their pocket and now we're at the point in history where we have to define what a photograph is, because everyone is trying to shoehorn some shitty AI image gen thing into our cameras for a quick profit
• arkensaw 2y ago
  I was giving this my attention until the author included a long quote from Steve Jobs from the author's own dream Sorry, what? Apart from the level of dream-detail recalled being highly dubious, quoting your own hallucination of Steve Jobs to help with your argument about generative AI being useless (and missing the irony) is downright weird. Also Math notes is basically the same thing search engines have been able to do for over a decade now. Enter a sum, get an answer.
  • xena 2y ago
    No, I'm aware of the irony. I also wrote it down when I woke up, and you can see on stream that I copy it from a Discord message when I'm looking for it (https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8?t=14677 https://youtu.be/N_KNpVujAL8?t=14677). I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using.
    • arkensaw 2y ago
      > I figured you'd rather read something my brain made up (albeit unconsciously) than something a machine made up using linear algebra without understanding any of the words that it's using. I mean, any article written by a human is something the brain made up. And I'm fine with that. But it reads like trying to give your opinion extra weight by associating it with Steve Jobs. It just came off weird. I'm with you on most points. I'm not an iphone user but I can certainly appreciate that Apple Intelligence does not match the hype. That seems to be a recurring theme with AI though. Release a thing, shout from the rooftops about how great it is, and then wait for people to start posting about glue in pizza recipes or urging people to kill themselves or generating fictional news alerts.
  • chrisbrandow 2y ago
    the example he gave was multiline with variables. That's somewhat different than what search engines do. Also, it's almost exactly what Solver has done for years.
• deleted 2y ago
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• tracerbulletx 2y ago
  It does seem a little sloppy, but the actually interesting part of Apple Intelligence isn't out yet so I'd withhold judgement, even on the initial release.
• gdubs 2y ago
  So far it feels very unfinished, but having followed Apple for a long time I've seen many products launched and iterate over time. Maps, for instance, had a fairly disastrous early period but eventually became my preferred navigation app.
  • adamc 2y ago
    That used to be the standard apology for Microsoft products, where Mac OS app developers "sweated the pixels", i.e., delivered products that were pretty much on target at launch.
    • gdubs 2y ago
      I mean, Apple Intelligence looks good ha. Yea, I'm not saying it's great or that this is the preferred approach. Just highlighting that it's not the end of the world as many frame it every time something like this happens. Software sometimes takes a few iterations.
  • robertoandred 2y ago
    It is unfinished, several parts haven't shipped yet.
    • gdubs 2y ago
      Agreed – they've even said as much. But some of the marketing is conflicting there, and I've had friends IRL confused that their new phones don't contain all the Apple Intelligence features they've heard of.
• gigel82 2y ago
  > If you have any modicum of site reliability experience, this seems like an unsatisfiable set of constraints. It seems literally impossible, yet here they are claiming that they have done it. His first instinct was right. It seems impossible, because it is. Unless I can run the entirety of the "Private Cloud Compute" on my own hardware in my own firewalled network, I 100% believe that the pipeline is compromised; our data is siphoned off and sold off to advertisers, especially now that they know they can do it and get less than slap on the wrist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578929
• hbn 2y ago
  It's a bit funny his favourite "Apple Intelligence feature" is something that wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't even invoke the actual model at all under the hood. Parsing text for variables when it sees an equals sign and running basic calculations on them? I feel that could have been a novel feature 30 years ago.
  • Multicomp 2y ago
    I mean some of this Math Notes equation features have been in OneNote since what? 2007? Maybe all the way back in 2003?
  • shadowfacts 2y ago
    Soulver has indeed been doing this without large language models (so far as I know) for many years: https://soulver.app/ https://soulver.app/
  • horsawlarway 2y ago
    I also struggled with this for similar reasons. His favorite AI feature is essentially writing valid js for calculations (his example is literally valid js if you just drop the equals on the last line - you can paste it right into the console on his site and see the answer). The whole article feels like it suffers from a similar lack of coherence. Ex - I am hardly an apple fanboy (I strongly dislike the company) but the complaints here are basically The service sometimes has outages The image gen is not as customizable as he'd like He's morally opposed to cleanup in photos Notifications summaries are bad (and how dare I get my texts 5 seconds slower). --- None of that is really related in any way to the security footprint of the tooling he discusses up front, and it's also hardly distinct from most other current AI offerings, and it's not really a consistent complaint about the tech. My opinion of Apple is that they do a crappy job with the vast majority of their apps... They build good hardware, and they abuse their small hardware footprint to make decent device experiences and a decent (but getting worse) OS - but their actual applications are generally mediocre at best (mediocre copies of a previously successful, usually better, app that they will put out of business through shady store practices if I'm being blunt). --- If anything, the failure here is that Apple marketed a thing that AI can't really do (yet, maybe at all), and most of the things AI can do without being incredibly invasive aren't actually all that useful to most folks. Very useful to a handful of power users in specific circumstances, but otherwise essentially novelty apps. So... it's not an implementation failure. It's a marketing failure. And this is hardly unique to Apple right now. The only difference is that usually Apple doesn't play their hand until this inflection point with new tech is over, so it's more obvious this time around just how bad the product fit is for general use.
• BenFranklin100 2y ago
  I’m withholding judgement on Apple Intelligence until iOS 18.4 is shipped in May. That is when they plan to release a revamped Siri with better contextual and personalized responses. For instance, AI/Siri will be aware of what is currently on the screen when responding and also integrate personal data across apps. Ultimately Apple’s strategy of a privacy focused AI will be a winner for a consumer device with access to sensitive personal information. It’s a question of whether they can pull it off technically.
• asimpletune 2y ago
  What's interesting is how I opened Safari's reader mode to digest this 5000+ word polemic, and then noticed for the first time a new option to summarize its contents. A few seconds later I had a clear idea of what the author's thesis is, without being under the false impression that it had conveyed its finer points.
  • msangi 2y ago
    I read the article. After reading this comment I tried to get it summarised. The result wasn't pretty. The summary claimed that there is skepticism over the security of Private Cloud computing, which the article actually praises.
    • asimpletune 2y ago
      Strange that we received two very different summaries. There was a part in the article where the author mentioned that Apple's private cloud compute claims were "literally impossible", but that was hardly the general takeaway of the article. Mine basically said Apple has fallen short of their vision because of the inherent limitations in relying on web services.
• tim333 2y ago
  >Then they casually dropped the holy grail of trusted compute... By which I think he means the AI stuff runs on your machine rather than the cloud. For me that's not a holy grail at all or even something I'm terribly interested in. I downloaded Apple AI on the macbook, found it quite meh and am now seeing if there is a way to remove it as it uses quite a lot of GB or memory. I can see for someone wanting to use LLMs on confidential corporate data that would be important but that's a specialist use case that I don't think Apple Intelligence is particually good for.
  • hb-robo 2y ago
    That corporate context is a good candidate, yes, but I think it's simpler than that. Assuming whatever Apple and Google cook up these next few years is essentially identical from a user standpoint, you can assume that Google's will be selling off every microscopic datum they collect from you, and know for a verifiable fact that Apple's will not (and cannot).
• deleted 2y ago
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• eviks 2y ago
  > They sell bicycles for the mind. Given the lack of a single good supporting example (what, did PCs have no word processors that reacted to backspace keys?) it seems like these are fantasy bicycles... And since no evidence is needed to believe, you can of course believe in Intelligence that can act better than your brain (what are "those pics from San Francisco", you've snapped a hundred there, which 5 would you like to post?) And yet the disillusionment comes a bit faster than expected, why not give Apple a few more decades to iron out some kinks on such a revolutionary fantasy path?
• djaouen 2y ago
  This is why I switched to Guix lol
• fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Apple has a history of releasing early proofs of product concept or basic table stakes products built with a high enough quality they feel like they’re “done,” but then proceed to methodically iterate on them for years to decades until they fade into the background. It’s hard to imagine the iPhone essentially started as a click wheel iPod - comparing the two is night and day in terms of capabilities, function, and form. They take weird side ways jaunts - but generally shift back into a path that is sensible. I was interested to see what they did with Apple intelligence, but assumed it would be establishing of a basic set of capabilities, the effective proposals for APIs, and the seeding of product discussions with their customers over a long time. People seem to think a few years into the current cycle of AI technology we are seeing the final fruits rather than seeing the infancy - for those who develop these sorts of tools it feels very much like iPhone gaming felt in 2009. At some point over the decade we will hit the nadir, then descend into total enshitification (and yes those who think AI has already reached peak enshitification you are totally wrong). Along the way though we will see a lot more truly stunning advances towards the final arrival at pervasive exploitation.
• xivusr 2y ago
  Mac’s being able to export PDF’s for free was a huge deal back in the acrobat days :-P I’m hoping with what they’ve built in infrastructure and custom chips is a step towards making personal LLM also highly available to non-technical people. I think this is where Apple has always shined - making things not just better, but accessible and grokable for normal people.
• aaroninsf 2y ago
  <glances at recent story reconfirming Apple as the most highly valued private company the world has ever known> This is sardonic, as yes, Apple could have chosen different monopolies than it currently has, at different points, and had a different (maybe not better?) trajectory, some of of us are old enough to remember the antipathy towards Microsoft when to the Office suite it added default Explorer, But also, maybe our system fundamentally rewards the "wrong" things if one's definition of "right" includes things like innovation. Or maybe, the welfare of the commons and the common good.
  • Cipater 2y ago
    Apple is not a private company.
    • aaroninsf 2y ago
      Sorry, ambiguous phrasing, I meant private not in terms of "public issue," but as opposed to quasi-governmental corporations... which I imagine in China and perhaps elsewhere (state oil companies in petrostates?) may have a greater value. Though it depends on how you compute value when there aren't shares as well!
• LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  > Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect Because that’s a laughably false premise.
• deergomoo 2y ago
  The “play the podcast my wife sent me the other day” example is interesting to me. That shouldn’t be difficult to do without AI. Yeah asking a thing is always gonna be quicker (provided it works), but a well designed app should make that possible within like ten seconds. I can’t help but wonder if the reason “agentic” systems seem so appealing to people is because as an industry we’ve spent the past fifteen years making software harder to use.
  • teach 2y ago
    I had a similar example the other day. I was visiting Arizona for the first time and was driving in a rental car from Phoenix south to Tucson. I have the latest Google Pixel, and was using Google Maps to navigate. I pressed the "voice search" button from within Google Maps and said "What is the name of the mountain on the left that I'm about to drive past?" Instead of a context-aware answer, my phone simply did a Google search for that exact phrase and showed the results to me. The top hit was a Reddit thread about some mountain near Seattle. :)
    • SamBam 2y ago
      I'm wondering if you actually thought that there was a chance that Google Maps was going to answer you correctly? I guess we're entering an age where people might have a reasonable expectation that any app is a context-aware LLM, but personally I don't have that assumption yet.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    I’m not sure. If the word “podcast” wasn’t used then it might be tricky, but an LLM might figure it out from context. It also depends on the context of the action. If you’re sitting in front of your computer, yeah, no big deal. Type “podcast” in the search field of the messages app and click the thing it finds. But if you’re busy cooking dinner or cleaning out the cat box, it’s a pain to get your phone out and poke around. The main draw of voice assistants (at least to me) is that they let you do things quickly when you don’t already have a device in your hands.
  • xadhominemx 2y ago
• viccis 2y ago
  The "bicycle for the mind" goal, and the Steve Jobs quote that inspired it, is really just another restatement of McLuhan's idea of media as being extensions of man. The bicycle (or wheel, more generally) is an extension of the legs, a phone is an extension of your voice, etc. The problem with interpreting AI through that lens is that AI, as it is being used here, is not an extension of your mind. Plenty of other things are (organizers for example), but AI does not extend your thoughts. It replaces them. Its notification summary feature does not improve your ability to quickly digest lots of notification information, it replaces it with its own attempt, which, not being your own judgment, can and does easily err. There are some uses of AI that do act more like a McLuhanesque medium. Some copilot applications, in which suggestions are presented that a user accepts and refines them, are examples of this. But a lot of the uses of both image generation and LLM tools serve to limit what your mind does rather than expand it.
• voidfunc 2y ago
  > Many companies want to make computers that you can use to do computer things. Apple makes tools that you use as an extension of your body in order to do creative things. They don't just sell computers, they sell something that helps enable you to create things that just so happen to be computers. An Apple marketing executive is smiling somewhere. Brainwashed another one!
  • throitallaway 2y ago
    Right, this is such cringe. Almost like Apple's "What's a computer?" kid come to life. Apple sells overpriced tech to people that don't know any better.
    • cudgy 2y ago
      Uh … the new base model Mac mini is an unbelievable deal. I hope Apple doesn’t read this …
    • kennyloginz 2y ago
      I’m sure you can build a “budget gaming pc” for 100 bucks cheaper. But the m4 Mac mini is a decent piece of gear at 599. The overpriced complaint is obsolete.
  • power78 2y ago
    why are some apple users so cringey?
• jedberg 2y ago
  A somewhat tangential observation: Apple has done such a good job with marketing that my 10 year old thinks that AI stands for Apple Intelligence. We live in the Bay Area so she's seen a bunch of billboards with that. I have to constantly remind her that that is not what it means in most cases.
  • BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Considering how quickly the definition of "AI" changes (several times per decade now ?), and what happened to smartphones, it's possible that she becomes right in a few years...
• gwern 2y ago
  It's astonishing to see Apple settle for DALL-E 3 (or worse?! these remind me of the Bing samples) for the image generator part. Hasn't the incredible extent of mode-collapse and the horrible DALL-E 3 style become universally known and disliked yet?
  • xena 2y ago
    No, it's worse than DALL-E 3, it's an on-device model that can only reproduce placid soulless images. The ones I put in the article have been heavily cherry-picked. The worst ones get far worse. DALL-E 3 can at least do text. Original prompt to Image Playground: "Enron logo" with the Enron logo as img2img input https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3lf472e2yfc2u https://bsky.app/profile/yasomi.xeiaso.net/post/3lf472e2yfc2...
    • gwern 2y ago
      Oh, I assumed the image gen at least was running on the fancy remote GPU server. But it being on-device doesn't prove it's not a DALL-E 3. Just like GPT-3 & GPT-4 & Llamas come in many sizes, some of which are (probably) feasible to run on-device... Still, I suppose that probably does imply that it's some Apple half-hearted image-gen model (trained on a lot of DALL-E 3 contaminated data?), since I'm not sure OA would want to risk leaking even years from now a tiny, terrible, hyper-optimized-for-size DALL-E 3's weights.
      • xena 2y ago
        If you have a compatible Apple device, generate a few dozen images with Image Playground. The device heats up a lot. It's assuredly on-device.
  • llm_nerd 2y ago
    Image Playground uses a tiny on device model. It certainly isn't DALL-E 3. In no universe are on device models intended to compete with massive cloud models.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  The image playground app is an embarrassment
• aucisson_masque 2y ago
  I'm still having to look for thunderbolt cable all around my house to charge that one freaking device that is iphone when everyone else switched 10 years ago to USB C. How is apple intelligence going to help me with that ?
  • neilalexander 2y ago
    Your comment is a bit pointless on a post that has nothing to do with charging, but regardless, the iPhone 15 and 16 models both have USB-C.
    • aucisson_masque 2y ago
      Oh I'm just astonished reading this article how Apple can spend a huge amount of money and lot of time making a private cloud LLM yet can't be arsed to implement simple things like USB C without literally having the Europe force them to do.
• ericd 2y ago
  I normally really like this blog, but what’s all this noise about? They’ve done the hard part of lining their entire foundation up, now all they have to do is build the applications on top, and let others do so as well. In the meantime, they’re shipping the best non-workstation computers, by far, to run models locally. They don’t have to be the ones to implement all of this themselves, you can install ollama right now, and BoltAI can integrate those models into other parts of the OS. And Apple will watch, and Sherlock the best parts of what others do into the OS, and sell gobs of machines. They haven’t squandered anything, the foundations are still there.
• bentt 2y ago
  This article makes great points, but the outcome seems to be “in progress” and not final. They have the tech stack and the right philosophy, they just botched the execution out of the gate. This is the same company that didn’t think 3rd party apps on the iPhone would be a thing. They managed to course correct.
  • lallysingh 2y ago
    Ref: both apps and Apple Maps.
    • gordon_freeman 2y ago
      Apple Maps is still not good compared to Google Maps. If I want to go somewhere for the first time I can't trust to use Apple Maps. (tried a lot, always come back to Google)
      • HnUser12 2y ago
        Depends on the place I'd think. I almost exclusively use Apple Maps except for when I need data about a business. On the other hand Google has also sent me to wrong places a few times, sent me to a closed road etc.
      • bentt 2y ago
        I'm even between these two, and I used to be very in favor of Google. At this point, Google has not improved a single product in the last 5 years.
• rylan-talerico 2y ago
  While I agree with the post's sentiment, its assessment of Apple Intelligence overlooks its incomplete rollout, with most of the meaningful, step-change features (e.g., Siri’s contextual awareness) scheduled for release in 2025 at the earliest. In my view, Private Cloud Compute and Apple Intelligence, together with the ubiquity of Apple devices, position Apple as a leading candidate to realize the widespread, AI-enabled transformation of personal computing discussed in the post — with tasks requiring less energy and cognitive load than they do today for the general consumer.
  • motohagiography 2y ago
    I agree. the idea of being short Apple's ability to create an AI product seems to miss the one thing they are excellent at: the simple things. what they understand is you don't want AI to be impressive, you just want the things you already do today to work really well and be satisfying to use- and not know or care if there is AI behind it. steve jobs understood you have to do really hard things very well to do anything simple beautifully. I'm pretty sure most of their AI play is still in front of them.
  • twobitshifter 2y ago
    Meanwhile Siri is worse than before and can’t fond my flights to add to my calendar any longer.
  • 015a 2y ago
    Execution matters. Microsoft was best-positioned to reap the widespread, mobile-enabled transformation of personal computing. They didn't, and today with the discontinuation of the Surface Duo, they have literally zero strategy in mobile.
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      Worse, because of that bad decision they don't have any endpoints to sell AI and XBox services. When Windows Phone was killed it had about 10% market share in Europe, it was slowly becoming the device that people that didn't like Android, and lacked the funds for an iPhone. Turns out 10% is better than 0%, but they decided otherwise, and selling Microsoft Android was always hard to swallow.
• choonway 2y ago
  It's not just about the man on a bicycle, it's a man on a bicycle on a flat road.
• nordiczordic 2y ago
  Imagine how much better you would be at typing if you didn't have a backspace key.
• keepamovin 2y ago
  Stepping back the way I see it is it’s a cultural thing. Apple loves to own the whole stack and even though circumstances forced them to use the hot new thing because it’s useful, Apple as an organization doesn’t really wanna do that. It wants to have its own stuff, and so it could never really make something succeed that wasn’t its own and that’s why it failed. So far.
• archeantus 2y ago
  It feels very apparent to me that Apple was caught completely flat footed by ChatGPT’s release. As a result, they were very far behind and have been unable to catch up. What they released as Apple Intelligence wasn’t a well-planned, cohesive product as much as the only thing they could possibly do, given the timelines they were up against. Maybe they’ll catch up, but they’re definitely behind and it’s a shocking thing to behold.
• tehjoker 2y ago
  This is very funny. The picture of Stalin and Yezhov was exactly what was going through my mind as an Apple Store sales guy explained the photo clean up feature to me. It felt rude to bring it up though.
• twodave 2y ago
  They failed IMO as soon as they started marketing this stuff as AI. Nobody _actually_ cares about that. They just want new and exciting device capabilities. The fact that they haven’t done anything compelling enough to detach it from the AI moniker means they don’t have anything. Yet. The overall foundation is sound. Maybe in a generation or two we will have a truly compelling use case. Part of me doubts it, though, because Apple isn’t the company they used to be when it comes to innovating.
  • para_parolu 2y ago
    Funniest part is that bar is too low. People just wanted siri not to be utterly stupid
  • widdershins 2y ago
    Interesting note: they don't market it as AI. They market it as Apple Intelligence. I think this is deliberate. So it seems they've already taken your advice (albeit with the 'wink' of using the same initials).
    • twodave 2y ago
      I mean, I wrote my comment knowing this and that it's bullshit, so I don't really see the difference personally.
• fijiaarone 2y ago
  Math notes is a Fortan repl. It’s only impressive to someone who has never seen a calculator.
• nbzso 2y ago
  The Apple bicycle is the Apple user. They know how to ride it well. And how to take the Money. Generative AI is a dud. ML has a lot of applications. I use my smartphone for calls, chat and banking apps. I use my iPad only for drawing, mail and some games. For everything else, I have computers. With real OS.
• henry_viii 2y ago
  > Except for Math Notes. Holy crap. I love Math Notes so much. I wish other note-taking apps had it. It's easily the best feature they've ever come up with. The Cursor editor literally has this.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    you use Cursor as note-taking app?
    • henry_viii 2y ago
      Yes. Features I use all the time when taking notes in Cursor / VS Code: - Ctrl + click -> open link in browser - Alt + shift + click -> create multiple cursors I keep Cursor minimized when I'm not using it the rest of the time.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• kennyloginz 2y ago
  This is Apple being smart and hedging their bets. They are dedicating “AI” hardware to their current devices, and are building a framework for many different futures. In regards to software, they are first building the safety, then MVP’s to provide APIs to their chips. So yah, maybe they aren’t holding the holy grail at the moment. At least we won’t be drinking from lead goblets .