8 ms·

Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown

143 points by ndr42 2y ago

ndr42 2y ago
The Quote: "AI can never fail, it can only be failed" is something to think about
bigyabai 2y ago
Ooh I like this one. "Apple's chips aren't slowing down. TSMC is."
gibbitz 2y ago
I think AI is just running up against a company whose mantra was "it just works" and finding consumers who expect a working product won't tolerate the lack of quality "AI" has delivered. Welcome to reality venture capitalists...
upcoming-sesame 2y ago
No, Apple AI is a letdown regardless
- taytus 2y ago
  I agree. Both things could be true at the same time.
b112 2y ago
"Hey, I know! We should spend billions replacing code and data that provide the precise same output every time (or random from data we choose), with completely random, uncurated data that changes with every new model, because why not! It's awesome!", says every company now. AI is not useful if you want curated fact, if you want consistent output, if you want repeated quality. How about training an AI on 1990s style encyclopedias, with their low error rate. Even wikipedia has random yahoos coming in and changing pages about the moon landing, to say it was filmed in a studio. AI is being trained on random, it outputs random.
- simmerup 2y ago
  Surely even if you train it on an encyclopedia, if you ask a question that isnt in the encyclopedia it'll just make something up still
- calmoo 2y ago
  Yeah but at the same time if I ask you any question and ask an LLM the same one, in any subject, the LLM is going to beat you 99% of the time.
  - b112 2y ago
    Not true, but even if so, that's not the point. Using curated data means Widgets Inc outputs help to a customer the same always. 99% means AI tells the customer "you stink!" or "our products suck" randomly. It's useless.
    - calmoo 2y ago
      If I ask you general trivia spanning the world's knowledge and history, I guarantee an LLM will beat you. You can test it yourself.
      - b112 2y ago
        Not if it gets points removed for incorrect answers
nixpulvis 2y ago
If you can't explain how it works, I don't want it. If your explanation boils down to a bunch of "it should do..." or "most of the time it does..." then I still don't want it.
MarkusWandel 2y ago
The scenario in the article, about how AI is "usually" right in queries like "which airport is my mom's flight landing at and when?" is exactly the problem with Google's AI summaries as well. Several times recently I've googled something really obscure like how to get fr*king suspend working in Linux on a recent-ish laptop, and it's given me generic pablum instad of the actual, obscure trick that makes it work (type a 12-key magic sequence, get advanced BIOS options, pick an option way down a scrolling list to nuke fr*king modern suspend and restore S3 sleep... happiness in both Windows and Linux in the dual boot environment). So it just makes the answers harder to find, instead of helping.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  But Google have a big problem in that the internet is full of random crap and people trying to actively mess with them. Siri on the other hand should have access to definitely non-noise data like: your calendar. The message your mom sent to say ‘see you at _____ airport and your entire chat history with her. I am 100% certain that if you gave GPT4 this info, it could EASILY get this right 100% of the time. Apple’s ability to make Siri do anything useful with AI is totally incomprehensible and it is definitely not a problem with AI. It could well be a problems with running a very tiny AI on device. I would not trust even GPT 3.5 with this task and it is a lot more capable than anything an iPhone could run.
pram 2y ago
I've been experiencing "AI" making things worse. Grammarly worked fine for a decade+ but now since, I guess, they've been trying to cram more LLM junk into it the recommendations have been a lot less reliable. Now it's sometimes missing even obvious typos.
martinald 2y ago
I just do not understand this attitude. ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that are clearly getting value from it, despite any mistakes it may make. To me the almost unsolvable problem Apple has is wanting to do as much as possible on device, but also have been historically very stingy with RAM (on iOS and Mac devices - iOS more understandably, given it doesn't really need huge amounts of RAM until LLMs came along). This gives them a real real problem, having to use very small models which hallucinate a lot more than giant cloud hosted ones. Even if they did manage to get 16GB of RAM on their new iPhones that is still only going to be able to fit a 7b param model at a push (leaving 8GB for 'system' use). In my experience even the best open source 7B local models are close to unusable. They'd have been mindblowning a few years ago but when you are used to "full size" cutting edge models it feels like an enormous downgrade. And I assume this to always be the case; while small models are always improving, so are the full size ones, so there will always be a big delta between them, and people are already used to the large ones. So I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud services more like their Private Compute idea, but they have an issue there in so much that they have 1b+ users and it is not trivial at all to be able to handle that level of cloud usage for core iOS/Mac features (I suspect this is why virtually nothing uses Private Compute at the moment). Even if each iOS user only did 10 "cloud LLM" requests a day, that's over 10b/requests a day (10x the scale that OpenAI currently handles). And in reality it'd ideally be orders of magnitude more than that given how many possible integration options they are for mobile devices alone.
- inetknght 2y ago
  > ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that are clearly getting value from it, despite any mistakes it may make. You assume hundreds of millions of users could identify serious mistakes when they see them. But humans have demonstrated repeatedly that they can't. I don't think it can ever be understated how dangerous this is. > I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud services more You ignore lessons from the the recent spat between Apple and the UK.
  - qntmfred 2y ago
    > You assume hundreds of millions of users could identify serious mistakes when they see them. But humans have demonstrated repeatedly that they can't. same is true for humans whether they're interacting with LLMs or other humans. so I'm inclined to take statements like > I don't think it can ever be understated how dangerous this is. as hysteria
rossdavidh 2y ago
The worst thing about "AI" is its name. It isn't intelligent, it isn't even dumb. If the current wave had been called "neural networks" or "large language models", then the hype wouldn't have been as breathless, but the disappointment wouldn't be as sharp either, because it wouldn't be used for things it isn't suited for. It's an algorithm; it's just an algorithm. It's useful for a few things. It isn't useful for most things. Like MVC, or relational databases, or finite state machines, or OOP, it's not something you should have to (or want to) tell the end user that you are using in the internals. The reason most "AI" products brag about using "AI", is there isn't anything else interesting about them.
pedalpete 2y ago
This is Apple's spin machine working overtime trying to say "we're not failing at AI, everyone is failing at AI". I'm not sure anyone is going to buy it, but it doesn't cost them anything to get a few of their PR hacks to give it a try. It's about as convincing as "we didn't build a bad phone, you're just holding it wrong!".
epolanski 2y ago
Apple went from $170 to $220 after the Apple Intelligence bs promises. Still sits there despite having long plateaued in revenue and is still priced for some impressive revenue growth. Go figure.
Workaccount2 2y ago
>If it’s 100% accurate, it’s a fantastic time saver. If it is anything less than 100% accurate, it’s useless. The insane levels of hypocrisy hearing this come from a mainstream media source. The damage that has been done to all of society by misrepresenting and half-truthing about events to appease audiences is unrivaled, yet here they are on the high horse of "anything less than 100% accurate is useless" Take note CNN, take fucking note.
- throwawa14223 2y ago
  Even if it is 100% accurate but it is slower than finding and reading the answer it is still useless.
- bwfan123 2y ago
  It is good to see both sides of the debate. Thus far, media was feeding into the hype, now media is being skeptical. This is a nature evolution path of any new tech. why be salty ?
flippy_flops 2y ago
With Apple/iOS, I can’t help but think of the Joker’s quote, “You have nothing… Nothing to do with all your strength.” The efficiency half is excellent but what with the power? AR? Gaming? AI seems the first broad fit. And where was Apple? Literally chasing cars and an ill conceived VR headset. I say this as a massive Apple fanboy. AI was heavily advertised as a selling point of iPhone 15 Pro and is completely MIA 6 months later. It’s a major letdown. It’s not the end of the world, but let’s just call it what it is. For those saying Apple doesn’t release imperfect products, may I introduce to you Siri? It was average when they bought it and it’s become a punch line. And there are so many uses of AI that don’t have to be at the risk level of, “Oops, AI left grandma at LeGuardia.” Apple should go back to its roots and provide high quality LLM/MCP and other API sdks to developers and let them go nuts. Then just clone or buy the apps that work like they always do.
roughly 2y ago
Two thoughts: The first is that LLMs are bar none the absolute best natural language processing and producing systems we’ve ever made. They are absolutely fantastic at taking unstructured user inputs and producing natural-looking (if slightly stilted) output. The problem is that they’re not nearly as good at almost anything else we’ve ever needed a computer to do as other systems we’ve built to do those things. We invented a linguist and mistook it for an engineer. The second is that there’s a maxim in media studies which is almost universally applicable, which is that the first use of a new media is to recapitulate the old. The first TV was radio shows, the first websites looked like print (I work in synthetic biology, and we’re in the “recapitulating industrial chemistry” phase). It’s only once people become familiar with the new medium (and, really, when you have “natives” to that medium) that we really become aware of what the new medium can do and start creating new things. It strikes me we’re in that recapitulating phase with the LLMs - I don’t think we actually know what these things are good for, so we’re just putting them everywhere and redoing stuff we already know how to do with them, and the results are pretty lackluster. It’s obvious there’s a “there” there with LLMs (in a way there wasn’t with, say, Web 3.0, or “the metaverse,” or some of the other weird fads recently), but we don’t really know how to actually wield these tools yet, and I can’t imagine the appropriate use of them will be chatbots when we do figure it out.
- artyom 2y ago
  Most grounded and realistic take on the AI hype I've read recently.
- brulard 2y ago
  It was a mistake to call LLMs "AI". Now people expect it to be generic.
  - exe34 2y ago
    They're pretty AI to me . I've been using chat gpt to explain things to me while learning a foreign language, and a native speaker has been overseeing the comments from it. it hasn't said anything that the native has disagreed with yet.
originalvichy 2y ago
AI working with your OS is absolutely the letdown. I do not want to give my personal computer's data a direct feed into the hands of the same developers who lie about copyright abuses when mining data. 90% of the mass consumer AI tech demos in the past 2-3 years are the exact same demos that voice assistants used to do with just speech-to-text + search functions. And these older tech demos are already things only 10% of users probably did regularly. So they are adding AI features to halo features that look good in marketing but people never use. Keep the OS secure and let me use an Apple AI app in 2-3 years when they have rolled their own LLM.
4ndrewl 2y ago
"Apple made a rare stumble" Auto. Vision Pro. AI. Is there a pattern emerging here?
- reliabilityguy 2y ago
  No need to go that far. Search in Mail is abysmal since forever. Everyone knows it. Apple knows it. No change still. So, no surprise here.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    search in outlook is abysmal and it is part of microsoft’s core business… :)
    - reliabilityguy 2y ago
      well, I think the expectations from Apple's product on a much higher level, which makes the situation with search even more embarrassing.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        how interesting… I expect the opposite, just like maps, search is just not apple’s “thing” and I don’t expect much at all
    - hu3 2y ago
      whataboutism won't save Apple when Gmail search has been great since forever
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        hm search company’s search is decent, that’s surprising…
        hu3 2y ago
ichiwells 2y ago
One of apple’s biggest missed with “AI” in my opinion, is not building a universal search. For all the hype LLM generation gets, I think the rise of LLM-backed “semantic” embedding search does not get enough attention. It’s used in RAG (which inherits the hallucinatory problems), but seems underutilized elsewhere. The worst (and coincidentally/paradoxically I use the most) searches I’ve seen is Gmail and Dropbox, both of which cannot find emails or files that I know exist, even if using the exact email subject and file name keywords. Apple could arguably solve this with a universal search SDK, and I’d value this far more than yet-another-summarize-this-paragraph tool.
- brulard 2y ago
  I have this same issue with gmail. I can not find e-mails by an exact word from text or subject. It is there, but search would not show it. I don't understand how a number one email provider can fail at that.
  - squid_ca 2y ago
    Or, say, a number one search provider ;)
  - fragmede 2y ago
    and search provider! Of all the companies in the world, why is Gmail search just not better?
- krackers 2y ago
  For this to happen they'd have to actually pay attention to spotlight and the quicklook/spotlight plugin ecosystem they abandoned. There's lots of obvious ways to combine LLMs with macOS' unique software advantages (applescript, bundle extensibility) but they have spent years systematically burning those bridges. I don't think they'll be able to swallow their pride and walk everything back.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
AI might be disappointing, but Apple Intelligence is definitely a stumble. I've been playing with Gemini and it works shockingly well. I fully expect Apple to catch up, but it will take a while for them to recover from the reputational damage.
aaomidi 2y ago
Yes and no. Siri didn’t need to suck all these years. Even before the LLM craze.
seydor 2y ago
Trough of disillusionment
andrewstuart 2y ago
AI is at the Web 1.0 stage when people didn’t really know how to make the most of it. It sounds ridiculous now but Web 1.0 was mostly about putting companies paper brochures onto websites. It sounds doubly ridiculous that Web 1.0 came to an end when the market crashed because no one could figure out how to make money from the internet. Web 1.0 started in 1994 and it would be ten years until Facebook arrived. So AI has some really really big surprises in store that no one has thought of yet and when they do, fortunes will be made.
- throwawa14223 2y ago
  Or it could be like blockchain and we could laugh at the people still hawking it a few years later.
  - andrewstuart 2y ago
    I use AI through most of my day in personal and work situations. AI constantly solves problems and makes life fun for me. I never once had anything to do with blockchain, NFTs. Crypto just lost me money.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    I wish I could laugh at all the people who bought BTC for a measly $1K back in the day...
- g-b-r 2y ago
  You're claiming that the web began to be useful with the introduction of Facebook, rather than that being its downfall? It not being lucrative was a *feature*, not a defect.
tallytarik 2y ago
“Hey Siri open the curtains” “I found some web results. I can show them if you ask again from your iPhone” Nah, Apple is the letdown, and has been since before ChatGPT.
kittikitti 2y ago
Why is a source about AI from CNN being taken seriously? Isn't their "journalism" just clickbait?
amelius 2y ago
Only if you are susceptible to the RDF.
stavros 2y ago
To me, "AI is the letdown" is the letdown. The sheer lack of imagination and wonder you must have to see what are almost virtual people, something that was _unthinkable_ five years ago, and to say it's a letdown, I will never understand. We have programs, actual programs that you can run on your laptop, that will understand images and describe them to you, understand your voice, talk to you, explain things to you. We have experts that will answer your every question, that will research things for you, and all we keep saying is how disappointing it is that they aren't better than humans. To me, this is very much the old joke of "wow, your dog can sing?!" "Eh, it's not that impressive, he's pitchy". To go from "AI that can converse fluently is impossible, basically science fiction" to "AI is a letdown" just shows me the infinite capability humans have to find anything disappointing, no matter how jaw-droppingly amazing it is.
- namaria 2y ago
  Frankly the "this didn't exist before" and extend-the-line "it will keep getting better" is not only bad reasoning, it's getting tired. Yeah transformers doing NLP well is pretty impressive. No, it is not worth burning hundreds of billions of dollars on GPU data centers. And please, stop the hype. Non-technical decision makers are really spoiling everything with magical thinking about "artificial intelligence". We still have to learn domains and engineer products. There is no silver bullet.
  - voidspark 2y ago
    It is worth burning hundreds of billions, because users are demanding it and getting value from it. Grok has already overloaded their 200k GPU cluster and is struggling to keep up with the demand.
  - stavros 2y ago
    I don't know whom you're replying to, but it doesn't seem to be to my comment. It feels like you skimmed my comment and then replied to a straw man.
    - namaria 2y ago
bradgessler 2y ago
Apple would be much better saying to the world, "we're going to make Siri better". That's concrete, people get it, LLMs are good at it, and something we'd all appreciate. Instead they're failing to build a bunch of stuff that nobody asked for under the banner, "Apple Intelligence". Please Apple, just make Siri better.
- natch 2y ago
  Replace Siri. Don't make it better. The Siri persona is flawed. It has a dated and corporate sense of humor, is a prude about the most innocuous and natural uses of language, and is not game for anything. It was impressive for the first few months when it came out, but now it's unfixable. Dump it.
deleted 2y ago
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throwawa14223 2y ago
I've noticed that Siri has gotten far worse at playing a song based on a verbal request. Frequently Siri now assures me that songs are not downloaded to my phone only for me to discover that they have been the whole time.
deadbabe 2y ago
We keep trying to find justifications for business use of LLMs. We keep getting shut down by simpler, purpose built tools that work predictably. LLM is just good for synthesizing vague inputs.
- int_19h 2y ago
  There absolutely are valid cases for productive use of LLMs. Translation is a big one - for languages with a large corpus, they are insanely good at it.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Realtime translation is not one of our problems.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      I didn't say anything about "realtime". But also, both realtime and non-realtime translations are real problems. They might not be your problems, but I for one use LLM as translators pretty much daily.
ohso4 2y ago
> Apple’s obsession with privacy and security is the reason most of us don’t think twice to scan our faces, store bank account information or share our real-time location via our phones. Uh do you have any freaking idea of what happens with your location data? bank account information is a matter of security. So is face ID data.
icu 2y ago
Where exactly is the Apple Intelligence that was advertised? Siri absolutely cannot go into your phone's calendar and see who you bumped into at some bar or café. I've been using the Pixel 9 Pro as my daily driver and while I really wanted to install CalyxOS on it, I've found Gemini to be actually useful (and I'm generally biased against Google). Apple is behind the curve like Google was prior to Gemini 2.5 Pro, but unlike Google, I cannot see Apple having the talent to catch up unless they make some expensive acquisitions and even then they will still be behind. I was shocked at how good Gemini 2.5 Pro is. The cost and value for money difference is so big that I'm considering switching away from my API usage of Claude Sonnet 3.7 to Gemini 2.5 Pro.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  They’re being sued because it is nowhere. They’re trying to do it on device with a tiny model. All the google Ai stuff is cloud based, run on their massive Google cloud data centres. Apple don’t have those, so getting more talent isn’t gonna fix it!
  - threeseed 2y ago
    No. Siri has three parts. On device AI model which handles light tasks like notifications. Apple Compute Cloud which runs a more powerful version of the same model and handles more complex operations. And integration with OpenAI, Gemini etc for LLM tasks.
    - jonplackett 2y ago
      In practice it rarely uses ChatGPT. And even when it does, it doesn’t work properly. Eg. The other day I had a birthday invitation for a kids party sent to me as a jpg. I figure, I’ll ask Siri to add it to my calendar. After a lot of persuasion I manage to get it to send it to ChatGPT to process it (which makes no sense since even the photos app can read text in an image). But anyway, it sends it to ChatGPT. Which replies by reading out the contents of the image including all the day and time and location. And that’s it. No action from Siri. So I follow up with ‘so can you add it to my calendar now?’ Siri replies “what would you like to me add to your calendar?” That was 5 minutes of my life I won’t get back…
lvl155 2y ago
This sort of takeaway is from people who do not have experience in cutting edge. AI is developing at such a rapid pace right now. I’ve seen some amazing things in the past three months. I will say Apple AI completely sucks for a company with all the resources available to them.
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ginkgotree 2y ago
Right. CNN is absolutely the authority here.
ohgr 2y ago
Hyper optimism in this thread. Outside tech users it’s a novelty that lasts about a week or disappears in a puff of smoke the moment money is asked for it. The whole industry is blind to the fact the market doesn’t need it and it it doesn’t really solve any problems. It’s not even a means to an end. What consumers want is to be left the fuck alone and their stuff to last longer. But this doesn’t make numbers go up.
acuntcalleddan 2y ago
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saagarjha 2y ago
Nah, Apple just never implemented good AI. I think AI itself is a letdown but let’s not forget that Apple claimed they were going to implement that and they didn’t. If someone tells you they’re going to eat a hamburger and then they just don’t eat lunch you can feel they’re making bad decisions even if the thing they set out to do was also possibly a bad decision.
smallnix 2y ago
> Apple’s obsession with privacy and security is the reason most of us don’t think twice to scan our faces, store bank account information or share our real-time location via our phones. People do that because it's very useful, not because it's safe.
puppycodes 2y ago
They just need more time to implement it. Most people still have no idea how useful it can be. I'm a firm beleiver it will be an absolute godsend to older folks who struggle to learn new interfaces and technologies.
raymond00 2y ago
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thedanner 2y ago
So much Apple apologeticism in this article. 100s of apple employees planned an event where they got on stage and said to the world "we have working AI use cases." And they haven't delivered. There are no excuses.
thedanner 2y ago
[flagged]
Farer 2y ago
I really dislike extreme views. 0 or 1. This is a concept that only fits the Digital world. The world we live in is analog. Although we call the world we live in a 'Digital World,' in reality, the 'Digit' itself is simply recorded on a certain analog machine. Just because the 'AI' services we use today cause certain levels of error doesn't mean we can disregard their value as zero. Are Apple’s services flawless? (Vision Pro... I won’t say more.) Since humans are not perfect, everything created by humans can never be perfect. Between 0 and 1, there are countless values like 0.1, 0.0002, etc. Ignoring this concept is something I personally find truly repulsive. When the so-called 'AI' industry was booming, Apple was completely fumbling. Why? Because Apple is not perfect either. After all, Apple is run by people.

143 points by ndr42 2y ago

ndr42 2y ago

The Quote: "AI can never fail, it can only be failed" is something to think about

bigyabai 2y ago

Ooh I like this one. "Apple's chips aren't slowing down. TSMC is."

gibbitz 2y ago

I think AI is just running up against a company whose mantra was "it just works" and finding consumers who expect a working product won't tolerate the lack of quality "AI" has delivered. Welcome to reality venture capitalists...

upcoming-sesame 2y ago

No, Apple AI is a letdown regardless

taytus 2y ago
I agree. Both things could be true at the same time.

b112 2y ago

"Hey, I know! We should spend billions replacing code and data that provide the precise same output every time (or random from data we choose), with completely random, uncurated data that changes with every new model, because why not! It's awesome!", says every company now. AI is not useful if you want curated fact, if you want consistent output, if you want repeated quality. How about training an AI on 1990s style encyclopedias, with their low error rate. Even wikipedia has random yahoos coming in and changing pages about the moon landing, to say it was filmed in a studio. AI is being trained on random, it outputs random.

simmerup 2y ago
Surely even if you train it on an encyclopedia, if you ask a question that isnt in the encyclopedia it'll just make something up still
calmoo 2y ago
Yeah but at the same time if I ask you any question and ask an LLM the same one, in any subject, the LLM is going to beat you 99% of the time.
- b112 2y ago
  Not true, but even if so, that's not the point. Using curated data means Widgets Inc outputs help to a customer the same always. 99% means AI tells the customer "you stink!" or "our products suck" randomly. It's useless.
  - calmoo 2y ago
    If I ask you general trivia spanning the world's knowledge and history, I guarantee an LLM will beat you. You can test it yourself.
    - b112 2y ago
      Not if it gets points removed for incorrect answers

nixpulvis 2y ago

If you can't explain how it works, I don't want it. If your explanation boils down to a bunch of "it should do..." or "most of the time it does..." then I still don't want it.

MarkusWandel 2y ago

The scenario in the article, about how AI is "usually" right in queries like "which airport is my mom's flight landing at and when?" is exactly the problem with Google's AI summaries as well. Several times recently I've googled something really obscure like how to get fr*king suspend working in Linux on a recent-ish laptop, and it's given me generic pablum instad of the actual, obscure trick that makes it work (type a 12-key magic sequence, get advanced BIOS options, pick an option way down a scrolling list to nuke fr*king modern suspend and restore S3 sleep... happiness in both Windows and Linux in the dual boot environment). So it just makes the answers harder to find, instead of helping.

jonplackett 2y ago
But Google have a big problem in that the internet is full of random crap and people trying to actively mess with them. Siri on the other hand should have access to definitely non-noise data like: your calendar. The message your mom sent to say ‘see you at _____ airport and your entire chat history with her. I am 100% certain that if you gave GPT4 this info, it could EASILY get this right 100% of the time. Apple’s ability to make Siri do anything useful with AI is totally incomprehensible and it is definitely not a problem with AI. It could well be a problems with running a very tiny AI on device. I would not trust even GPT 3.5 with this task and it is a lot more capable than anything an iPhone could run.

pram 2y ago

I've been experiencing "AI" making things worse. Grammarly worked fine for a decade+ but now since, I guess, they've been trying to cram more LLM junk into it the recommendations have been a lot less reliable. Now it's sometimes missing even obvious typos.

martinald 2y ago

I just do not understand this attitude. ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that are clearly getting value from it, despite any mistakes it may make. To me the almost unsolvable problem Apple has is wanting to do as much as possible on device, but also have been historically very stingy with RAM (on iOS and Mac devices - iOS more understandably, given it doesn't really need huge amounts of RAM until LLMs came along). This gives them a real real problem, having to use very small models which hallucinate a lot more than giant cloud hosted ones. Even if they did manage to get 16GB of RAM on their new iPhones that is still only going to be able to fit a 7b param model at a push (leaving 8GB for 'system' use). In my experience even the best open source 7B local models are close to unusable. They'd have been mindblowning a few years ago but when you are used to "full size" cutting edge models it feels like an enormous downgrade. And I assume this to always be the case; while small models are always improving, so are the full size ones, so there will always be a big delta between them, and people are already used to the large ones. So I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud services more like their Private Compute idea, but they have an issue there in so much that they have 1b+ users and it is not trivial at all to be able to handle that level of cloud usage for core iOS/Mac features (I suspect this is why virtually nothing uses Private Compute at the moment). Even if each iOS user only did 10 "cloud LLM" requests a day, that's over 10b/requests a day (10x the scale that OpenAI currently handles). And in reality it'd ideally be orders of magnitude more than that given how many possible integration options they are for mobile devices alone.

inetknght 2y ago
> ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that are clearly getting value from it, despite any mistakes it may make. You assume hundreds of millions of users could identify serious mistakes when they see them. But humans have demonstrated repeatedly that they can't. I don't think it can ever be understated how dangerous this is. > I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud services more You ignore lessons from the the recent spat between Apple and the UK.
- qntmfred 2y ago
  > You assume hundreds of millions of users could identify serious mistakes when they see them. But humans have demonstrated repeatedly that they can't. same is true for humans whether they're interacting with LLMs or other humans. so I'm inclined to take statements like > I don't think it can ever be understated how dangerous this is. as hysteria

rossdavidh 2y ago

The worst thing about "AI" is its name. It isn't intelligent, it isn't even dumb. If the current wave had been called "neural networks" or "large language models", then the hype wouldn't have been as breathless, but the disappointment wouldn't be as sharp either, because it wouldn't be used for things it isn't suited for. It's an algorithm; it's just an algorithm. It's useful for a few things. It isn't useful for most things. Like MVC, or relational databases, or finite state machines, or OOP, it's not something you should have to (or want to) tell the end user that you are using in the internals. The reason most "AI" products brag about using "AI", is there isn't anything else interesting about them.

pedalpete 2y ago

This is Apple's spin machine working overtime trying to say "we're not failing at AI, everyone is failing at AI". I'm not sure anyone is going to buy it, but it doesn't cost them anything to get a few of their PR hacks to give it a try. It's about as convincing as "we didn't build a bad phone, you're just holding it wrong!".

epolanski 2y ago

Apple went from $170 to $220 after the Apple Intelligence bs promises. Still sits there despite having long plateaued in revenue and is still priced for some impressive revenue growth. Go figure.

Workaccount2 2y ago

>If it’s 100% accurate, it’s a fantastic time saver. If it is anything less than 100% accurate, it’s useless. The insane levels of hypocrisy hearing this come from a mainstream media source. The damage that has been done to all of society by misrepresenting and half-truthing about events to appease audiences is unrivaled, yet here they are on the high horse of "anything less than 100% accurate is useless" Take note CNN, take fucking note.

throwawa14223 2y ago
Even if it is 100% accurate but it is slower than finding and reading the answer it is still useless.
bwfan123 2y ago
It is good to see both sides of the debate. Thus far, media was feeding into the hype, now media is being skeptical. This is a nature evolution path of any new tech. why be salty ?

flippy_flops 2y ago

With Apple/iOS, I can’t help but think of the Joker’s quote, “You have nothing… Nothing to do with all your strength.” The efficiency half is excellent but what with the power? AR? Gaming? AI seems the first broad fit. And where was Apple? Literally chasing cars and an ill conceived VR headset. I say this as a massive Apple fanboy. AI was heavily advertised as a selling point of iPhone 15 Pro and is completely MIA 6 months later. It’s a major letdown. It’s not the end of the world, but let’s just call it what it is. For those saying Apple doesn’t release imperfect products, may I introduce to you Siri? It was average when they bought it and it’s become a punch line. And there are so many uses of AI that don’t have to be at the risk level of, “Oops, AI left grandma at LeGuardia.” Apple should go back to its roots and provide high quality LLM/MCP and other API sdks to developers and let them go nuts. Then just clone or buy the apps that work like they always do.

roughly 2y ago

Two thoughts: The first is that LLMs are bar none the absolute best natural language processing and producing systems we’ve ever made. They are absolutely fantastic at taking unstructured user inputs and producing natural-looking (if slightly stilted) output. The problem is that they’re not nearly as good at almost anything else we’ve ever needed a computer to do as other systems we’ve built to do those things. We invented a linguist and mistook it for an engineer. The second is that there’s a maxim in media studies which is almost universally applicable, which is that the first use of a new media is to recapitulate the old. The first TV was radio shows, the first websites looked like print (I work in synthetic biology, and we’re in the “recapitulating industrial chemistry” phase). It’s only once people become familiar with the new medium (and, really, when you have “natives” to that medium) that we really become aware of what the new medium can do and start creating new things. It strikes me we’re in that recapitulating phase with the LLMs - I don’t think we actually know what these things are good for, so we’re just putting them everywhere and redoing stuff we already know how to do with them, and the results are pretty lackluster. It’s obvious there’s a “there” there with LLMs (in a way there wasn’t with, say, Web 3.0, or “the metaverse,” or some of the other weird fads recently), but we don’t really know how to actually wield these tools yet, and I can’t imagine the appropriate use of them will be chatbots when we do figure it out.

artyom 2y ago
Most grounded and realistic take on the AI hype I've read recently.
brulard 2y ago
It was a mistake to call LLMs "AI". Now people expect it to be generic.
- exe34 2y ago
  They're pretty AI to me . I've been using chat gpt to explain things to me while learning a foreign language, and a native speaker has been overseeing the comments from it. it hasn't said anything that the native has disagreed with yet.

originalvichy 2y ago

AI working with your OS is absolutely the letdown. I do not want to give my personal computer's data a direct feed into the hands of the same developers who lie about copyright abuses when mining data. 90% of the mass consumer AI tech demos in the past 2-3 years are the exact same demos that voice assistants used to do with just speech-to-text + search functions. And these older tech demos are already things only 10% of users probably did regularly. So they are adding AI features to halo features that look good in marketing but people never use. Keep the OS secure and let me use an Apple AI app in 2-3 years when they have rolled their own LLM.

4ndrewl 2y ago

"Apple made a rare stumble" Auto. Vision Pro. AI. Is there a pattern emerging here?

reliabilityguy 2y ago
No need to go that far. Search in Mail is abysmal since forever. Everyone knows it. Apple knows it. No change still. So, no surprise here.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  search in outlook is abysmal and it is part of microsoft’s core business… :)
  - reliabilityguy 2y ago
    well, I think the expectations from Apple's product on a much higher level, which makes the situation with search even more embarrassing.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      how interesting… I expect the opposite, just like maps, search is just not apple’s “thing” and I don’t expect much at all
  - hu3 2y ago
    whataboutism won't save Apple when Gmail search has been great since forever
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      hm search company’s search is decent, that’s surprising…
      - hu3 2y ago

ichiwells 2y ago

One of apple’s biggest missed with “AI” in my opinion, is not building a universal search. For all the hype LLM generation gets, I think the rise of LLM-backed “semantic” embedding search does not get enough attention. It’s used in RAG (which inherits the hallucinatory problems), but seems underutilized elsewhere. The worst (and coincidentally/paradoxically I use the most) searches I’ve seen is Gmail and Dropbox, both of which cannot find emails or files that I know exist, even if using the exact email subject and file name keywords. Apple could arguably solve this with a universal search SDK, and I’d value this far more than yet-another-summarize-this-paragraph tool.

brulard 2y ago
I have this same issue with gmail. I can not find e-mails by an exact word from text or subject. It is there, but search would not show it. I don't understand how a number one email provider can fail at that.
- squid_ca 2y ago
  Or, say, a number one search provider ;)
- fragmede 2y ago
  and search provider! Of all the companies in the world, why is Gmail search just not better?
krackers 2y ago
For this to happen they'd have to actually pay attention to spotlight and the quicklook/spotlight plugin ecosystem they abandoned. There's lots of obvious ways to combine LLMs with macOS' unique software advantages (applescript, bundle extensibility) but they have spent years systematically burning those bridges. I don't think they'll be able to swallow their pride and walk everything back.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

AI might be disappointing, but Apple Intelligence is definitely a stumble. I've been playing with Gemini and it works shockingly well. I fully expect Apple to catch up, but it will take a while for them to recover from the reputational damage.

aaomidi 2y ago

Yes and no. Siri didn’t need to suck all these years. Even before the LLM craze.

seydor 2y ago

Trough of disillusionment

andrewstuart 2y ago

AI is at the Web 1.0 stage when people didn’t really know how to make the most of it. It sounds ridiculous now but Web 1.0 was mostly about putting companies paper brochures onto websites. It sounds doubly ridiculous that Web 1.0 came to an end when the market crashed because no one could figure out how to make money from the internet. Web 1.0 started in 1994 and it would be ten years until Facebook arrived. So AI has some really really big surprises in store that no one has thought of yet and when they do, fortunes will be made.

throwawa14223 2y ago
Or it could be like blockchain and we could laugh at the people still hawking it a few years later.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  I use AI through most of my day in personal and work situations. AI constantly solves problems and makes life fun for me. I never once had anything to do with blockchain, NFTs. Crypto just lost me money.
- int_19h 2y ago
  I wish I could laugh at all the people who bought BTC for a measly $1K back in the day...
g-b-r 2y ago
You're claiming that the web began to be useful with the introduction of Facebook, rather than that being its downfall? It not being lucrative was a *feature*, not a defect.

tallytarik 2y ago

“Hey Siri open the curtains” “I found some web results. I can show them if you ask again from your iPhone” Nah, Apple is the letdown, and has been since before ChatGPT.

kittikitti 2y ago

Why is a source about AI from CNN being taken seriously? Isn't their "journalism" just clickbait?

amelius 2y ago

Only if you are susceptible to the RDF.

stavros 2y ago

To me, "AI is the letdown" is the letdown. The sheer lack of imagination and wonder you must have to see what are almost virtual people, something that was _unthinkable_ five years ago, and to say it's a letdown, I will never understand. We have programs, actual programs that you can run on your laptop, that will understand images and describe them to you, understand your voice, talk to you, explain things to you. We have experts that will answer your every question, that will research things for you, and all we keep saying is how disappointing it is that they aren't better than humans. To me, this is very much the old joke of "wow, your dog can sing?!" "Eh, it's not that impressive, he's pitchy". To go from "AI that can converse fluently is impossible, basically science fiction" to "AI is a letdown" just shows me the infinite capability humans have to find anything disappointing, no matter how jaw-droppingly amazing it is.

namaria 2y ago
Frankly the "this didn't exist before" and extend-the-line "it will keep getting better" is not only bad reasoning, it's getting tired. Yeah transformers doing NLP well is pretty impressive. No, it is not worth burning hundreds of billions of dollars on GPU data centers. And please, stop the hype. Non-technical decision makers are really spoiling everything with magical thinking about "artificial intelligence". We still have to learn domains and engineer products. There is no silver bullet.
- voidspark 2y ago
  It is worth burning hundreds of billions, because users are demanding it and getting value from it. Grok has already overloaded their 200k GPU cluster and is struggling to keep up with the demand.
- stavros 2y ago
  I don't know whom you're replying to, but it doesn't seem to be to my comment. It feels like you skimmed my comment and then replied to a straw man.
  - namaria 2y ago

bradgessler 2y ago

Apple would be much better saying to the world, "we're going to make Siri better". That's concrete, people get it, LLMs are good at it, and something we'd all appreciate. Instead they're failing to build a bunch of stuff that nobody asked for under the banner, "Apple Intelligence". Please Apple, just make Siri better.

natch 2y ago
Replace Siri. Don't make it better. The Siri persona is flawed. It has a dated and corporate sense of humor, is a prude about the most innocuous and natural uses of language, and is not game for anything. It was impressive for the first few months when it came out, but now it's unfixable. Dump it.

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throwawa14223 2y ago

I've noticed that Siri has gotten far worse at playing a song based on a verbal request. Frequently Siri now assures me that songs are not downloaded to my phone only for me to discover that they have been the whole time.

deadbabe 2y ago

We keep trying to find justifications for business use of LLMs. We keep getting shut down by simpler, purpose built tools that work predictably. LLM is just good for synthesizing vague inputs.

int_19h 2y ago
There absolutely are valid cases for productive use of LLMs. Translation is a big one - for languages with a large corpus, they are insanely good at it.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Realtime translation is not one of our problems.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    I didn't say anything about "realtime". But also, both realtime and non-realtime translations are real problems. They might not be your problems, but I for one use LLM as translators pretty much daily.

ohso4 2y ago

> Apple’s obsession with privacy and security is the reason most of us don’t think twice to scan our faces, store bank account information or share our real-time location via our phones. Uh do you have any freaking idea of what happens with your location data? bank account information is a matter of security. So is face ID data.

icu 2y ago

Where exactly is the Apple Intelligence that was advertised? Siri absolutely cannot go into your phone's calendar and see who you bumped into at some bar or café. I've been using the Pixel 9 Pro as my daily driver and while I really wanted to install CalyxOS on it, I've found Gemini to be actually useful (and I'm generally biased against Google). Apple is behind the curve like Google was prior to Gemini 2.5 Pro, but unlike Google, I cannot see Apple having the talent to catch up unless they make some expensive acquisitions and even then they will still be behind. I was shocked at how good Gemini 2.5 Pro is. The cost and value for money difference is so big that I'm considering switching away from my API usage of Claude Sonnet 3.7 to Gemini 2.5 Pro.

jonplackett 2y ago
They’re being sued because it is nowhere. They’re trying to do it on device with a tiny model. All the google Ai stuff is cloud based, run on their massive Google cloud data centres. Apple don’t have those, so getting more talent isn’t gonna fix it!
- threeseed 2y ago
  No. Siri has three parts. On device AI model which handles light tasks like notifications. Apple Compute Cloud which runs a more powerful version of the same model and handles more complex operations. And integration with OpenAI, Gemini etc for LLM tasks.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    In practice it rarely uses ChatGPT. And even when it does, it doesn’t work properly. Eg. The other day I had a birthday invitation for a kids party sent to me as a jpg. I figure, I’ll ask Siri to add it to my calendar. After a lot of persuasion I manage to get it to send it to ChatGPT to process it (which makes no sense since even the photos app can read text in an image). But anyway, it sends it to ChatGPT. Which replies by reading out the contents of the image including all the day and time and location. And that’s it. No action from Siri. So I follow up with ‘so can you add it to my calendar now?’ Siri replies “what would you like to me add to your calendar?” That was 5 minutes of my life I won’t get back…

lvl155 2y ago

This sort of takeaway is from people who do not have experience in cutting edge. AI is developing at such a rapid pace right now. I’ve seen some amazing things in the past three months. I will say Apple AI completely sucks for a company with all the resources available to them.

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ginkgotree 2y ago

Right. CNN is absolutely the authority here.

ohgr 2y ago

Hyper optimism in this thread. Outside tech users it’s a novelty that lasts about a week or disappears in a puff of smoke the moment money is asked for it. The whole industry is blind to the fact the market doesn’t need it and it it doesn’t really solve any problems. It’s not even a means to an end. What consumers want is to be left the fuck alone and their stuff to last longer. But this doesn’t make numbers go up.

acuntcalleddan 2y ago

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saagarjha 2y ago

Nah, Apple just never implemented good AI. I think AI itself is a letdown but let’s not forget that Apple claimed they were going to implement that and they didn’t. If someone tells you they’re going to eat a hamburger and then they just don’t eat lunch you can feel they’re making bad decisions even if the thing they set out to do was also possibly a bad decision.

smallnix 2y ago

> Apple’s obsession with privacy and security is the reason most of us don’t think twice to scan our faces, store bank account information or share our real-time location via our phones. People do that because it's very useful, not because it's safe.

puppycodes 2y ago

They just need more time to implement it. Most people still have no idea how useful it can be. I'm a firm beleiver it will be an absolute godsend to older folks who struggle to learn new interfaces and technologies.

raymond00 2y ago

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thedanner 2y ago

So much Apple apologeticism in this article. 100s of apple employees planned an event where they got on stage and said to the world "we have working AI use cases." And they haven't delivered. There are no excuses.

thedanner 2y ago

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Farer 2y ago

I really dislike extreme views. 0 or 1. This is a concept that only fits the Digital world. The world we live in is analog. Although we call the world we live in a 'Digital World,' in reality, the 'Digit' itself is simply recorded on a certain analog machine. Just because the 'AI' services we use today cause certain levels of error doesn't mean we can disregard their value as zero. Are Apple’s services flawless? (Vision Pro... I won’t say more.) Since humans are not perfect, everything created by humans can never be perfect. Between 0 and 1, there are countless values like 0.1, 0.0002, etc. Ignoring this concept is something I personally find truly repulsive. When the so-called 'AI' industry was booming, Apple was completely fumbling. Why? Because Apple is not perfect either. After all, Apple is run by people.