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Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nadirhadad747 1y ago[dead]
- bigyabai 1y agohttps://archive.ph/1332I https://archive.ph/1332I
- drexlspivey 1y agoThere are rumors around that Apple is trying to buy perplexity which makes no sense to me. Perplexity doesn’t have their own foundation model they just wrap existing models so what good are they? They should buy Mistral instead.
- tough 1y agoI read on some other thread perplexity / android integration and app was somewhat decent. Might be the easiest way to acquire a team for Android dev?
- halJordan 1y agoThat rumor was a rumor about apple replacing its search engine. Perplexity has a home grown search engine. Regardless i dont accept the false constraint the Apple simply must buy a foundation model or whatever that means. Perplexity's "wrapper" does a better job than chatgpt or geminiin its domain.
- drexlspivey 1y agoApple needs a team that knows how to train an LLM. Why would they need to buy perplexity to use their search engine?
- barkerja 1y agoTo allow users to query for anything? The index isn't to train and build a model, it's to behave as a search engine for their users. It would (or could) effectively replace Google for Apple users. Imagine an updated Spotlight that would allow the user to enter any query, obtaining information from the internet, enriched with their local context/data. LLM Siri is an entirely different concern than Apple potentially acquiring Perplexity. I view them as two wildly different initiatives.
- nickthegreek 1y agoI really like perplexity. It’s now my default search. there are ways to get perplexity pro for extremely cheap. I recommend those with a passing interest try it out.
- barkerja 1y agoPerplexity is great. I’ve been a happy paying customer for a while.
- jonplackett 1y agoI find this all quite baffling. I’m pretty sure I could knock up a decent Siri clone with got4o-mini, because I already did a bootleg Alexa to power our smart home stuff after Amazon removed the privacy controls. The only hard bit was the wake word. Siri is currently so terrible that even something like Mistral 8b could do a decent job. Whey don’t they just run something like that on their own servers instead?
- int_19h 1y agoThey are competing against Gemini on Android, so it stands to reason that they need something on par with that. Per TFA they are still talking about running those models on Apple's own servers. The more interesting question is how they're going to handle the 180 on all the talk about privacy.
- tough 1y agoClaude can be used via amazon bedrock technically on your own managed AWS infra... But yeah you're not trusting Anthropic but Apple + Amazon I dunno if thats even a win?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WA 1y agoThey could secretly make Siri slightly better in intervals. People have a low opinion of Siri anyways. No way they compare Siri to Gemini. For them, Siri might just stop sucking completely at some point and then the comparison is between the Siri of the last several weeks and the old Siri.
- hylaride 1y ago> Siri might just stop sucking completely at some point and then the comparison is between the Siri of the last several weeks and the old Siri. The same thing did happen to Apple Maps, but many people still default to google (though google maps is still significantly better at finding businesses). But Apple was humiliated by the Apple Maps rollout. Siri has just been a slow-burning joke that's only really useful for setting a timer or reminder.
- jonplackett 1y agoMaybe they should just start putting 16gb ram in iPhones from now on and make their local inference job so much easier.
- raverbashing 1y agoI know, right I bet Apple put 16GB on their notebooks as default while grinding their teeth and cursing at the whole $5 of extra cost per unit
- alwa 1y ago$5 of cost, $195 of foregone profit...
- drexlspivey 1y agoToo late, iphone 17 pro is already in production with 12 GB. They should have done it two years ago, it was such an obvious move.
- atonse 1y agoAt this point, just about anything Apple can do will be way way way better than the absolute turd that is Siri. (It was only impressive 15 years ago). Apple's AI strategy has seriously hurt their reputation. I'd love to be a fly on the wall where they discussed a strategy that amounted to "forget using the most basic LLM to understand combinations of commands like, stop all the timers and just keep the one that has about four minutes left... or turn on the lights in x, y, z room and turn off the fans around the house. let's just try to invent a completely new wheel that will get us bogged down in tech hell for years never making any progress" They could've just improved the thing probably 99% of people use Siri for (Music, Home, Timers, Weather, Sports Scores) without developing any new tech or trying to reinvent any wheel. And in the background, continue to iterate in secret like they do best. Instead they have zero to show for two years since good LLMs have been out. Even my son suggested things like "I wish your phone had ChatGPT and you could ask it to organize all your apps into folders" – we can all come up with really basic things they could've done so easily, with privacy built in.
- Rebuff5007 1y agoI know this is the leading narrative, but I actually disagree. Apple has a wonderful set of products without any form of generative AI, and those products continues to exist. Yes there is opportunity to add some fancy natural-language based search / control, but that seems like relatively low hanging fruit compared to the moat they have and defend. Will adding gen ai natively to apple products have people non-trivially change the way they use iphones or macs? Probably not. So there is literally no rush here.
- halJordan 1y agoObviously reasonable minds may disagree. And i do i disagree with your disagree-al. Your reasonable response necessarily stems from a foundation that llms are just stochastic parrots incapable of non-trivially changing someone's usage. That isn't true, and has been shown to be untrue in many domains at this point. And that's only from the chatbot form of llms. Tool usage and agents will reveal more new paradigms
- thejazzman 1y ago
- blakesterz 1y agoI would've held off on buying a new phone another year (AT LEAST) had I known all that Apple Intelligence hype was just hype.
- cheeze 1y agoDid people actually think "we've added AI" was a selling point for the new flagships? Felt like the most obvious "CEO says we need to do this, doesn't matter if it isn't ready" kinda thing. Straight up checking a box for parity with Samsung et al.
- seydor 1y agoI understand apple's strategy. If they had really good AI, their phones and watches would be reduced to a microphone and speaker. No more advantage. So they stick to crappy AI that forces users to tap on their phone frustratingly instead. Their idea about running openAI models is meant to make people disable AI features altogether. Brilliant strategy (/s)
- mrtesthah 1y agoOh wow, you just came up with a smartphone killer! How can I invest in your multibillion dollar idea? /s
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drivingmenuts 1y agoAnd here's me trying to figure out what I would need AI on a phone. Apps are going to phone home and use their own AI, not Apple's. I don't need an AI to set a timer, search Google, or add to my calendar. If I write anything, I do it on my main machine. Really wish this would be optional, but you know it won't be.
- canjobear 1y agoI’m not surprised that Apple has been struggling to integrate LLMs. By their very stochastic nature they go against Apple’s philosophy of total vertical control of every aspect of their products. There’s no way to guarantee that an LLM will do anything and so they would be ceding control of the user experience to a random number generator.
- hylaride 1y agoThe problem with Apple is that their corporate culture doesn't vibe well with a lot of new tech. Their culture of secrecy held them back with the original "smart assistants" as all the best talent were PhDs who wanted to publish, but apple wouldn't allow that; on top of that, they didn't pay top dollar like Google or Amazon did at the time, either (whom also let their employees publish on top of that!). Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology to possibly keep up unless they loosen up. But they're being run by a bunch of 50+ year old white guys trying to still be cool, but not understanding what's really going on. I'm not saying they need to publish a roadmap or anything, but they need to tell their marketing dept. to piss off and that not everything needs to be a "delightful surprise" on stage.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> problem with Apple is that their corporate culture doesn't vibe well with a lot of new tech Apple has never been the company that does it first. They're the company that does it right. Arguably, their fuckup with LLMs was rushing a garbage product to market instead of waiting and watching and perfecting in the background. > Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology Strongly disagree. OpenAI and Anthropic are blowing billions on speculative attempts at advancing the frontier. They're advancing, but at great cost and uncertainty in respect of future returns. The smart move would be to recapitulate the deal with Google, possibly being paid by these cash-burning companies for the default AI slot on the iPhone, all the while watching what Apple's users do. Then, when the technology stabilises and the best models are known, Sherlocking the whole thing.
- guerrilla 1y agoIs it not uncharactaristic that they're talking sbout this in public?
- eviks 1y agoThey aren't? > Representatives for Apple, Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment.
- gdiamos 1y agoGo with anthropic
- bilsbie 1y agoI wish it could be on device though. I’d upgrade my phone for that.
- bilsbie 1y agoIt’s getting kind of silly that we don’t have AI on phones in a usable way. My wishlist: Let me talk to AI about anything on my screen. Hey AI why did this guy email me? Hey AI what’s this webpage about? Etc AI designs the UI on the fly depending on the task I’m doing. No more specific apps? just a fluid interface for whatever I need. Leave AI in listening or video mode and ask about my environment or have a conversation.
- minimaxir 1y agoThe bottleneck for AI on the phones is more hardware/compute, which due to the development lifecycle always lags a bit and the 2 years since the LLM boom tracks for changes that would need to be met to match the moment (e.g. iPhones shipping with more RAM for Apple Intelligence).
- adabyron 1y agoIMO Apple's play here is to be the host that runs something like mcp servers and allows/encourages App devs to allow users to ask Siri to make requests that utilize their apps. Then we can interact with multiple apps all via Siri and have them work together. To me that's a huge win.
- tzs 1y agoI don't use Siri much, but I have noticed sometime over the last few months a problem in something that Siri uses. That's the voice dictation. I use it all the time on iPad to enter search terms. So for instance if I wanted information on public transit options in London I'd tap the search bar in Safari, tap the mic icon, and say "Public transit options in London" and that used to work pretty much all the time. It would even work if I had a loud TV on or loud music on, and it was great about realizing when I'd stopped speaking and automatically starting the search. Lately it has tended to cut off early, so I only get "Public transit options" entered. I can get it to work if I try again and say each word very loud and with a distinct short gap between the words. My understanding is that modern dictation systems make heavy use of deep learning so I'd expect it shares from underlying technology with Siri. I wonder if there is a problem with that underlying technology?
- BenGosub 1y agoWhy not use one of the open source models?
- dham 1y agoThey don't need Anthropic or OpenAI. Literally just go to ollama.com and throw a dart at a random model. That will be better than whatever they are doing now.
- Melatonic 1y agoDownloaded Apple intelligence and realised I was probably never going to use it. Fully disabled. Siri has been disabled since day 1 (moved over from Android to the iPhone 15 pro max) I would much rather see small individual uses of AI using the quite powerful hardware than another chatbot. Photo editing for example - the new AI feature to remove an object (like a random person behind you in a selfie) works great. Give us more upgrades like that with real world uses ! I don't care about some giant all encompassing Siri. I don't even like talking to my phone in general.
- rorylawless 1y agoIf Apple still had “courage”, they’d give up on AI and release a truly revolutionary “average phone”. A phone stripped of social media apps and features, with only access to music, mapping and messaging apps.
- bitpush 1y agoGenuine question - who's asking for that? You doing think HN if representative of the larger iPhone user base do you?
- UltraSane 1y agoI truly do not understand how the same company that can create a truly innovative and incredible bit of hardware like the Vision Pro can also let Siri stagnate for almost its entire life.
- Nevermark 1y agoLook at AppleTV Big screen should mean “shared computing” Where is the gesture interface? That responds to everyone in its field of view? For shared use of apps, maps, etc. Why can’t I browse my home devices on it? Why can’t I share to a buddies AppleTV 100 miles away, for shared viewing, for shared app use, with an audio connection between us. Why not room to room video conferencing? With a bar at the bottom to send docs to, to be opened on screen or downloaded by whoever is in the conference? On and on. The opportunities to do an “Apple Watch” rethink of AppleTV have been there … but it’s still just a streaming box + low end game box.
- bitpush 1y agoThey painted themselves into a corner really. It started with privacy marketing and then they started believing it. Data = radioactive etc etc Siri can't get better without access to copious amounts of data; data apple doesn't have. They are fucked
- brikym 1y agoSiri is basically only good for checking the weather, starting a timer and basic maths. It messes up half the tasks I ask of it: Alarm rings: "Hey siri, stop" -> "Which alarm would you like me to delete?" "Hey siri how far is from the bottom of [hiking trail] to the top?" "It'll take you x hours to walk from your location to the trail.". "Hey siri call Jeff" [Calls different person] It always keeps listening until I tell it to go away. Feel free to reply with your examples of not being taken Sirisly.
- octo888 1y agoThis is a rare and fantastic grilling of Apple by a journalist over Siri, with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. It's a masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo
- daft_pink 1y agoHope they can address the fact that many devices we use for Siri are low powered and it’s not practical to put expensive chips in them, such as our Homepods. I’m sure that has something to do with why something like OpenAI looks attractive. The situation where they would want to run own AI is to run locally on device.
- lvl155 1y agoI think it’s time that Apple bids Anthropic with an obscene amount of money they can’t refuse. In my view, Anthropic is SOTA. And while OpenAI is also nice, you don’t have to deal with that one person with a “main character” syndrome.