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For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that

• __loam 1y ago
  I'm happy they ate shit here because I like my mac not getting co-pilot bullshit forced into it, but apparently Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic. Supposedly a lot of politics got in the way of delivering on a good product combined with the general difficulty of building LLM products.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • Gigachad 1y ago
    I do prefer that Apple is opting to have everything run on device so you aren’t being exposed to privacy risks or subscriptions. Even if it means their models won’t be as good as ones running on $30,000 GPUs.
    • alfalfasprout 1y ago
      It also means that when the VC money runs dry, it's sustainable to run those models on-device vs. losing money running on those $$$$$ GPUs (or requiring consumers to opt for expensive subscriptions).
      • DrewADesign 1y ago
        I’m kind of surprised to see people gloss over this aspect of it when so many folks here are in the “if I buy it, I should own it” camp.
    • gerdesj 1y ago
      On device. If you have say 16GB of GPU RAM and around 64GB of RAM and a reasonable CPU then you can make decent use of LLMs. I'm not a Apple jockey but I think you normally have something like that available and so you will have a good time, provided you curb your expectations. I'm not an expert but it seems that the jump from 16 to 32GB of GPU RAM is large in terms of what you can run and the sheer cost of the GPU! If you have 32GB of local GPU RAM and gobs of RAM you can rub some pretty large models locally or lots of small ones for differing tasks. I'm not too sure about your privacy/risk model but owning a modern phone is a really bad starter for 10! You have to decide what that means for you and that's your thing and your's alone.
  • protocolture 1y ago
    Mac LLM vs Lisa LLM?
    • DonHopkins 1y ago
      Apple ][ LLM Forever! https://paleotronic.com/2025/08/03/connect-ai-to-microm8-apple-iie-emulator-and-turtlespaces-logo-using-mcp-model-context-protocol-for-vibe-coding-and-other-activities/ https://paleotronic.com/2025/08/03/connect-ai-to-microm8-app...
  • genghisjahn 1y ago
    Apparently? From what? Where did this information come from that they had two competing teams?
    • alwa 1y ago
      I feel like I hear people referring to Wayne Ma’s reporting for The Information to that effect. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-ai-makeover https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... > Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team. > It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.
      • nl 1y ago
        https://archive.is/Ncefp https://archive.is/Ncefp This is a pretty good article, and worth reading if you aren't aware that Apple has seemingly mostly abandoned the vision of on-device AI (I wasn't aware of this)
    • __loam 1y ago
      I heard it from the Verge podcast several months ago but someone has shared another source.
  • Frieren 1y ago
    > Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic That is a sign of very bad management. Overlapping responsibilities kill motivation as winning the infighting becomes more important than creating a good product. Low morale, and a blaming culture is the result of such "internal competition". Instead, leadership should do their work and align goals, set clear priorities and make sure that everybody rows in the same direction.
    • rmccue 1y ago
      It’s how Apple (relatively famously?) developed the iPhone, so I’d assume they were using this as a model. > In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? Jobs preferred the former option, since he would then have a mobile operating system he could customize for the many gizmos then on Apple’s drawing board. Rather than pick an approach right away, however, Jobs pitted the teams against each other in a bake-off. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna44904886 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna44904886
      • hnaccount_rng 1y ago
        But that's not the same thing right? That means having two teams competing for developing the next product. That's not two organisations handling the same responsibilities. You may still end up in problems with infighting. But if there is a clear end date for that competition and then no lasting effects for the "losers" this kind of "competition" will have very different effects than setting up two organisations that fight over some responsibility
• zitterbewegung 1y ago
  Now their strategy is to allow for Apple Events to work with the MCP. https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/22/macos-tahoe-26-1-beta-1-mcp-integration/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/22/macos-tahoe-26-1-beta-1-mcp-i...
  • krackers 1y ago
    Article says app intents, not apple events. Apple Events would be the natural thing but it's an abandoned ecosystem that would require them to walk back the past decade so of course they won't do that.
• alfalfasprout 1y ago
  > I think Apple execs genuinely underestimated how difficult it would be to get LLMs to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control Not only Apple, this is happening across the industry. Executives' expectations of what AI can deliver are massively inflated by Amodei et al. essentially promising human-level cognition with every release. The reality is aside from coding assistants and chatbot interfaces (a la chatgpt) we've yet to see AI truly transform polished ecosystems like smartphones and OS' for a reason.
  • api 1y ago
    Standard hype cycle. We are probably creating the top of the peak of inflated expectations.
• N_Lens 1y ago
  Apple’s typical standards of “polish and control” seem to be slipping drastically if MacOS Tahoe is anything to go by.
  • toledocavani 1y ago
    You need to reduce the standard to fit the Apple Intelligence (AI) in. This is also industry best practice.
• teeray 1y ago
  > minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. The notification / email summaries are so unbelievably useless too: it’s hardly more work to skim the notification / email that I do anyway.
  • SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Like most AI products it feels like they started with a solution first and went searching for the problems. Text messages being too long wasn't a real problem to begin with. There are some good parts to Apple Intelligence though. I find the priority notifications feature works pretty well, and the photo cleanup tool works pretty well for small things like removing your finger from the corner of a photo, though it's not going to work on huge tasks like removing a whole person from a photo.
    • CjHuber 1y ago
      I mean it happened quite a few times that phishing emails became the priority notification on my phone
      • harvey9 1y ago
        Do you know if apple is using their new tools to do mail filtering? It's an interesting choice if they are since it's a genuine problem with a mature (but always evolving) solution.
      • SchemaLoad 1y ago
        Really those should have been filtered out by the spam filter. If it's made it all the way to your inbox it's not surprising it got marked as a priority since phishing emails are written to look urgent, something which if real would be a priority notification.
    • mikodin 1y ago
      Honestly I love the priority notifications and the notification summaries. The thing that drives me absolutely insane, is that the fact that when I view the notification through clicking on it from another space other than the "While in the reduce interruptions focus" it doesn't clear. Because of this, I always have infinite notifications. I want to open WhatsApp and open the message and have it clear the notif. Or atleast click the notif from the normal notif center and have it clear there. It kills me
• mock-possum 1y ago
  Which is ironic, given all I really want from Siri is an advanced-voice-chat-level chat gpt experience - being able to carry on about 90% of a natural conversation with gpt, while Siri vacillates wildly between 1) simply not responding 2) misunderstanding and 3) understand but refusing to engage - feels awful.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
    Probably the issue is it is free. If people paid for it they could scale infra to cope.
  • Gepsens 1y ago
    That tells you AAPL didn't have the staff necessary to make this happen.
• ano-ther 1y ago
  Maybe they used their AI to design Liquid Glass. Impressive at first sight, but unusable in practice.
  • immibis 1y ago
    All form and no function, or in other words, slop.
• veunes 1y ago
  Apple's whole brand is built around tight control, predictable behavior, and a super polished UX which is basically the opposite of how LLMs behave out of the box
• arethuza 1y ago
  My wife was in China recently and was sending back pictures of interesting things - one came in while I was driving and my iPhone read out a description of the picture that had been sent - "How cool is that!" I thought. However, when I stopped driving and looked at the picture the AI generated description was pretty poor - it wasn't completely wrong but it really wasn't what I was expecting given the description.
  • ChrisGreenHeur 1y ago
    is this a complaint about the wife or the ai?
    • arethuza 1y ago
      The Apple AI
  • bombcar 1y ago
    It’s been surprisingly accurate at times “a child holding an apple” in a crowded picture, and then sometimes somewhat wrong. What really kills me is “a screenshot of a social media post” come on it’s simple OCR read the damn post to me you stupid robot! Don’t tell me you can’t, OCR was good enough in the 90s!
    • arethuza 1y ago
      The description said "People standing in front of impressive scenery" (or something like that) - it got the scenery part correct but the people are barely visible and really small.
• rldjbpin 1y ago
  > to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control. i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general. the ux/ui used to be a top priority, but the quality control has certainly gone down over the years [1]. the company is now driven by supply chain and business-minded optimizations than what to give to the end user. at the same time, what one can do using AI has large correlation with what one does with their devices in the first place. a windows recall like feature for ipad os might have been interesting (if not equally controversial), but not that useful because even till this day it remains quite restrictive for most atypical tasks. [1] https://www.macobserver.com/news/macos-tahoe-upside-down-ui-bug-joins-long-list-of-visual-glitches/ https://www.macobserver.com/news/macos-tahoe-upside-down-ui-...
  • dingdingdang 1y ago
    >> to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control. >i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general. One 100% agree with this, if I compare AI's ability to speed up the baseline for me in terms of programming Golang (hard/tricky tasks clearly still require human input - watch out for I/O ops) with Apple's lack of ability to integrate it in even the simplest of ways.. things are just peculiar on the Apple front. Bit similar to how MS seems to be gradually loosing the ability to produce a version of Windows that people want to run due to organisational infighting.
    • lazide 1y ago
      Personally, I’ve never seen an AI flow of any kind that meets what would meet the quality of a typical ‘corporate’ acceptable flow. As in, reliably works, doesn’t go crazy randomly, etc. I’ve seen a lot of things that look like they’re working for a demo, but shortly after starting to use it? Trash. Not every time (and it’s getting a little better), but often enough that personally I’ve found them a net drain on productivity. And I literally work in this space. Personally, I find apples hesitation here a breath of fresh air, because I’ve come to absolutely hate Windows - and everybody doing vibe code messes that end up being my problem.
      • 1y ago
• belter 1y ago
  The thought that a company like Apple, which surely put hundreds of engineers to work on these tools and went through multiple iterations of their capabilities, would launch the capabilities...Only for its executives to realize after release that current AI is not mature enough to add significant commercial value to their products, is almost comical. The reality is that if they hadn’t announced these tools and joined the make-believe AI bubble, their stock price would have crashed. It’s okay to spend $400 million on a project, as long as you don’t lose $50 billion in market value in an afternoon.
• duxup 1y ago
  What I don't get is there's some fairly ... easy bits they could do, but have not. Why not take the easy wins? Like let me change phone settings with Siri or something, but nope. A lot of AI seems to be mismanaging it into doing things AI (LLMs) suck at... while leaving obvious quick wins on the table.
• xp84 1y ago
  > get LLMs to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control. I reject this spin (which is the Apple PR explanation for their failure). LLMs already do far better than Apple’s 2025 standards of polish. Contrast things built outside Apple. The only thing holding Siri back is Apple’s refusal to build a simple implementation where they expose the APIs to “do phone things” or “do home things” as a tool call to a plain old LLM (or heck, build MCP so LLM can control your device). It would be straightforward for Apple to negotiate with a real AI company to guarantee no training on the data, etc. the same way that business accounts on OpenAI etc. offer. It might cost Apple a bunch of money, but fortunately they have like 1000 bunches of money.
  • beyarkay 1y ago
    I could also imagine that Apple execs might be too proud to use someone else's AI, and so wanted to train their own from scratch, but ultimately failed to do this. Totally agree that this smells like a people failure rather than a technology failure
    • lazystar 1y ago
      reminds me of the attempts that companies in the game industry made to get away from steam in the 2010's - 2020's. turns out having your game developers pivot to building a proprietary virtual software market feature, and then competing with an established titan, is not an easy task.
• beyarkay 1y ago
  Apple is a good example. I kinda still can't believe they've done basically nothing, despite investing so heavily in apple silicon and MLX. Also kinda crazy that all the "native" voice assistants are still terrible, despite the tech having been around for years by now.
• codebra 1y ago
  Apple’s experience has almost nothing to do with “harnessing” LLMs, and everything to do with their wildly misjudged assumption they could run a viable model on a phone. Useful LLMs require their own power plants and can only be feasibly run in the cloud, or in a limited manner on powerful equipment like a 5090. Apple seems to have misunderstood that the “large” in large language model isn’t just a metaphor.