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> Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple is doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their inte

• rustyhancock 5mo ago
  Apple seems to purposefully have decided to sit out the arms race. Probably smart time to rent and not buy if they plan on buying in a downturn.
  • stefan_ 5mo ago
    Okay, but why is the Siri team sitting out transformers. I really wanna move past the „Dragon Naturally Speaking“ experience with a bolted on decision tree.
    • gchamonlive 5mo ago
      I think it's the same reason why MacOS and iOS degraded a lot in terms of UX the past decade. The focus of Apple shifted towards hardware independence. The 2010s was marked by Intel's lazy product lineup, year after year pumping rehashes of older products, iterating on top of their 14nm lithography with increasingly minor improvements on its architecture until AMD overcame them. In the process, Apple's partnership with Intel became a liability it had to solve, and a push for the unified ARM architecture was no small feat. If you ask me I don't think it's justified to degrade the user experience for the sake of focusing on this. It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know. In any case I think it explains really well why Siri feels so abandoned.
      • threetonesun 5mo ago
        I dunno, Apple has always had a pretty high level of hardware independence, and one could imagine even if Intel did produce great chips for longer the ARM architecture would replace it eventually. Certainly the timeline got shifted (and I'm glad for it) but I don't know if that really impacted Siri. If anything it seems like it got pushed to the bottom of the pile in favor of projects like the Apple Car and Vision Pro OS one on side and the demand to increase services revenue on the other.
        • newsclues 5mo ago
          A series is their own chip design, not Power PC or Intel designs. It's the CPUs they have built for their purposes, which is next level hardware independence.
        • Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
          Also: Before, Apple was dependent on Intel (whose "product" is an integrated chip design and the fab to make it). Now they're dependent on TSMC (whose "product" is a fab). I'm... not really sure they've reduced their dependence? If TSMC starts falling behind Intel--which doesn't seem likely, but what happened to Intel didn't seem likely two decades ago--Apple will be stuck.
          • GeekyBear 5mo ago
            TSMC does have competitors. Intel is already being evaluated to fab Apple's entry level chips, if they can meet performance, energy efficiency, and production targets.
            • Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
              Sure, but Intel has/had competitors too.
              • GeekyBear 5mo ago
                Sure, and Apple very successfully competed with Intel when it came to chip design. With fabs, other companies can still compete, but you absolutely require a partner with deep pockets to place big orders, since the costs have grown exponentially.
      • realusername 5mo ago
        I always found that Apple had pretty mediocre software qualify, it's always been a very strong hardware company first and foremost. They have great kernel, drivers and low level engineering but the stack above that has a lot of questionable stuff.
        • gchamonlive 5mo ago
          I don't dispute that, but Apple made its business on the premise of being the best in the business in terms of UX. Note though that you can have great UX powered by mediocre software, so those aren't mutually exclusive.
          • robotresearcher 5mo ago
            Apple’s Mac software in the 90s had great UX and very underwhelming and old fashioned kernel software which they struggled to replace. Jobs knew this and did the work externally with NeXT.
            • gchamonlive 5mo ago
              I knew that only by hearsay. After watching Halt and Catch Fire I truly understood how revolutionary Apple's UX was
        • pfisherman 5mo ago
          The comment above is on to something. I find CarPlay to much more valuable and much more of a lock in to the iPhone than Siri. I do not think I could ever go back to using the infotainment systems that ship with cars. So makes sense why they might prioritize over Siri. And in the context of CarPlay, the simplicity of Siri is nice. I really only need it to execute a few simple commands like looking up directions, making calls, reading / sending texts, playing a podcast, etc.
          • deleted 5mo ago
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      • Cthulhu_ 5mo ago
        It's one of the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world, but your comment seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software.
        • gchamonlive 5mo ago
          > It's a trillion dollar company, and has been for a while. Sure it could have tackled both, but what do I know. I didn't imply, it's explicit in my comment. it's what their actions show. Their updates make their systems worse and worse, Tim Cook is out and Siri is in shambles. It might have been something else, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, because the alternative is just sheer stupidity.
        • footydude 5mo ago
          > seems to imply they have to pick and choose what they pursue. They really don't, especially if it's hard- vs software. Money can often just be one part of the equation. To do things well you also need - available & capable technical resource, suitable facilities, available & capable leadership and management (with engaging at the right level in the business) and a clear vision of what you're trying to achieve/working towards. Given how Apple appears to operate, I wonder if a strong desire for senior management control/oversight over major developments means they (artificially) limit how many concurrent large-scale things they can work on at any given time? Maybe not, but that'd be my guess.
      • HumblyTossed 5mo ago
        They're valued at $4T, they have hundreds of billions hoarded. They could run 50 billion dollar startup projects and not feel it. Imagine a startup getting handed a billion dollars ... and the vast knowledge that Apple has access to already. There's no way they couldn't do a better Siri. For some reason, they just ... won't.
        • gnerd00 5mo ago
          here is a clue delivered -- money does not make software better, and lots of money often results in worse.. it makes no sense? actual experience begs to differ. Classical homework assignment -- the Mythical Man Month and related essays
          • ux266478 5mo ago
            Money is a means to an end, so that's true. Just because you have a screwdriver does not mean you will drive screws. You have to have someone who can use the screwdriver, knows righty-tighty, wants to drive the screws, etc. Stupidly throwing money at a problem can get you places, but the efficiency can also drop to near zero. The problem is we're talking about a quantity of money where you don't need to be highly efficient. Savants can do pioneering work in a cave with a box of scraps, but you don't have to strive for that kind of austere efficiency. Nobody is expecting that. If Apple can't harness the potential of the currently overfilled labor pool, that indicates a systemic issue within Apple. The entire raison d'etre of management structures within a business is to increase efficiency of capital to drive productive forces. If they cannot do that, then that would indicate an extremely problematic competency crisis within Apple's management organ. This kind of failure when you are a company with the valuation of a first world country's GDP should be raising alarm bells in any rational person's mind.
          • HumblyTossed 5mo ago
            I’ve read all that. I know all that. None of that changes my point.
        • foobiekr 5mo ago
          Heavily funded startups have terrible track records in reality. The only cases where it seems to have worked is when the money was used to undermine the market dynamics by nuking competition via severe underpricing.
    • readams 5mo ago
      Gemini will be replacing the legacy Siri: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
    • acdha 5mo ago
      Who’s doing it better? I have yet to hear from a Google or Amazon user who has a transformatively better experience, and I think that’s why they haven’t jumped so far because they have hundreds of millions of users who have daily habits that they don’t want to lightly disturb.
      • wenc 5mo ago
        Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better. The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it for an hour without it missing a beat.
        • barumrho 5mo ago
          Siri doesn't need to have conversations with you. ChatGPT can do that. But, it should be able to do actions you'd do on your phone.
          • cachius 5mo ago
            Speech to text should work. I regularly have to manually edit the transcribed input. The more special words the more frequent. Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary.
            • nozzlegear 5mo ago
              > Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary. Does any voice assistant do this right now? Genuine question, I don't actually know. It sounds useful as long as it's not invasive.
              • mh- 5mo ago
                Any of the LLM-based ones should pull this* off - so that's to say.. none of the popular commercially available ones, yet? Alexa+ does, but I don't use it for anything except kitchen timers and home automation triggers, so I can't speak to how well it works in a longer conversation. Zoom's meeting notes excels at this, Google Meet is terrible at it. Meet mishears our company name about 90% of the time; various attendee names are a coin toss. * "this" being: context consideration in speech-to-text/transcription.
    • colechristensen 5mo ago
      I think they could never make it good enough at the right price. You have to remember all of the AI companies are making cash bonfires. People aren't going to stop buying iPhones because Siri can only do what it does now. If Apple focuses on hardware and skips the pay-for-inference bubble they'll come out the other side with the best consumer hardware everybody already has for local inference which is going to eat the whole industry's lunch. nvidia is going to have a hard time convincing people they need to buy $1000 LLM inference hardware. Apple isn't going to have a hard time convincing people to buy the next generation of phone/tablet/laptop.
    • stetrain 5mo ago
      Not sure "sitting out" is the right way to put it. They've been publicly trying to ship a next-gen Siri for years and haven't been able to get something good enough to release. The latest plan is to base it on Gemini so we should be seeing progress on that next month at WWDC.
    • pxc 5mo ago
      The experience of using LLMs as digital assistants so far is not great. Gemini on Android sucks so bad it's hard to describe. It can't tell what its own capabilities are, it can't inspect the states of the apps it manipulates, it hallucinates constantly, and it needs more handholding than the crappy old decision tree to do the right thing. I much more often have to pull over to make sure Google Maps is doing the right thing than I ever used to before, because trusting the LLM to be "smarter" so often fails for me. Be careful what you wish for.
    • GeekyBear 5mo ago
      They did create a chatbot version of Siri small enough to run locally, but decided that hallucinations were a big enough issue to push the release.
    • yieldcrv 5mo ago
      Because the competitor voice models sound good but are dumb upon any scrutiny ChatGPT’s voice model has a great user experience and seems like it is seamlessly integrated into the chat, but its actually a far smaller and dumber model. @husk.irl on instagram has videos displaying how dumb and undiscerning it is People were wowed by the magic at one point, but its faded. Apple avoids those things and the limitations havent been solved
    • insane_dreamer 5mo ago
      in my experience voice recognition on Claude (using the iPhone app) isn't that great -- maybe even worse than Siri (I'm referring to voice transcription specifically, not the inference of course)
  • iLoveOncall 5mo ago
    Not participating in the war is the only true way to win the war, nothing new. And in this particular war, it's even worse, the "winner" will actually just be the "biggest loser", contrarily to a traditional war.
    • dylan604 5mo ago
      It seems to be Blu-ray vs HD-DVD again. Luckily for me, I made the right decision and got out of the shiny round disc business as that battle was raging all around me having been in the DVD programming business for 8 years or so. This battle of LLMs is interesting to watch from the sidelines as I have nothing to do with them. Not sure this will end with one LLM to rule them all while the others fade away. People can use the one they prefer and not really impact others.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >Not participating in the war is the only true way to win the war, nothing new. Really not true both in real wars and in tech wars. There's no evidence to support this claim. Android only exists as the dominant mobile platform because it went to full scale war with Apple when the iPhone launched. Those that didn't take part and came after the battle have like <1% market share and Apple and Google are printing money from the cut to their app stores. Apple doesn't take part in the AI race because whichever AI wins the war in the end, they'll have to be on their Appstore to reach the users, so Apple wins regardless due to their Appstore monopoly. AIs are no threat to their phone, laptops and Appstore business. But Google can't afford not to take part in this race because AIs are a threat to their search and ads business. Same with real wars, US is the world superpower because it got involved in WW2 even though it didn't have to be. Same with Russia and Ukraine, provided they don't wipe each other out scorched earth, their militaries will be the most advanced on the planet on modern drone warfare they invented after the war is over, and every other military on the planet will be paying them for their gear and expertise, which they already are.
  • api 5mo ago
    This is how they usually roll. They innovate sometimes in hardware but tend to fast follow or even slow follow in software and services. Apple Intelligence is a placeholder and a toe in the water.
    • xnorswap 5mo ago
      They fast-follow then market so aggressively with just enough proprietary tweaks so they can trademark it that people think that Apple invented the technology.
      • evilduck 5mo ago
        People end up thinking Apple invented something because they tend to make the first usable version of something that could appeal to the general population.
        • gambiting 5mo ago
          I literally can't think of an example. Care to share one?
          • stouset 5mo ago
            I’ll give you a hint: you may very well have replied on this category of device.
            • gambiting 5mo ago
              ...are we going to pretend smartphones didn't exist before iPhone was launched? I think I was on my 3rd one when the iPhone came out and even then it was a luxury toy for the rich, I didn't know anyone who actually had an iPhone for a good few years after they came out. Unless you're implying something else?
              • Yajirobe 5mo ago
  • mathisfun123 5mo ago
    I love these comments - have you ever heard of Occam's razor?
  • dzhiurgis 5mo ago
    Wonder how much of it is raw compute constrain. Adding additional 1billion LLM users is near impossible. I spend a lot on tokens and still get throttled.
• piker 5mo ago
  I'm suspicious of that take from Mark Gurman. That's a lot of detail around pricing and "holding Apple over a barrel" as relates to the Siri deal that seems like a nice PR spin from Anthropic. Anthropic probably couldn't give the uptime guarantees that Google can, right?
  • Spooky23 5mo ago
    Apple is a pretty difficult company to deal with on a B2B basis. If you have terms that conflict with theirs, they aren’t very flexible. Anthropic can be similarly difficult, and their needs from a business perspective probably don’t align with Siri. I would imagine that Google has a more flexible/long term approach to absorbing some risk in a revenue share arrangement than anthropic who generally wants cash. Anthropic’s only purpose is to juice whatever KPI‘s are gonna increase their IPO market cap.
    • engineer_22 5mo ago
      Tbh I thought their purpose was to power the war machine
    • piker 5mo ago
      Yeah, that makes more sense to me than "Anthropic had them over the barrel". Which seemed quite odd given the relative cash positions and installed base of each firm.
    • sailfast 5mo ago
      You say that, but don’t you think at this point they actually believe some of the stuff they say about safety and the future of humanity? It’s tough in this day and age not to be overly cynical but they did draw a line in the sand at the DoD and that wasn’t for IPO numbers…
      • Spooky23 5mo ago
        I'm too cynical to believe the kubuki theatre. The US government in 2026 is openly and cravenly corrupt, and I don't believe anything at face value. The story about the targeting may be real and material, or backwards engineered to fit the reality. OpenAI is aligned with Larry Ellison and Oracle, and given the favor granted to them by the government, I'd look to that relationship first.
• jedisct1 5mo ago
  > They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally. This is the important point. Sending their internal code, documentation, secret tokens, etc. to Anthropic would be completely irresponsible. But if they are running the models on their own servers, why not!
  • JeremyNT 5mo ago
    Was it even publicly known that Anthropic offered this capability? I wasn't aware on-prem Claude was a thing.
    • sheiyei 5mo ago
      If you're Apple (or even Apple-sized), you can get a bunch of things others can't.
    • conception 5mo ago
      Bedrock? If you’ve got the cash they’ll deploy it.
    • halJordan 5mo ago
      Yes it was known. The usg is also running their own copies on fedramp data centers (for now)