6 ms·

AI is a technology not a product

480 points by ch_sm 5mo ago

rglover 5mo ago
Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago: "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss
- micheletyson 5mo ago
  [dead]
- otterley 5mo ago
  "Working backwards" is also, famously, Amazon's philosophy. It's one of my most cherished takeaways from working there.
  - justonceokay 5mo ago
    Once I extracted the medicine from the poison I am very glad that Amazon was my first corporate work experience. Many of the leadership principles and cultural norms there are actually very good ideas when not taken to extremes. I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy
    - copperx 5mo ago
      Please go on. You mean at Amazon you would be grilled with questions if you were the presenter?
      - justonceokay 5mo ago
        Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was: - no PowerPoint - 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen - meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts. - presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections - intellectual bloodbath as all participants try to poke holes and see around corners not foreseen by the presenter - follow up next week, until the group/manager is satisfied about the direction of the project
        Sammi 5mo ago
        It's almost like working with a coding agent.
        kj4211cash 5mo ago
        We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
        nh2 5mo ago
        Asking the grandparent: The what is the idea behind the "ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence" part? The fact that people that have already read it have nothing to do and waste time sitting around bored sounds like an obvious flaw, are we missing something?
  - shepherdjerred 5mo ago
    AWS had great culture when I worked there, maybe they still do. The leadership principles are universal and I don't know of any other company that took their principles so seriously.
- paulddraper 5mo ago
  What was Siri?
  - rglover 5mo ago
    A product built on government funded technology (CALO) [1]. SRI -> SiRI Inc. [1] https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innovation-calo-cognitive-assistant-that-learns-and-organizes/ https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innov...
- m463 5mo ago
  "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." answer... ditch phone/screen, just have an earpod you talk to.
  - coded_monkey 5mo ago
    I mean, one of the last big things Jobs did was buy Siri and he reportedly saw it as the next big interaction model. Apple just messed it up by letting it get progressively worse ever since.
  - basisword 5mo ago
    Who wants to talk to an earpod in 95%+ of real world situations? I remember the original Siri ads where a guy was configuring his schedule via Siri on a run. 15 years later and most of the world still thinks you're a doofus if you're running and talking to your voice assistant. Some things will never change.
    - m463 5mo ago
      I've always thought they would come out with subvocal microphones that I though you could use diving or whatever. (I don't know if they exist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
  - FridgeSeal 5mo ago
    “Take the flexible, rich method of conveying information, and replace it with a slower, jankier, more limited and more rigid form!” Sounds heinous, please never design the UX for a product I’ve got to use.
- piker 5mo ago
  I love this video. It's classic Steve Jobs in a real meta way. While I agree with the thesis, the response is total reality distortion field. He says "you have to start with the customer experience" rather than the technology. Then he name drops 4-5 technologies that were speculative endeavors and says when Apple put them all together to make the laser printer: "we can sell this".
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- amelius 5mo ago
  > "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works. Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that? How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and I have __one__ need right now. Wait, I'm supposed to use maps again to find a public toilet? Chances are it's going to be smelly and dirty. Not the great UX I am looking for, Apple. Seriously, Apple has been addressing the wrong problems for far too long now. They are not looking from the user's perspective, but rather from the viewpoint of: we have a CPU and a touchscreen and a camera, what can we make with that so that more people will buy it? And how can we sell people even more stuff __through__ it? But of what use is a better camera if the device can't even solve basic needs? If you want to call yourself a revolutionary company, you gotta step back and think different.
  - paulhebert 5mo ago
    I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You want iPhones to be able to differentiate and find clean bathrooms on the fly?
    - amelius 5mo ago
      No I want iPhones to solve real problems users have rather than pretend my entire life happens inside a 7" screen. "You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
      - yladiz 5mo ago
        So you want your phone to transform into a toilet??
  - nozzlegear 5mo ago
    Wouldn't there just be signs pointing to a public bathroom if you're abroad in a city? This is an utterly bizarre contrivance.
- vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
  "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." To do this right, you probably need to learn from the many attempts others made before. I bet nobody knows yet what a good customer experience for AI will be. They are all still experimenting until somebody puts together all the parts in a successful package.
oulipo2 5mo ago
[flagged]
- dwa3592 5mo ago
  I was honestly a bit intrigued to read that article but its written on a stack of weak arguments. for example: >>technologies have built-in politics that stem from the political views and goals of the people building the technology. First, its not just technology that has built-in politics. It's everything, think of tshirts, cups, hats sold on political rallied. Second- how does this even hold up in the context of AI? Who do you credit for building "AI"? Is it just the bunch of founders listed in the article? What about Geoffrey hinton? What about Turing or shannon or leibniz?
  - pixl97 5mo ago
    Yea, in itself AI is just AI. The practical implementation is what leads to the autocratic and or fascist like tendencies. LLMs in their current state take massive amounts of money/compute/energy to make. Those items in large amounts are typically managed by corporations or governments. Corporations are not democracies. Corporations also have liability considerations they have to work around. And, they have to do all this without pissing off the government they operate under too much. So yes, this is almost always going to lead to a situation that is not individual friendly. The implementation ends up opinionated because it must. There are only a small number of implementations and the company has much less freedom in what it outputs than the average 'open all the freedom gates' idiot thinks. Really the only solution here, if possible, is hoping that we can train LLMs/AI with far less resources in the future. If so, this can lead to a proliferation of different models optimized for different purposes. But at the end of the day we must remember all models are biased, this includes human brains. At the end of the day, both AI and brains, are a map and not the territory. We are defined by what we filter out.
- tancop 5mo ago
  another "ai is inherently evil" take coming from the "ai is inherently evil" blog. i agree that specific implementations of a technology (claude, gemini, qwen) are never neutral but any tech itself (llms as a concept) is neutral you can implement it in any way you want. you can make a llm trained on diverse data, tuned for anti fascist opinions, using solar power and recycled hardware to be carbon neutral. the reason nobody is really doing it is just good old wealth inequality. as long as only big corporations can afford to use and develop llms or any other tech it will be biased to benefit them, thats why its so important to democratize it. and for the open source part, the fact that it started as a libertarian movment dont mean it cant also be socialist. its going against the capitalist norm of exclusive property rights (including ip) and profit at all costs. sharing the product of your labor with everyone for free is one of the biggest things you can do to help, its like the online equivalent of putting food in the community fridge. open llms let you fine tune them to add the missing under represented perspectives. you can run them locally with zero climate impact. analyze them in depth to reveal biases the devs never noticed or dont want you to see. none of that possible with closed source. the right thing to do is not avoid using ai at all costs but do everything you can to make it good. your skills and hardware access are a privilege. use it.
hresvelgr 5mo ago
This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale. All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference. [1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/ https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/
- basch 5mo ago
  and the differentiating factor on hardware will be the seamlessness of the interface, in software. the combination of voice, eye tracking, swiping, capture of intent, being able to mumble to myself at a volume only my device can hear. The hardware needs to be little more than something that gets out of the way and acts as an input device with a battery.
- mastermage 5mo ago
  and alot of software still has only dropbox sync support. As every Cloud Storage Provider facing Consumers just implements their own propriatary bullshit protocoll so there is always only 3 supported Cloud Storages and usualy they are Icloud, Dropbox, Google Drive.
HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
I totally agree - the phone as a form factor is not going away. People are always going to want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life. The phone is not going to be replaced by smart glasses or some other wearable or screen-less pocket device. It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI. Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall? There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > the phone as a form factor is not going away It's not going away in the next few years. Which means Apple doesn't have to rush to release an AI product for the sake of it à la Giannandrea.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    That's really the point of the article. As long as the phone is the (or at least a significant) conduit for our use of AI technology, Apple is in a good spot, and it's the same spot where they have historically done very well.
- enos_feedler 5mo ago
  I think the vision of pocket assistant versus discrete apps is very much Apple. Remember the original iPhone had no app store. The app store is kind of a pain to deal with. If I had to bet, this starts with Apple pivoting Swift Playground into Playground releasing it across all devices. The programming language becomes invisible. The live canvas is the document.
wiseowise 5mo ago
Anything is a product if you can sell it.
amazingamazing 5mo ago
GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America. To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
- miguel_rdp 5mo ago
  Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown.. Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
  - amazingamazing 5mo ago
    Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech
    - wrxd 5mo ago
      100% I would be happier to have a small model that can run locally capable of searching the web than a stand-alone frontier model
      - undeveloper 5mo ago
        can you not just do this with most local models nowadays? the qwen series is quite capable
    - 5mo ago
coffeefirst 5mo ago
Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music. To much of this hype cycle has no user in mind.
- samrus 5mo ago
  Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users. This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users
  - new_account_100 5mo ago
    > When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Please elaborate
    - MrDarcy 5mo ago
      Replace search for one.
      - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
        Proper search is far more powerful. I can set the weights for the results to various parameters, focusing on certain metadata in particular. Sad to see popular search tools have gone stupid in recent years. But search is still very powerful and Imo ai is no replacement for good search. An example of a powerful search engine is pubmed and the logic you can craft in your queries.
junto 5mo ago
The answer as always in these situations is to zoom out. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the perspective in the daring fireball post aligns exactly with this author’s perspective: https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-echoes/ https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-e...
- lioeters 5mo ago
  Really enjoyed that article, thanks for the link. I agree there can be a bubble and a genuine paradigm shift at the same time. We're going through our first wave of attempts, more or less wrong, but the general direction is right, that the future will never be the same.
kordlessagain 5mo ago
It’s a lot of noise out there. That's the problem with these threads—everyone wants to sound profound, so they end up debating abstractions instead of building something that actually works. "AI is a political ideology" or "AI is a fascist artifact"—that’s just academic posturing. It’s a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a skull; the hammer doesn't have an opinion. The people using it do. The person talking about Siri? That's the only one in that whole thread actually making sense. Everyone else is tripping over themselves to define "AI," but they're missing the point. If your device can't pull up the context for your dinner reservation, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand agents living in your pocket. It’s useless. I’m tired of hearing about "AI products." We didn't build a "Microprocessor Product." We built a computer. The technology is the foundation, not the house. I'm going to look at the state of the local models. If everyone is so worried about corporate bias and closed systems, the only answer is to make the tech small enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough that anyone can run it on their own hardware. Then we'll see who's still talking about politics.
simianwords 5mo ago
Why is every consumer hardware company sleeping on AI? The best product is Openclaw and it is embarrassing. Today I wanted to book a public transport ticket in Germany but it was simply too hard to keep copy pasting screenshots from the app to ChatGPT. This seems to be a very easy problem to solve and standardise at the OS level but no one seems to want to do it. I agree its not a totally different "product" but does require some thought. Apple can't sleep on this.
- lxgr 5mo ago
  Everybody wants to do it, but doing it in a way that's survivable to a company with a brand image to preserve and potential legal liability for the consequences is not nearly as easy.
jmount 5mo ago
This is important to think through, does one have a product, tech, tool, or even just a feature. I given thing is not necessarily at the bottom of this stack, but also not always at the top.
- ako 5mo ago
  Really depends on the company and who you're selling to. For a car company a tire is a feature, for other companies it's their product.
wslh 5mo ago
If capable humanoid robots are really closer than most people think, I'd be surprised if Apple isn't exploring them. That may be the counterexample to "AI is not a product": a physical AI product where hardware, sensors, UX, privacy, and integration matter as much as the model.
- wolttam 5mo ago
  In that case the robot as a whole is the product and the model is just a part of the technology making it possible. That’s the thing; the LLM itself - the chat window - can’t be the whole product for an industry. It’s a technology that you build things with.
pizlonator 5mo ago
AI seems to be a product if you're Anthropic (the seller) and any enterprise with a software team (the buyer). I agree with Gruber's take, if the seller is Apple.
hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.” Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? I basically think it's just people that want to broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds it takes to hail an Uber. Its like all that "productivity optimization" porn that people spew online to show how focused they are. I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate. These folks like Levy who view this dystopian future as some sort of nirvana (and not because they view a different future, they actually want all this nonsense) can go F themselves. You can also tell how incredibly sheltered these people are because you can see they're rarely interacting with people outside their bubble. For example, a lot of people that open the Uber app make their decision based on data in the app, like "surge pricing, nevermind, I'll just walk" or "this looks expensive, let me try Lyft". You could argue an agent could learn all those rules, but again, these minutia of life are not exactly a nuisance to most people.
- wilg 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - the_af 5mo ago
    "Better how"? If you're going to dismiss a comment, you better address the points they are making, like: > I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate.
Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
...in the same way that people used to just accept bulky laptops with terrible batteries, I think people today have become inured to just how annoying it is to get your phone in and out of your pocket. This is why phones get dropped at broken constantly. Phones suck, and I don't think they are the final form factor. The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pretty far away. Before that can happen, we need computer chips and batteries to become almost microscopically small. For the foreseeable future—still long term, but much closer than glasses—I think the logical form factor is a smartwatch. For photos, it would have an under-screen front-facing camera, and an outward facing camera on the wrist band. The screen would be a bit larger than today's largest Apple watches, and it would fold out like a folding phone when you need more space. Even unfolded, the screen would have to be smaller than what we're currently used to on smartphones. However, this would be less important if most interaction was done via AI, just as limited-interaction iPods and Blackberries never commanded massive screens. People who want to watch movies, read longer books, or play games on larger screens could still carry folding tablets in their pockets on some occasions, but the watch would be the central device everyone always has. Apple, of course, already makes smartwatches, arguably the best ones on the market. But an Apple Watch is very much not the device I'm describing, and I'm not sure if Apple will let it get there. Apple is stuck in the innovator's dilemma, where the iPhone prints so much money they can't afford to cannibalize it. For the moment, the iPhone has been so good that this hasn't caught up to them. I think—and for the sake of innovation, I hope—that this doesn't last forever.
- lurking_swe 5mo ago
  your argument assumes that “fully integrated and in-my-face” == best form factor. Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.
  - Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
    But a watch isn't in your face. That's the other advantage over glasses (in addition to the "it's not really possible" part).
micromacrofoot 5mo ago
all technologies are also products
tombert 5mo ago
> Apple doesn’t have a social network business. They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
ebbi 5mo ago
For those that care, Gruber (author of this blog), said the following about news about the Genocide in Palestine: Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..." Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out." Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts, Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun" Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..." Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties" Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.
- selectively 5mo ago
  Gruber is a monstrous person. He's also written many different pieces that are more or less content-free anti-Korean racist screeds. The world would be much better if he'd retire and never speak in public again.
  - ebbi 5mo ago
    I totally agree! Also his writings on China. He's used quite strong language when discussing China, and at the time I thought this is just his brutal opinions, but when his own country does things, he's a lot more forgiving. Looking back, it just reads as sinophobic.
cawksuwcka 5mo ago
[dead]
yogthos 5mo ago
I've always looked at it as a platform to build stuff on top of as well. I expect that we'll be treating this tech the same way we treat stuff like Linux today. It'll become common open infrastructure that will be used to build products. Incidentally, this is exactly what Chinese companies seem to be banking on, hence why they don't worry about releasing their models in the open. They understand that getting more people using their models is the key part right now.
themafia 5mo ago
> Only a fool would argue that Apple can stand on the sidelines and ignore AI. Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments. There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.
singpolyma3 5mo ago
> Apple doesn’t have a social network business Um iMessage?
concinds 5mo ago
So far, Google has been better than Apple at treating AI as a technology/feature and not just a product. Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages. And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.
- dominotw 5mo ago
  google models have horrible personalities. i feel like i am talking to a disinterested dmv worker.
pie_flavor 5mo ago
By 2021, we'll have completely abandoned light switches. We'll just use an app on our phones to turn off the light in the bedroom, or perhaps request out loud for Alexa to do so. The future is the Internet of Things. I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.
- skiing_crawling 5mo ago
  I've been using Siri (via homekit) to turn all my lights on and off for about 3 years now. It's steadily getting worse and worse as somehow, Siri is becoming less accurate and Apple is failing to adopt this new technology in a timely fashion. I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light". Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.
arshia0098 5mo ago
Agreed. The more invisible AI inference becomes in systems, the more they start feeling more practical. I personally find it more engaging to have an agent visualize things for me using matplotlib. The problem is that too many startups are trying to do to OpenAI and Anthropic, what merchants do with commodities in the market. Seems more driven by profit in mind than by actual value creation.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
flashman 5mo ago
Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations. Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.
- pixelatedindex 5mo ago
  > Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia No chance. Currently Nvidia’s market cap is higher by about 1T.
  - brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
    Turns out NVidia and Apple are direct competitors. Would have never guessed a few years ago.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  > Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models Let's all pretend there was an intentional coherent strategy, and not because Apple's lagged its peers due to its secretive corporate DNA, internal silos, and restrictive publishing policies actively repelling AI talent at a critical time.
latentframe 5mo ago
The market still prices the AI companies like software businesses with some huge margins while the economics are starting to look like cloud or infrastructure with big capex heavy competition and rapidly falling prices.
ozim 5mo ago
By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft Oh that’s silly thinking. I already have Alexa and Hue lights. Only thing I use voice is „play music/stop music”. Turning off all lights or on all lights sometimes. Turning on specific lights app. If I spend time to name lights specific names that are quick to pronounce maybe I would use it more. Silly part is imagine trying to order Lyft on airport when everyone tries to do the same …
mailarchis 5mo ago
Reminded me of this video: "Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=161s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=161s
scotty79 5mo ago
AI is a new medium that's rapidly replacing the internet in similar fashion that the internet replaced TV.
7777777phil 5mo ago
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luodaint 5mo ago
If you don't know what exactly the user needs, the AI feature is the pitch itself. "Powered by AI" is something to say when you do not know how to sell the outcome. It's also something to develop when you have not set up the feedback loop to know which outcomes to optimize for. If the signal is clear – if you have observed the same person facing the same problem in the same workflow – then the AI feature deserves its place in the product by automating one step that they hate. The outcome does not necessarily need to be AI-powered. The user simply stops facing that problem anymore. The Gruber's logic works on the level of the whole product. But there is also a diagnostic implication here – the louder the product sells its AI capabilities, the less the team understands what exactly the product does.
jaspervanderee 5mo ago
AI is a commodity, like electricity. In a truly free market, it will go to free.
scholarnet-AI 5mo ago
AI is a tool for builders. It can help everyday end users by creating useful apps and bots for now.
eddy-sekorti 5mo ago
Yes, a nice article
thalesmello 5mo ago
Still Apple keeps shooting their foot with their software. I'd love to see an update to iOS and Mac OS that doesn't feel sluggish. They nailed hardware, software is sorely lacking.

480 points by ch_sm 5mo ago

Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago: "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss

micheletyson 5mo ago
[dead]
otterley 5mo ago
"Working backwards" is also, famously, Amazon's philosophy. It's one of my most cherished takeaways from working there.
- justonceokay 5mo ago
  Once I extracted the medicine from the poison I am very glad that Amazon was my first corporate work experience. Many of the leadership principles and cultural norms there are actually very good ideas when not taken to extremes. I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy
  - copperx 5mo ago
    Please go on. You mean at Amazon you would be grilled with questions if you were the presenter?
    - justonceokay 5mo ago
      Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was: - no PowerPoint - 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen - meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts. - presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections - intellectual bloodbath as all participants try to poke holes and see around corners not foreseen by the presenter - follow up next week, until the group/manager is satisfied about the direction of the project
      - Sammi 5mo ago
        It's almost like working with a coding agent.
      - kj4211cash 5mo ago
        We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
        nh2 5mo ago
        Asking the grandparent: The what is the idea behind the "ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence" part? The fact that people that have already read it have nothing to do and waste time sitting around bored sounds like an obvious flaw, are we missing something?
- shepherdjerred 5mo ago
  AWS had great culture when I worked there, maybe they still do. The leadership principles are universal and I don't know of any other company that took their principles so seriously.
paulddraper 5mo ago
What was Siri?
- rglover 5mo ago
  A product built on government funded technology (CALO) [1]. SRI -> SiRI Inc. [1] https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innovation-calo-cognitive-assistant-that-learns-and-organizes/ https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innov...
m463 5mo ago
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience." answer... ditch phone/screen, just have an earpod you talk to.
- coded_monkey 5mo ago
  I mean, one of the last big things Jobs did was buy Siri and he reportedly saw it as the next big interaction model. Apple just messed it up by letting it get progressively worse ever since.
- basisword 5mo ago
  Who wants to talk to an earpod in 95%+ of real world situations? I remember the original Siri ads where a guy was configuring his schedule via Siri on a run. 15 years later and most of the world still thinks you're a doofus if you're running and talking to your voice assistant. Some things will never change.
  - m463 5mo ago
    I've always thought they would come out with subvocal microphones that I though you could use diving or whatever. (I don't know if they exist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
- FridgeSeal 5mo ago
  “Take the flexible, rich method of conveying information, and replace it with a slower, jankier, more limited and more rigid form!” Sounds heinous, please never design the UX for a product I’ve got to use.
piker 5mo ago
I love this video. It's classic Steve Jobs in a real meta way. While I agree with the thesis, the response is total reality distortion field. He says "you have to start with the customer experience" rather than the technology. Then he name drops 4-5 technologies that were speculative endeavors and says when Apple put them all together to make the laser printer: "we can sell this".
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
amelius 5mo ago
> "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works. Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that? How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and I have __one__ need right now. Wait, I'm supposed to use maps again to find a public toilet? Chances are it's going to be smelly and dirty. Not the great UX I am looking for, Apple. Seriously, Apple has been addressing the wrong problems for far too long now. They are not looking from the user's perspective, but rather from the viewpoint of: we have a CPU and a touchscreen and a camera, what can we make with that so that more people will buy it? And how can we sell people even more stuff __through__ it? But of what use is a better camera if the device can't even solve basic needs? If you want to call yourself a revolutionary company, you gotta step back and think different.
- paulhebert 5mo ago
  I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You want iPhones to be able to differentiate and find clean bathrooms on the fly?
  - amelius 5mo ago
    No I want iPhones to solve real problems users have rather than pretend my entire life happens inside a 7" screen. "You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
    - yladiz 5mo ago
      So you want your phone to transform into a toilet??
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  Wouldn't there just be signs pointing to a public bathroom if you're abroad in a city? This is an utterly bizarre contrivance.
vjvjvjvjghv 5mo ago
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience." To do this right, you probably need to learn from the many attempts others made before. I bet nobody knows yet what a good customer experience for AI will be. They are all still experimenting until somebody puts together all the parts in a successful package.

oulipo2 5mo ago

[flagged]

dwa3592 5mo ago
I was honestly a bit intrigued to read that article but its written on a stack of weak arguments. for example: >>technologies have built-in politics that stem from the political views and goals of the people building the technology. First, its not just technology that has built-in politics. It's everything, think of tshirts, cups, hats sold on political rallied. Second- how does this even hold up in the context of AI? Who do you credit for building "AI"? Is it just the bunch of founders listed in the article? What about Geoffrey hinton? What about Turing or shannon or leibniz?
- pixl97 5mo ago
  Yea, in itself AI is just AI. The practical implementation is what leads to the autocratic and or fascist like tendencies. LLMs in their current state take massive amounts of money/compute/energy to make. Those items in large amounts are typically managed by corporations or governments. Corporations are not democracies. Corporations also have liability considerations they have to work around. And, they have to do all this without pissing off the government they operate under too much. So yes, this is almost always going to lead to a situation that is not individual friendly. The implementation ends up opinionated because it must. There are only a small number of implementations and the company has much less freedom in what it outputs than the average 'open all the freedom gates' idiot thinks. Really the only solution here, if possible, is hoping that we can train LLMs/AI with far less resources in the future. If so, this can lead to a proliferation of different models optimized for different purposes. But at the end of the day we must remember all models are biased, this includes human brains. At the end of the day, both AI and brains, are a map and not the territory. We are defined by what we filter out.
tancop 5mo ago
another "ai is inherently evil" take coming from the "ai is inherently evil" blog. i agree that specific implementations of a technology (claude, gemini, qwen) are never neutral but any tech itself (llms as a concept) is neutral you can implement it in any way you want. you can make a llm trained on diverse data, tuned for anti fascist opinions, using solar power and recycled hardware to be carbon neutral. the reason nobody is really doing it is just good old wealth inequality. as long as only big corporations can afford to use and develop llms or any other tech it will be biased to benefit them, thats why its so important to democratize it. and for the open source part, the fact that it started as a libertarian movment dont mean it cant also be socialist. its going against the capitalist norm of exclusive property rights (including ip) and profit at all costs. sharing the product of your labor with everyone for free is one of the biggest things you can do to help, its like the online equivalent of putting food in the community fridge. open llms let you fine tune them to add the missing under represented perspectives. you can run them locally with zero climate impact. analyze them in depth to reveal biases the devs never noticed or dont want you to see. none of that possible with closed source. the right thing to do is not avoid using ai at all costs but do everything you can to make it good. your skills and hardware access are a privilege. use it.

hresvelgr 5mo ago

This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale. All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference. [1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/ https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/

basch 5mo ago
and the differentiating factor on hardware will be the seamlessness of the interface, in software. the combination of voice, eye tracking, swiping, capture of intent, being able to mumble to myself at a volume only my device can hear. The hardware needs to be little more than something that gets out of the way and acts as an input device with a battery.
mastermage 5mo ago
and alot of software still has only dropbox sync support. As every Cloud Storage Provider facing Consumers just implements their own propriatary bullshit protocoll so there is always only 3 supported Cloud Storages and usualy they are Icloud, Dropbox, Google Drive.

HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago

I totally agree - the phone as a form factor is not going away. People are always going to want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life. The phone is not going to be replaced by smart glasses or some other wearable or screen-less pocket device. It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI. Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall? There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> the phone as a form factor is not going away It's not going away in the next few years. Which means Apple doesn't have to rush to release an AI product for the sake of it à la Giannandrea.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  That's really the point of the article. As long as the phone is the (or at least a significant) conduit for our use of AI technology, Apple is in a good spot, and it's the same spot where they have historically done very well.
enos_feedler 5mo ago
I think the vision of pocket assistant versus discrete apps is very much Apple. Remember the original iPhone had no app store. The app store is kind of a pain to deal with. If I had to bet, this starts with Apple pivoting Swift Playground into Playground releasing it across all devices. The programming language becomes invisible. The live canvas is the document.

wiseowise 5mo ago

Anything is a product if you can sell it.

amazingamazing 5mo ago

GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America. To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.

miguel_rdp 5mo ago
Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown.. Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
- amazingamazing 5mo ago
  Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech
  - wrxd 5mo ago
    100% I would be happier to have a small model that can run locally capable of searching the web than a stand-alone frontier model
    - undeveloper 5mo ago
      can you not just do this with most local models nowadays? the qwen series is quite capable
  - 5mo ago

coffeefirst 5mo ago

Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music. To much of this hype cycle has no user in mind.

samrus 5mo ago
Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users. This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users
- new_account_100 5mo ago
  > When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Please elaborate
  - MrDarcy 5mo ago
    Replace search for one.
    - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
      Proper search is far more powerful. I can set the weights for the results to various parameters, focusing on certain metadata in particular. Sad to see popular search tools have gone stupid in recent years. But search is still very powerful and Imo ai is no replacement for good search. An example of a powerful search engine is pubmed and the logic you can craft in your queries.

junto 5mo ago

The answer as always in these situations is to zoom out. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the perspective in the daring fireball post aligns exactly with this author’s perspective: https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-echoes/ https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-e...

lioeters 5mo ago
Really enjoyed that article, thanks for the link. I agree there can be a bubble and a genuine paradigm shift at the same time. We're going through our first wave of attempts, more or less wrong, but the general direction is right, that the future will never be the same.

kordlessagain 5mo ago

It’s a lot of noise out there. That's the problem with these threads—everyone wants to sound profound, so they end up debating abstractions instead of building something that actually works. "AI is a political ideology" or "AI is a fascist artifact"—that’s just academic posturing. It’s a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a skull; the hammer doesn't have an opinion. The people using it do. The person talking about Siri? That's the only one in that whole thread actually making sense. Everyone else is tripping over themselves to define "AI," but they're missing the point. If your device can't pull up the context for your dinner reservation, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand agents living in your pocket. It’s useless. I’m tired of hearing about "AI products." We didn't build a "Microprocessor Product." We built a computer. The technology is the foundation, not the house. I'm going to look at the state of the local models. If everyone is so worried about corporate bias and closed systems, the only answer is to make the tech small enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough that anyone can run it on their own hardware. Then we'll see who's still talking about politics.

simianwords 5mo ago

Why is every consumer hardware company sleeping on AI? The best product is Openclaw and it is embarrassing. Today I wanted to book a public transport ticket in Germany but it was simply too hard to keep copy pasting screenshots from the app to ChatGPT. This seems to be a very easy problem to solve and standardise at the OS level but no one seems to want to do it. I agree its not a totally different "product" but does require some thought. Apple can't sleep on this.

lxgr 5mo ago
Everybody wants to do it, but doing it in a way that's survivable to a company with a brand image to preserve and potential legal liability for the consequences is not nearly as easy.

jmount 5mo ago

This is important to think through, does one have a product, tech, tool, or even just a feature. I given thing is not necessarily at the bottom of this stack, but also not always at the top.

ako 5mo ago
Really depends on the company and who you're selling to. For a car company a tire is a feature, for other companies it's their product.

wslh 5mo ago

If capable humanoid robots are really closer than most people think, I'd be surprised if Apple isn't exploring them. That may be the counterexample to "AI is not a product": a physical AI product where hardware, sensors, UX, privacy, and integration matter as much as the model.

wolttam 5mo ago
In that case the robot as a whole is the product and the model is just a part of the technology making it possible. That’s the thing; the LLM itself - the chat window - can’t be the whole product for an industry. It’s a technology that you build things with.

pizlonator 5mo ago

AI seems to be a product if you're Anthropic (the seller) and any enterprise with a software team (the buyer). I agree with Gruber's take, if the seller is Apple.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago

Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.” Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? I basically think it's just people that want to broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds it takes to hail an Uber. Its like all that "productivity optimization" porn that people spew online to show how focused they are. I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate. These folks like Levy who view this dystopian future as some sort of nirvana (and not because they view a different future, they actually want all this nonsense) can go F themselves. You can also tell how incredibly sheltered these people are because you can see they're rarely interacting with people outside their bubble. For example, a lot of people that open the Uber app make their decision based on data in the app, like "surge pricing, nevermind, I'll just walk" or "this looks expensive, let me try Lyft". You could argue an agent could learn all those rules, but again, these minutia of life are not exactly a nuisance to most people.

wilg 5mo ago
[flagged]
- the_af 5mo ago
  "Better how"? If you're going to dismiss a comment, you better address the points they are making, like: > I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate.

Wowfunhappy 5mo ago

...in the same way that people used to just accept bulky laptops with terrible batteries, I think people today have become inured to just how annoying it is to get your phone in and out of your pocket. This is why phones get dropped at broken constantly. Phones suck, and I don't think they are the final form factor. The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pretty far away. Before that can happen, we need computer chips and batteries to become almost microscopically small. For the foreseeable future—still long term, but much closer than glasses—I think the logical form factor is a smartwatch. For photos, it would have an under-screen front-facing camera, and an outward facing camera on the wrist band. The screen would be a bit larger than today's largest Apple watches, and it would fold out like a folding phone when you need more space. Even unfolded, the screen would have to be smaller than what we're currently used to on smartphones. However, this would be less important if most interaction was done via AI, just as limited-interaction iPods and Blackberries never commanded massive screens. People who want to watch movies, read longer books, or play games on larger screens could still carry folding tablets in their pockets on some occasions, but the watch would be the central device everyone always has. Apple, of course, already makes smartwatches, arguably the best ones on the market. But an Apple Watch is very much not the device I'm describing, and I'm not sure if Apple will let it get there. Apple is stuck in the innovator's dilemma, where the iPhone prints so much money they can't afford to cannibalize it. For the moment, the iPhone has been so good that this hasn't caught up to them. I think—and for the sake of innovation, I hope—that this doesn't last forever.

lurking_swe 5mo ago
your argument assumes that “fully integrated and in-my-face” == best form factor. Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.
- Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
  But a watch isn't in your face. That's the other advantage over glasses (in addition to the "it's not really possible" part).

micromacrofoot 5mo ago

all technologies are also products

tombert 5mo ago

> Apple doesn’t have a social network business. They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping

ebbi 5mo ago

For those that care, Gruber (author of this blog), said the following about news about the Genocide in Palestine: Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..." Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out." Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts, Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun" Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..." Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties" Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.

selectively 5mo ago
Gruber is a monstrous person. He's also written many different pieces that are more or less content-free anti-Korean racist screeds. The world would be much better if he'd retire and never speak in public again.
- ebbi 5mo ago
  I totally agree! Also his writings on China. He's used quite strong language when discussing China, and at the time I thought this is just his brutal opinions, but when his own country does things, he's a lot more forgiving. Looking back, it just reads as sinophobic.

cawksuwcka 5mo ago

[dead]

yogthos 5mo ago

I've always looked at it as a platform to build stuff on top of as well. I expect that we'll be treating this tech the same way we treat stuff like Linux today. It'll become common open infrastructure that will be used to build products. Incidentally, this is exactly what Chinese companies seem to be banking on, hence why they don't worry about releasing their models in the open. They understand that getting more people using their models is the key part right now.

themafia 5mo ago

> Only a fool would argue that Apple can stand on the sidelines and ignore AI. Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments. There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.

singpolyma3 5mo ago

> Apple doesn’t have a social network business Um iMessage?

concinds 5mo ago

So far, Google has been better than Apple at treating AI as a technology/feature and not just a product. Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages. And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.

dominotw 5mo ago
google models have horrible personalities. i feel like i am talking to a disinterested dmv worker.

pie_flavor 5mo ago

By 2021, we'll have completely abandoned light switches. We'll just use an app on our phones to turn off the light in the bedroom, or perhaps request out loud for Alexa to do so. The future is the Internet of Things. I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.

skiing_crawling 5mo ago
I've been using Siri (via homekit) to turn all my lights on and off for about 3 years now. It's steadily getting worse and worse as somehow, Siri is becoming less accurate and Apple is failing to adopt this new technology in a timely fashion. I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light". Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.

arshia0098 5mo ago

Agreed. The more invisible AI inference becomes in systems, the more they start feeling more practical. I personally find it more engaging to have an agent visualize things for me using matplotlib. The problem is that too many startups are trying to do to OpenAI and Anthropic, what merchants do with commodities in the market. Seems more driven by profit in mind than by actual value creation.

deleted 5mo ago

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flashman 5mo ago

Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations. Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.

pixelatedindex 5mo ago
> Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia No chance. Currently Nvidia’s market cap is higher by about 1T.
- brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
  Turns out NVidia and Apple are direct competitors. Would have never guessed a few years ago.
overfeed 5mo ago
> Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models Let's all pretend there was an intentional coherent strategy, and not because Apple's lagged its peers due to its secretive corporate DNA, internal silos, and restrictive publishing policies actively repelling AI talent at a critical time.

latentframe 5mo ago

The market still prices the AI companies like software businesses with some huge margins while the economics are starting to look like cloud or infrastructure with big capex heavy competition and rapidly falling prices.

ozim 5mo ago

By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft Oh that’s silly thinking. I already have Alexa and Hue lights. Only thing I use voice is „play music/stop music”. Turning off all lights or on all lights sometimes. Turning on specific lights app. If I spend time to name lights specific names that are quick to pronounce maybe I would use it more. Silly part is imagine trying to order Lyft on airport when everyone tries to do the same …

mailarchis 5mo ago

Reminded me of this video: "Steve Jobs handling a tough question at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=161s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=161s

scotty79 5mo ago

AI is a new medium that's rapidly replacing the internet in similar fashion that the internet replaced TV.

7777777phil 5mo ago

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luodaint 5mo ago

If you don't know what exactly the user needs, the AI feature is the pitch itself. "Powered by AI" is something to say when you do not know how to sell the outcome. It's also something to develop when you have not set up the feedback loop to know which outcomes to optimize for. If the signal is clear – if you have observed the same person facing the same problem in the same workflow – then the AI feature deserves its place in the product by automating one step that they hate. The outcome does not necessarily need to be AI-powered. The user simply stops facing that problem anymore. The Gruber's logic works on the level of the whole product. But there is also a diagnostic implication here – the louder the product sells its AI capabilities, the less the team understands what exactly the product does.

jaspervanderee 5mo ago

AI is a commodity, like electricity. In a truly free market, it will go to free.

scholarnet-AI 5mo ago

AI is a tool for builders. It can help everyday end users by creating useful apps and bots for now.

eddy-sekorti 5mo ago

Yes, a nice article

thalesmello 5mo ago

Still Apple keeps shooting their foot with their software. I'd love to see an update to iOS and Mac OS that doesn't feel sluggish. They nailed hardware, software is sorely lacking.