7 ms·

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a r

by zmmmmm 4mo ago

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value that are actually still beyond the horizon. They either aren't reliable enough, aren't accessible to the tech, or exceed the sophistication of our existing trust models. For example, I'm planning a trip. Booking a multiday holiday - there's a real beast that is time consuming, complex and painful. I test out the AI tools. They fail. Hard. Hallucinations all over the place, false confidence, inability to act, inability of me to trust their actions. It's just nowhere near practical utility yet. Not "nearly there" but "not nearly half way there". I got the top tier of Gemini AI. Can it rent me a car? "As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you".

idle_zealot 4mo ago
Even the aspirational use cases you're talking about basically are just "digital secretary." There's a massive problem with that even if the models end up being capable in the future. The value of a secretary is that you know them, they know you, and you trust them to do things right. There are stakes if they don't. No company can provide that as a service at scale for everyone without it being a disaster. Not because it's not technically possible, but because of the incentives. That much power over the details of so many people's lives is irresistible; there will be persistent temptation to use it. The presence of that possibility makes the secretary impossible to trust.
- cjonas 4mo ago
  These use cases will just be built as "open source" (openclawd) or even custom one off application in the future. I've been building apps to run the tedious parts of my life recently. Meal planning, personal finance, bills, tax organization... Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build a app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon. Yes the code is shit and it wouldn't scale... But it doesn't need to
  - losteric 4mo ago
    > Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build an app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon. When we talk about “the market”, the customer base, remember it’s a market that typically doesn’t know how to or care to even install an adblocker.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - cjonas 4mo ago
      I don't see any mention of "the market" anywhere in this thread. I'm just talking about the ability for a motivated user to solve real problems with these tools. Right now these solutions are available to software developers but over time it will become approachable to more users
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  - whywhywhywhy 4mo ago
    > Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build a app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon Because the problem now took a whole afternoon to solved and sapped your creative energy instead.
- zmmmmm 4mo ago
  it's an interesting question if any of the AI companies would be willing to step up and absorb the risk ie: to give the AI agent a "stake". eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me. It would sort of just come down to buying premium travel insurance for everyone that uses it. And insurance for anything else they do. It has to be one of two things - they either believe the risks are worth it (so then there should be a financial model that can absorb the cost of insurance to do it), or in fact, the risks are too great. At some point, if they keep offering the tech on a "use at your own risk" basis, they are implicitly communicating that they themselves think the risks are too great - so YOU shouldn't trust it either.
  - teiferer 4mo ago
    > eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me That would be nice, but it's the wrong angle. The reason people like real secretaries is not because somebody is compensated when things go wrong. It's because things don't go wrong. I don't use this thing if I need to fear things go wrong, even if I'd be compensated. Maybe it would provide the right incentives for the companies though.
    - waterhouse 4mo ago
      Surely, if the compensation was high enough, you'd be like, "Sure, I'm happy with that outcome." And then, if the AI company thinks they have a low enough failure rate that the expected cost of paying out the compensation still lets them make a profit, then they could make that promise to all customers. Though a compensation that high sounds like it would invite fraud, where the customer would be glad to have something go "wrong" and get a fat check. Not sure if that's a solvable problem.
      - ml-anon 4mo ago
        they are literally burning billions of dollars and can presumably keep doing this for a while. Taking a trivial amount of additional financial liability to launder their reputation wouldn't meaningfully improve things.
- 9dev 4mo ago
  The vast majority of people never even asked for a personal assistant, because that isn’t something normal people have or do need in the first place. They aren’t so occupied/privileged/posh to need someone to do the trivial tasks of daily life for them. This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
  - Snoddas 4mo ago
    I think you are wrong. They never asked for one becase they never imagined being able to afford one. The amount of administration organizing a normal household takes I suspect most would be glad to leave to someon/something they trust and that can be held accountable. Today that someone needs to be a person (imo). But who knows, a startup may be plotting accountable digital assistans as we speak.
    - tempfile 4mo ago
      Obligatory: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
      - pnut 4mo ago
        Pretty sure unaccountability is a desired feature of management decisions in most organisations. That quote has an unexpressed precondition to the effect of "In order for an organisation to be objectively well run..." or "In order for an organisation to equitably benefit all stakeholders at all levels..." etc
    - djaro 4mo ago
      I think theres some real use cases in the household department. I would love an AI that I just tell my nutrition goals (I want to eat X calories, Y protein, Z fiber, hit all vitamins) and it just generates a full meal plan for me each day. Like, I go to the store and it made the complete shopping list for me. And automatically updates the rest of the day if I tell it I skipped a meal or ate a snack.
cootsnuck 4mo ago
Yup, precisely. Turns out getting AI to be reliable at doing useful things is harder than we've all been led to believe by the dominant narratives. https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-ai https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-a...
fruit2020 4mo ago
Booking and renting is certainly possible, they just need your auth credentials
- londons_explore 4mo ago
  I gave some LLM's my password manager and some credit cards to try to do this sort of thing lately. They failed most of the time. Simple things like finding the right password for Gmail sometimes was out of reach. Anti bot techniques sometimes stopped it. Impressively, sometimes they'd successfully write hugely complex bash or python scripts to do tasks on web pages they hadn't managed to do with the browser automation.
kristianc 4mo ago
An alien landing on earth consuming Apple marketing content would be under the impression that humans did nothing but organise hikes to Big Sur with their friends.
- dakolli 4mo ago
  best comment I've seen on this site in a while
- pastel8739 4mo ago
  Well.. it’s not the furthest thing from the truth in the bay
- zombot 4mo ago
  That would be deceptively constructive and healthy compared to doom-scrolling instagram or tictoc while clogging the intertubes with AI slop.
- 9dev 4mo ago
  As Psychology is the study of the psyche of white male psychology students, big tech is technology for affluent citizens of San Francisco with a career in IT…
  - Ntrails 4mo ago
    > Psychology is the study of the psyche of white male psychology students Huh? Maybe my uni was an outlier / it is a UK thing, but there were ~99 female and 1 male psych students in my year. This was not considered unusual.
    - spacebacon 4mo ago
      This may support the point further xD
    - projektfu 4mo ago
      It's actually "WEIRD", Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The "white cis male" meme says more about GP than psychology.
skylurk 4mo ago
For fun I planned a holiday entirely with LLM's lately, and followed through. It used good models and did a lot of searching, including searches in other languages. It got nothing right, riddled with fake places and times. It also found some weird and unique places I never would have considered. I had a blast, brought me back to traveling pre-internet, requiring a level of spontaneity I had forgotten we used to depend on. 100% recommend it.
- wahnfrieden 4mo ago
  What was a “good model” and harness? I would expect decent results using say Codex with 5.5 xhigh to research and verify an itinerary. 5.5 Pro with search would also be promising.
  - skylurk 4mo ago
    I suspect it would perform admirably well with 'Paris' or 'Copenhagen' (see sibling comment), but if you want to have some real fun try 'Southern Spain' or 'Rural Malaysia'.
- pookieinc 4mo ago
  To counter, we did the same with a trip to Copenhagen for 7 days and it got most paths correct. Train routes, places to visit with kids, restaurants, reservations, weather, most of it was great. There were a couple mistakes of course here and there, thankfully we did our due diligence, but by and large, we plan to do this for future trips.
  - orrito 4mo ago
    I feel like one city is enough focus to actually get good results. If you plan a trip where you move between different (smaller) places problems start to arise
- lukan 4mo ago
  That was funny, thank you. I am now reminded of a short trip with less tech savy folks, where I also on the trip noticed that the plan was a bit .. not working. And the person organizing it complaining to the bus driver, why they were not going what the internet told him, they were going. The internet being ChatGPT.
harrouet 4mo ago
Spot on! I am also under the impression that the LLM tech is plateauing before bringing the promised productivity. Great as a coding assistant, great a summarizing a text, translating, great a helping plan a trip... But for the rest, e.g. act as a life assistant, it is still far off with no hope to reach the desired performance level. I would not be surprisd to see OpenAI and the likes to start reverting to Siri v1 strategies, i.e. "if this then that" kind of agent routing.
- piokoch 4mo ago
  Why this is surprising? LLM-s are good in text generation on the base of the stuff they were trained on. Software is text generation, translation is text generation, LLMs can answer questions since billions were spent on tuning foundation models, that is people were collecting in (semi)automatic way questions with answers to the point we might think that LLM-s are "thinking". Now people want to handle car rental. What are the relevant data that models were trained on for this kind of application? For Python code there is kirjillion examples on Github, for mathematical proofs there is endless stream of papers, books, etc. But for car rental? Mostly adds in the internet that want to trick you into a bad deal. So yes, LLM will be a disappointment, as it tries, well, to trick you into a bad deal. In addition, data are rather scarce so there will be a lot of hallucination, as it gets mixed up with yacht rental, bikes rental, ski equipment rental, etc.
  - jorisw 4mo ago
    Who said it was surprising? The performance of specific tasks will depend on either those tasks having been included in the training (which Apple could work on), or added by ways of fine tuning, and context sourced from userland. For any category of tasks, there's a ton to be gained still in terms of how context is populated more effectively (relevance) and efficiently (token use). See software engineering harnesses and the skills architecture of OpenClaw for example. SWE harnesses make all the difference in how well Claude Code and OpenAI Codex perform. OpenClaw can't do shit without loading skills from the filesystem into context JIT. I'll be very curious to find out how Apple is feeding context in their new AI approach. Part of it appears to be an 'index' that my iPhone started building (visible in main Settings screen) after installing the iOS 27 Developer Beta.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
I sometimes do random weeklong roadtrips. ChatGPT is the best way to do this. Attractions that are esoteric, RV parks with 50A hookups for under $50, oldest/biggest/best restaurant with local food in a town, historical stops along the way, suburbs close to big cities but where hotel prices are lower etc.
dansquizsoft 4mo ago
"I got the top tier of Gemini AI." - that's your issue, get a subscription to a lab offering actual frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI.
- Mistletoe 4mo ago
  Nonsense. https://livebench.ai/#/?highunseenbias=true https://livebench.ai/#/?highunseenbias=true
  - tmoravec 4mo ago
    Model != AI tool. Especially with Gemini, the model is fantastic, both in benchmarks and in the API. Sentiment is not that positive for Google AI.
fragmede 4mo ago
All you're saying is that (the harness you're using for) Gemini sucks. OpenAI has their own web browser to fill out forms with and Claude has a whole Cowork feature that interacts with you computer including your web browser. If new Siri still sucks, well, it's sucked the entire time. The worst of it is the security aspect where the setting to let you use Siri without authenticating hasn't worked since they added it! (still broken, iOS 26.5)
madrox 4mo ago
I get the impression Apple designers don't actually use AI, and so have no idea what to build, since users don't know what they want from AI yet either.
panicinducer 4mo ago
It reminds me of the Apple Vision Pro hype trailer. "Put on a helmet so you can view 2D photographs in 3D space." Present-day Apple sure has a way of making extremely impressive tech seem totally superfluous.
blitzar 4mo ago
> interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be Have a conversation with the average Ai power user (outside of tech / coding) and this is the level the conversation will be on.
whywhywhywhy 4mo ago
Extremely surprised we didn’t get the “book me a flight” example that has been an AI demo used over and over but everyone’s so particular about flights I can’t see many people just wanting to one shot it. The laundry list of object removal, spacial photos, better speech to text etc is always just the latest open models just being slapped in there and branded as Apple. Ultimately the meat of this presentation was the work of people outside Apple.
- stevage 4mo ago
  For me "book me a flight to X on day Y" is so easy to do manually I don't need AI. Where I do want AI is for really complex queries, like "find me a time and money efficient itinerary through Europe visiting places I haven't been before. Present options and I'll tell you what I don't like about each of them then we'll narrow in on an optimal solution"
MrDunham 4mo ago
Agree and disagree on the "planning a trip" use case... as I'm sitting on a river cruise on an AI co-planned vacation (we found the cruise, AI set the daily itinerary). Now the big (BIG) caveat is that I used Claude Code on my Max 20x plan from within VS Code. I have a fairly decent harness that I'd built and was sure to prompt it to run several subagents, including one that grounded walking times with Google Maps directly. I'd say this is FAR beyond what the average person would do ("Hey Siri, plan me a trip to Prague") but also it shows that the models can do it with the right harness and guidelines. This wasn't that hard for me to do, so it seems to be more of a feature buildout ("the travel expert" AI) with a few markdown files than anything. All told: web search for grounding times/locations, map grounding for walking paths and times, an adversarial agent to keep the model(s) honest, and a little bit of prompting and you've got a really great travel planner. In short: the average person won't do this, but if I can build it in a few hours any of the 100% of people working at Apple/OpenAI/Anthropic who are smarter than me can build it and bake it into Siri (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc).
- audiala 4mo ago
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audiala 4mo ago
We are currently working on this with Audiala (iOS and webapp, Android should be released any coming days), making progress slowly but surely. We started to add tools to the AI chat to organise your trip and explore the place following your preferences and those of your group if you decide to share the trip. We can turn feedback into actual improvements pretty fast now, so would love to have yours and progress towards building the app you really want.
globular-toast 4mo ago
Renting a car isn't a problem I have either. I've rented cars and vans plenty of times. I just phone up and talk to someone or email them. It's really easy. A lot of these "problems" seem to stem from people just not wanting to interact with other people at all. Do we really want to become like Asimov's "Solarians"?
- stevage 4mo ago
  Millennials and below absolutely do want to avoid interactions with strangers. Especially gen Z will go to great lengths to avoid making a phone call. It sucks. This is why none of my local supermarkets have real checkouts anymore.
  - mingus88 4mo ago
    I don’t think generational stereotypes are at fault here. This is another lazy retread about how Millennials/GenZ killed -insert thing here- straight from businessinsider.com Nobody wants to make a phone call anymore because most calls are scams; phone networks are terrible and apps have replaced them, like a lot of legacy tech. Supermarkets make more profit if they pass on the checkout labor to the customer. That’s the whole story. These generations are disillusioned from decades of decline in our society that have root causes predating any of them.
    - stevage 4mo ago
      > Nobody wants to make a phone call anymore because most calls are scams; phone networks are terrible and apps have replaced them, like a lot of legacy tech. This has nothing to do with the unwillingness of young people to use a phone to call a business. > Supermarkets make more profit if they pass on the checkout labor to the customer. That’s the whole story. It's half the story. The willingness of young people to accept it, and even prefer it, is the other half.
bsenftner 4mo ago
The issue is anything that is of value requires some level of detail, of complexity, and that is only of interest to people that know that specific complexity, and it is a pain point for them. Now they'll care. Everyone else? Lost them. So, the marketing challenge is to find some aspirational complexity that people wish they knew, and how that can be solved with AI, and without turning that thing into a trivial nuisance, but a valued skill. That logical series right there is, well, too much for far too many.
ml-anon 4mo ago
there is this bullshit term you hear paraded about the dwarkesh-adjacent circles: "capability overhang". Aside from being effectively meaningless jargon, there is a kernel of an idea that somehow the models are far more capable than what "normies" use them for. Well, I think Siri AI puts this notion firmly to rest. Yes, if you have unlimited tokens and well-posed problems you can solve open Erdos problems. However, if you have meaningful real-world computational and reliability constraints then you better just stick to "summarize my messages and find the dogs in my photos". And this isn't just Gemini, I can burn effectively unlimited Opus tokens and still get garbage code out or be run around in circles without very diligent oversight.
torben-friis 4mo ago
OPPO just added a great feature into my phone. You point your camera at a foreign restaurant menu and it generates a translated version including a picture so you can get a general idea of what it usually looks like. The genius part is that the menu is interactive, so you can add items to a shopping cart, which then results in a local language text you can show to waiters asking them for your full order. It was a great sample of how even a little bit of ux can go a long way.
chaos_emergent 4mo ago
This morning, while putting in daily contacts, I realized I was down to my last few pairs. Still standing at the bathroom sink, I used the ChatGPT app on my phone to voice-command the Codex app on my computer to book an optometrist appointment for Saturday. It visited the website, figured out the API, and booked it. No, this isn’t the same as planning a multi-day vacation. But it is plainly useful today, and it feels very close to handling more complex tasks like that. Maybe the difference is the model and the harness. At this point, I’m starting to think some people are either gaslighting themselves about how useful these systems are, or overgeneralizing from one narrow setup. Gemini, for example, seems especially weak at agentic behavior. The wholesale dismissal just feels strange coming from the HN community I’m used to.
- gedy 4mo ago
  It is neat, but come on you could've booked from website on the phone too.
- stevage 4mo ago
  This is the kind of example that people use to demonstrate "usefulness" that falls so flat to me. I could make that phone call in a minute and have no doubts about whether my agent had stuffed up somehow. It's just not compelling to say that an AI can do an easy task quickly. This is still worth zero dollars to me.
deleted 4mo ago
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JamesKaranja 4mo ago
Its feels as if apple are trying to create deterministic use cases for AI - a non deterministic solution!
OptionOfT 4mo ago
My iPhone knows the forecast for today. I installed iOS 27 yesterday. I asked it: please notify me when the temperature goes above 80F (so I can close the windows). Siri responded: it'll be 99F today in Phoenix. ...
- mark_l_watson 4mo ago
  do you live in Phoenix? I just asked Siri a few weather questions and named the city where I live, nailed it. My favorite digital device is my Apple Watch and if Siri improves over the next hear or two, that will be great for me.
  - OptionOfT 4mo ago
    I live in Phoenix. I would like it to tell me: 8am. Not what the actual high is today.
    - mark_l_watson 4mo ago
      I am on a wait list for the ‘better Siri model’ - what iOS and macOS betas just shipped with is awful. I do think the Apple Foundation Model built in to the system is better: I was using it from Python yesterday and it performs tool calling accurately and it is a very small model.
jawilson2 4mo ago
My high school kid has a printed basketball schedule for this summer. I tried taking a pic with Siri to parse it and add it to the calendar with their visual intelligence thing or whatever. It can't do it. I had Claude parse the calendar picture and generate an ics file. Calendar on iPhone and on their website can no longer import ics files. This is like remedial AI functionality that probably could have worked 20 years ago, and it can't do the simplest most basic task.
- lopis 4mo ago
  Lots of tech used to work and was just deprecated because it's not profitable. Google used to have amazing features on android, assistant and maps, that are just gone now, and slowly coming back in gemini.
lurking_swe 4mo ago
i have not tried it since i’m too scared to try, but i know Codex recently came out with a feature where it can control your chrome browser. Not spin up a chrome browser, but control your open browser tabs. Presumably you might be able to task it with planning an itinerary with specific dates and bookings in mind, and then ask it to complete the task…sort of. The big gotcha i think is payments. Obviously you wouldn’t want to enter your credit card details into an llm lol. perhaps it would be ok if you had a saved card on file with your favorite airline, etc? Or maybe chrome has a feature to autofill a credit card for quick entry? Not sure. Still…it’s a messy unsolved problem and we’re definitely not there. I wonder how this tech will look in 10 years from now?
jeffaf 4mo ago
Skill issue. I've had gpt5.5 help me plan a vacation. It even pointed out where I could save money. I did the actually bookings but it created the plan.
Jzush 4mo ago
Yes, big companies do not know how to advertise AI. AI isn't a killer feature for anyone except people working in AI. No one uses it for anything but party tricks otherwise. The things AI would actually be useful for, it is incapable of doing. AI as a "product" is about sucking up data for corporate interests first, then providing functionality to common people last with probably a few other steps in between. Marketing departments have to twist themselves into pretzels and invent customers that don't exist in hopes to sell AI to people who look at those fake customers in the ads and go "Gee, I wish that was me!". People who casually book trips to Japan to shop for vintage clothes generally don't exist in such large numbers that they justify entire product stacks. Here's what I need AI to do. Open an app, perform an action in said app, close app. Maybe open multiple apps and do things in other apps that are contingent upon data from one of the other apps. Here's what AI can do. Poop Emojii with glasses....
mr_toad 4mo ago
> As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you It’s like they were trained on corpuses of box ticking material, like iso 9000 documentation, or security certifications. And now they know how to describe what they should be doing, but they never actually do anything.

by zmmmmm 4mo ago

idle_zealot 4mo ago

Even the aspirational use cases you're talking about basically are just "digital secretary." There's a massive problem with that even if the models end up being capable in the future. The value of a secretary is that you know them, they know you, and you trust them to do things right. There are stakes if they don't. No company can provide that as a service at scale for everyone without it being a disaster. Not because it's not technically possible, but because of the incentives. That much power over the details of so many people's lives is irresistible; there will be persistent temptation to use it. The presence of that possibility makes the secretary impossible to trust.

cjonas 4mo ago
These use cases will just be built as "open source" (openclawd) or even custom one off application in the future. I've been building apps to run the tedious parts of my life recently. Meal planning, personal finance, bills, tax organization... Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build a app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon. Yes the code is shit and it wouldn't scale... But it doesn't need to
- losteric 4mo ago
  > Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build an app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon. When we talk about “the market”, the customer base, remember it’s a market that typically doesn’t know how to or care to even install an adblocker.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - cjonas 4mo ago
    I don't see any mention of "the market" anywhere in this thread. I'm just talking about the ability for a motivated user to solve real problems with these tools. Right now these solutions are available to software developers but over time it will become approachable to more users
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 4mo ago
  > Why would I pay for services that will be enshiftified when I can build a app that does exactly what I want in an afternoon Because the problem now took a whole afternoon to solved and sapped your creative energy instead.
zmmmmm 4mo ago
it's an interesting question if any of the AI companies would be willing to step up and absorb the risk ie: to give the AI agent a "stake". eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me. It would sort of just come down to buying premium travel insurance for everyone that uses it. And insurance for anything else they do. It has to be one of two things - they either believe the risks are worth it (so then there should be a financial model that can absorb the cost of insurance to do it), or in fact, the risks are too great. At some point, if they keep offering the tech on a "use at your own risk" basis, they are implicitly communicating that they themselves think the risks are too great - so YOU shouldn't trust it either.
- teiferer 4mo ago
  > eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me That would be nice, but it's the wrong angle. The reason people like real secretaries is not because somebody is compensated when things go wrong. It's because things don't go wrong. I don't use this thing if I need to fear things go wrong, even if I'd be compensated. Maybe it would provide the right incentives for the companies though.
  - waterhouse 4mo ago
    Surely, if the compensation was high enough, you'd be like, "Sure, I'm happy with that outcome." And then, if the AI company thinks they have a low enough failure rate that the expected cost of paying out the compensation still lets them make a profit, then they could make that promise to all customers. Though a compensation that high sounds like it would invite fraud, where the customer would be glad to have something go "wrong" and get a fat check. Not sure if that's a solvable problem.
    - ml-anon 4mo ago
      they are literally burning billions of dollars and can presumably keep doing this for a while. Taking a trivial amount of additional financial liability to launder their reputation wouldn't meaningfully improve things.
9dev 4mo ago
The vast majority of people never even asked for a personal assistant, because that isn’t something normal people have or do need in the first place. They aren’t so occupied/privileged/posh to need someone to do the trivial tasks of daily life for them. This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
- Snoddas 4mo ago
  I think you are wrong. They never asked for one becase they never imagined being able to afford one. The amount of administration organizing a normal household takes I suspect most would be glad to leave to someon/something they trust and that can be held accountable. Today that someone needs to be a person (imo). But who knows, a startup may be plotting accountable digital assistans as we speak.
  - tempfile 4mo ago
    Obligatory: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
    - pnut 4mo ago
      Pretty sure unaccountability is a desired feature of management decisions in most organisations. That quote has an unexpressed precondition to the effect of "In order for an organisation to be objectively well run..." or "In order for an organisation to equitably benefit all stakeholders at all levels..." etc
  - djaro 4mo ago
    I think theres some real use cases in the household department. I would love an AI that I just tell my nutrition goals (I want to eat X calories, Y protein, Z fiber, hit all vitamins) and it just generates a full meal plan for me each day. Like, I go to the store and it made the complete shopping list for me. And automatically updates the rest of the day if I tell it I skipped a meal or ate a snack.

cootsnuck 4mo ago

Yup, precisely. Turns out getting AI to be reliable at doing useful things is harder than we've all been led to believe by the dominant narratives. https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-ai https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-a...

fruit2020 4mo ago

Booking and renting is certainly possible, they just need your auth credentials

londons_explore 4mo ago
I gave some LLM's my password manager and some credit cards to try to do this sort of thing lately. They failed most of the time. Simple things like finding the right password for Gmail sometimes was out of reach. Anti bot techniques sometimes stopped it. Impressively, sometimes they'd successfully write hugely complex bash or python scripts to do tasks on web pages they hadn't managed to do with the browser automation.

kristianc 4mo ago

An alien landing on earth consuming Apple marketing content would be under the impression that humans did nothing but organise hikes to Big Sur with their friends.

dakolli 4mo ago
best comment I've seen on this site in a while
pastel8739 4mo ago
Well.. it’s not the furthest thing from the truth in the bay
zombot 4mo ago
That would be deceptively constructive and healthy compared to doom-scrolling instagram or tictoc while clogging the intertubes with AI slop.
9dev 4mo ago
As Psychology is the study of the psyche of white male psychology students, big tech is technology for affluent citizens of San Francisco with a career in IT…
- Ntrails 4mo ago
  > Psychology is the study of the psyche of white male psychology students Huh? Maybe my uni was an outlier / it is a UK thing, but there were ~99 female and 1 male psych students in my year. This was not considered unusual.
  - spacebacon 4mo ago
    This may support the point further xD
  - projektfu 4mo ago
    It's actually "WEIRD", Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The "white cis male" meme says more about GP than psychology.

skylurk 4mo ago

For fun I planned a holiday entirely with LLM's lately, and followed through. It used good models and did a lot of searching, including searches in other languages. It got nothing right, riddled with fake places and times. It also found some weird and unique places I never would have considered. I had a blast, brought me back to traveling pre-internet, requiring a level of spontaneity I had forgotten we used to depend on. 100% recommend it.

wahnfrieden 4mo ago
What was a “good model” and harness? I would expect decent results using say Codex with 5.5 xhigh to research and verify an itinerary. 5.5 Pro with search would also be promising.
- skylurk 4mo ago
  I suspect it would perform admirably well with 'Paris' or 'Copenhagen' (see sibling comment), but if you want to have some real fun try 'Southern Spain' or 'Rural Malaysia'.
pookieinc 4mo ago
To counter, we did the same with a trip to Copenhagen for 7 days and it got most paths correct. Train routes, places to visit with kids, restaurants, reservations, weather, most of it was great. There were a couple mistakes of course here and there, thankfully we did our due diligence, but by and large, we plan to do this for future trips.
- orrito 4mo ago
  I feel like one city is enough focus to actually get good results. If you plan a trip where you move between different (smaller) places problems start to arise
lukan 4mo ago
That was funny, thank you. I am now reminded of a short trip with less tech savy folks, where I also on the trip noticed that the plan was a bit .. not working. And the person organizing it complaining to the bus driver, why they were not going what the internet told him, they were going. The internet being ChatGPT.

harrouet 4mo ago

Spot on! I am also under the impression that the LLM tech is plateauing before bringing the promised productivity. Great as a coding assistant, great a summarizing a text, translating, great a helping plan a trip... But for the rest, e.g. act as a life assistant, it is still far off with no hope to reach the desired performance level. I would not be surprisd to see OpenAI and the likes to start reverting to Siri v1 strategies, i.e. "if this then that" kind of agent routing.

piokoch 4mo ago
Why this is surprising? LLM-s are good in text generation on the base of the stuff they were trained on. Software is text generation, translation is text generation, LLMs can answer questions since billions were spent on tuning foundation models, that is people were collecting in (semi)automatic way questions with answers to the point we might think that LLM-s are "thinking". Now people want to handle car rental. What are the relevant data that models were trained on for this kind of application? For Python code there is kirjillion examples on Github, for mathematical proofs there is endless stream of papers, books, etc. But for car rental? Mostly adds in the internet that want to trick you into a bad deal. So yes, LLM will be a disappointment, as it tries, well, to trick you into a bad deal. In addition, data are rather scarce so there will be a lot of hallucination, as it gets mixed up with yacht rental, bikes rental, ski equipment rental, etc.
- jorisw 4mo ago
  Who said it was surprising? The performance of specific tasks will depend on either those tasks having been included in the training (which Apple could work on), or added by ways of fine tuning, and context sourced from userland. For any category of tasks, there's a ton to be gained still in terms of how context is populated more effectively (relevance) and efficiently (token use). See software engineering harnesses and the skills architecture of OpenClaw for example. SWE harnesses make all the difference in how well Claude Code and OpenAI Codex perform. OpenClaw can't do shit without loading skills from the filesystem into context JIT. I'll be very curious to find out how Apple is feeding context in their new AI approach. Part of it appears to be an 'index' that my iPhone started building (visible in main Settings screen) after installing the iOS 27 Developer Beta.

dyauspitr 4mo ago

I sometimes do random weeklong roadtrips. ChatGPT is the best way to do this. Attractions that are esoteric, RV parks with 50A hookups for under $50, oldest/biggest/best restaurant with local food in a town, historical stops along the way, suburbs close to big cities but where hotel prices are lower etc.

dansquizsoft 4mo ago

"I got the top tier of Gemini AI." - that's your issue, get a subscription to a lab offering actual frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Mistletoe 4mo ago
Nonsense. https://livebench.ai/#/?highunseenbias=true https://livebench.ai/#/?highunseenbias=true
- tmoravec 4mo ago
  Model != AI tool. Especially with Gemini, the model is fantastic, both in benchmarks and in the API. Sentiment is not that positive for Google AI.

fragmede 4mo ago

All you're saying is that (the harness you're using for) Gemini sucks. OpenAI has their own web browser to fill out forms with and Claude has a whole Cowork feature that interacts with you computer including your web browser. If new Siri still sucks, well, it's sucked the entire time. The worst of it is the security aspect where the setting to let you use Siri without authenticating hasn't worked since they added it! (still broken, iOS 26.5)

madrox 4mo ago

I get the impression Apple designers don't actually use AI, and so have no idea what to build, since users don't know what they want from AI yet either.

panicinducer 4mo ago

It reminds me of the Apple Vision Pro hype trailer. "Put on a helmet so you can view 2D photographs in 3D space." Present-day Apple sure has a way of making extremely impressive tech seem totally superfluous.

blitzar 4mo ago

> interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be Have a conversation with the average Ai power user (outside of tech / coding) and this is the level the conversation will be on.

whywhywhywhy 4mo ago

Extremely surprised we didn’t get the “book me a flight” example that has been an AI demo used over and over but everyone’s so particular about flights I can’t see many people just wanting to one shot it. The laundry list of object removal, spacial photos, better speech to text etc is always just the latest open models just being slapped in there and branded as Apple. Ultimately the meat of this presentation was the work of people outside Apple.

stevage 4mo ago
For me "book me a flight to X on day Y" is so easy to do manually I don't need AI. Where I do want AI is for really complex queries, like "find me a time and money efficient itinerary through Europe visiting places I haven't been before. Present options and I'll tell you what I don't like about each of them then we'll narrow in on an optimal solution"

MrDunham 4mo ago

Agree and disagree on the "planning a trip" use case... as I'm sitting on a river cruise on an AI co-planned vacation (we found the cruise, AI set the daily itinerary). Now the big (BIG) caveat is that I used Claude Code on my Max 20x plan from within VS Code. I have a fairly decent harness that I'd built and was sure to prompt it to run several subagents, including one that grounded walking times with Google Maps directly. I'd say this is FAR beyond what the average person would do ("Hey Siri, plan me a trip to Prague") but also it shows that the models can do it with the right harness and guidelines. This wasn't that hard for me to do, so it seems to be more of a feature buildout ("the travel expert" AI) with a few markdown files than anything. All told: web search for grounding times/locations, map grounding for walking paths and times, an adversarial agent to keep the model(s) honest, and a little bit of prompting and you've got a really great travel planner. In short: the average person won't do this, but if I can build it in a few hours any of the 100% of people working at Apple/OpenAI/Anthropic who are smarter than me can build it and bake it into Siri (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc).

audiala 4mo ago
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audiala 4mo ago

We are currently working on this with Audiala (iOS and webapp, Android should be released any coming days), making progress slowly but surely. We started to add tools to the AI chat to organise your trip and explore the place following your preferences and those of your group if you decide to share the trip. We can turn feedback into actual improvements pretty fast now, so would love to have yours and progress towards building the app you really want.

globular-toast 4mo ago

Renting a car isn't a problem I have either. I've rented cars and vans plenty of times. I just phone up and talk to someone or email them. It's really easy. A lot of these "problems" seem to stem from people just not wanting to interact with other people at all. Do we really want to become like Asimov's "Solarians"?

stevage 4mo ago
Millennials and below absolutely do want to avoid interactions with strangers. Especially gen Z will go to great lengths to avoid making a phone call. It sucks. This is why none of my local supermarkets have real checkouts anymore.
- mingus88 4mo ago
  I don’t think generational stereotypes are at fault here. This is another lazy retread about how Millennials/GenZ killed -insert thing here- straight from businessinsider.com Nobody wants to make a phone call anymore because most calls are scams; phone networks are terrible and apps have replaced them, like a lot of legacy tech. Supermarkets make more profit if they pass on the checkout labor to the customer. That’s the whole story. These generations are disillusioned from decades of decline in our society that have root causes predating any of them.
  - stevage 4mo ago
    > Nobody wants to make a phone call anymore because most calls are scams; phone networks are terrible and apps have replaced them, like a lot of legacy tech. This has nothing to do with the unwillingness of young people to use a phone to call a business. > Supermarkets make more profit if they pass on the checkout labor to the customer. That’s the whole story. It's half the story. The willingness of young people to accept it, and even prefer it, is the other half.

bsenftner 4mo ago

The issue is anything that is of value requires some level of detail, of complexity, and that is only of interest to people that know that specific complexity, and it is a pain point for them. Now they'll care. Everyone else? Lost them. So, the marketing challenge is to find some aspirational complexity that people wish they knew, and how that can be solved with AI, and without turning that thing into a trivial nuisance, but a valued skill. That logical series right there is, well, too much for far too many.

ml-anon 4mo ago

there is this bullshit term you hear paraded about the dwarkesh-adjacent circles: "capability overhang". Aside from being effectively meaningless jargon, there is a kernel of an idea that somehow the models are far more capable than what "normies" use them for. Well, I think Siri AI puts this notion firmly to rest. Yes, if you have unlimited tokens and well-posed problems you can solve open Erdos problems. However, if you have meaningful real-world computational and reliability constraints then you better just stick to "summarize my messages and find the dogs in my photos". And this isn't just Gemini, I can burn effectively unlimited Opus tokens and still get garbage code out or be run around in circles without very diligent oversight.

torben-friis 4mo ago

OPPO just added a great feature into my phone. You point your camera at a foreign restaurant menu and it generates a translated version including a picture so you can get a general idea of what it usually looks like. The genius part is that the menu is interactive, so you can add items to a shopping cart, which then results in a local language text you can show to waiters asking them for your full order. It was a great sample of how even a little bit of ux can go a long way.

chaos_emergent 4mo ago

This morning, while putting in daily contacts, I realized I was down to my last few pairs. Still standing at the bathroom sink, I used the ChatGPT app on my phone to voice-command the Codex app on my computer to book an optometrist appointment for Saturday. It visited the website, figured out the API, and booked it. No, this isn’t the same as planning a multi-day vacation. But it is plainly useful today, and it feels very close to handling more complex tasks like that. Maybe the difference is the model and the harness. At this point, I’m starting to think some people are either gaslighting themselves about how useful these systems are, or overgeneralizing from one narrow setup. Gemini, for example, seems especially weak at agentic behavior. The wholesale dismissal just feels strange coming from the HN community I’m used to.

gedy 4mo ago
It is neat, but come on you could've booked from website on the phone too.
stevage 4mo ago
This is the kind of example that people use to demonstrate "usefulness" that falls so flat to me. I could make that phone call in a minute and have no doubts about whether my agent had stuffed up somehow. It's just not compelling to say that an AI can do an easy task quickly. This is still worth zero dollars to me.

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JamesKaranja 4mo ago

Its feels as if apple are trying to create deterministic use cases for AI - a non deterministic solution!

OptionOfT 4mo ago

My iPhone knows the forecast for today. I installed iOS 27 yesterday. I asked it: please notify me when the temperature goes above 80F (so I can close the windows). Siri responded: it'll be 99F today in Phoenix. ...

mark_l_watson 4mo ago
do you live in Phoenix? I just asked Siri a few weather questions and named the city where I live, nailed it. My favorite digital device is my Apple Watch and if Siri improves over the next hear or two, that will be great for me.
- OptionOfT 4mo ago
  I live in Phoenix. I would like it to tell me: 8am. Not what the actual high is today.
  - mark_l_watson 4mo ago
    I am on a wait list for the ‘better Siri model’ - what iOS and macOS betas just shipped with is awful. I do think the Apple Foundation Model built in to the system is better: I was using it from Python yesterday and it performs tool calling accurately and it is a very small model.

jawilson2 4mo ago

My high school kid has a printed basketball schedule for this summer. I tried taking a pic with Siri to parse it and add it to the calendar with their visual intelligence thing or whatever. It can't do it. I had Claude parse the calendar picture and generate an ics file. Calendar on iPhone and on their website can no longer import ics files. This is like remedial AI functionality that probably could have worked 20 years ago, and it can't do the simplest most basic task.

lopis 4mo ago
Lots of tech used to work and was just deprecated because it's not profitable. Google used to have amazing features on android, assistant and maps, that are just gone now, and slowly coming back in gemini.

lurking_swe 4mo ago

i have not tried it since i’m too scared to try, but i know Codex recently came out with a feature where it can control your chrome browser. Not spin up a chrome browser, but control your open browser tabs. Presumably you might be able to task it with planning an itinerary with specific dates and bookings in mind, and then ask it to complete the task…sort of. The big gotcha i think is payments. Obviously you wouldn’t want to enter your credit card details into an llm lol. perhaps it would be ok if you had a saved card on file with your favorite airline, etc? Or maybe chrome has a feature to autofill a credit card for quick entry? Not sure. Still…it’s a messy unsolved problem and we’re definitely not there. I wonder how this tech will look in 10 years from now?

jeffaf 4mo ago

Skill issue. I've had gpt5.5 help me plan a vacation. It even pointed out where I could save money. I did the actually bookings but it created the plan.

Jzush 4mo ago

Yes, big companies do not know how to advertise AI. AI isn't a killer feature for anyone except people working in AI. No one uses it for anything but party tricks otherwise. The things AI would actually be useful for, it is incapable of doing. AI as a "product" is about sucking up data for corporate interests first, then providing functionality to common people last with probably a few other steps in between. Marketing departments have to twist themselves into pretzels and invent customers that don't exist in hopes to sell AI to people who look at those fake customers in the ads and go "Gee, I wish that was me!". People who casually book trips to Japan to shop for vintage clothes generally don't exist in such large numbers that they justify entire product stacks. Here's what I need AI to do. Open an app, perform an action in said app, close app. Maybe open multiple apps and do things in other apps that are contingent upon data from one of the other apps. Here's what AI can do. Poop Emojii with glasses....

mr_toad 4mo ago

> As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you It’s like they were trained on corpuses of box ticking material, like iso 9000 documentation, or security certifications. And now they know how to describe what they should be doing, but they never actually do anything.