Apple is a hardware designer / producer. Everything else they do is aimed at selling more hardware.
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Apple AI Chief John Giannandrea Retiring After Siri Delays
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Google spends about 85 billion a year on infrastructure alone, most going to AI. The classic business model of ' I will give you the first one, I will sell you the second one is universal in business.
Also interestingly, the drug business model. Addiction to AI is on the upswing, and legal. There is some really weird AI cults on social media. Many LLM's have been designed for addiction for profit. The advertising leans on that
Yeah all that time at Google he worked for free with no stock options, during the explosive years.
Yeah, Apple is doing so bad these days😀 due to their AI failures. Blowing past Samsung.
Siri works great for me. I can dictate messages, emails, control my home, play music. I don’t need to know the top scorers of baseball teams. I don’t know where AI is going on iPhone but it ain’t hurting Apple much now despite the chattering tech press clutching their pearls about it.
Siri works great for me. I can dictate messages, emails, control my home, play music. I don’t need to know the top scorers of baseball teams. I don’t know where AI is going on iPhone but it ain’t hurting Apple much now despite the chattering tech press clutching their pearls about it.
Apple might be better off making a type of a framework in which you, the user, selects an AI, like Gemini or ChatGPT, and that AI works within the frameworks to deliver what you want with what you give it access to. For example, I give the AI access to my calendar so I can interact with my calendar through the AI. Now you have AI in the context of your calendar. Give it access to your calendar, contacts, phone, and media. Now you have AI in the context of those aspects of your data and apps. Tell it make call, it does so. Tell it play a playlist, it does. Ask it what your most played song is or ask it to look at your top ten most played songs and make suggestions for another ten, and it does.
This would also help them avoid monopoly accusations from regulators. They should stick to what they’re good at and not try to do everything.
What rubbish. Siri hasn’t “failed” and Apple is leading in actual, practical AI that does things that matter. People retire. big deal.
Long overdue. They hired this guy years ago and Siri still sucks. If Elon Musk can throw together a team in a few months and make a leading LLM, how hard can it be?
This guy is notable to me as being the only one on Apple’s leadership team outside of legal or finance that didn’t start his tenure under Steve Jobs. Apple’s leadership team is great but old hat. With the coming wave of retirements in the next few years, this bodes poorly for Apple.
Finally, as a consumer electronics company, there was never any way for Apple to “win” on AI. Apple is not a cloud service provider or merchant chip maker- all the AI “winners” are doing B2B. No one in the consumer space is making money on AI, so Apple is not really missing out. OpenAI dominates the consumer market, they don’t make money, and they’re trying to move towards an advertisement-based model- again, B2B. No one is making money on consumer AI hardware. OpenAI is working on something so Apple better be prepared but as of now there is nothing to see. Apple needs to get their house in order on AI, to make products like AR smart glasses possible, but they have time.
AI is massive bubble now, with companies taking on massive debt for investments that have no path to profitability. The investments are also circular between the leading players, so when investors finally realize that the debts cannot be repaid, all the AI “winners” will fall down together. Apple is lucky not to be exposed to the mess. Their biggest mistake on AI was succumbing to investor pressure and releasing the half-baked “Apple Intelligence” feature instead of biding their time.
This guy is notable to me as being the only one on Apple’s leadership team outside of legal or finance that didn’t start his tenure under Steve Jobs. Apple’s leadership team is great but old hat. With the coming wave of retirements in the next few years, this bodes poorly for Apple.
Finally, as a consumer electronics company, there was never any way for Apple to “win” on AI. Apple is not a cloud service provider or merchant chip maker- all the AI “winners” are doing B2B. No one in the consumer space is making money on AI, so Apple is not really missing out. OpenAI dominates the consumer market, they don’t make money, and they’re trying to move towards an advertisement-based model- again, B2B. No one is making money on consumer AI hardware. OpenAI is working on something so Apple better be prepared but as of now there is nothing to see. Apple needs to get their house in order on AI, to make products like AR smart glasses possible, but they have time.
AI is massive bubble now, with companies taking on massive debt for investments that have no path to profitability. The investments are also circular between the leading players, so when investors finally realize that the debts cannot be repaid, all the AI “winners” will fall down together. Apple is lucky not to be exposed to the mess. Their biggest mistake on AI was succumbing to investor pressure and releasing the half-baked “Apple Intelligence” feature instead of biding their time.
Here's some thoughts about AI and Apple:
- Right now, a Mac with 32GB is the only realistic way an average person can run an LLM privately entirely on your computer WITHOUT an expensive GPU. This is because of the genuinely shared memory approach and built in GPU as part of the M-series chips. Download something like LM Studio and it works out of the box by immediately installing GPT-OSS.
- People have been pointing out recently that, during the San Francisco gold rush (one of the biggest "bubbles"), it was people like Levi Strauss that came out of it rich (and whose business is still around today) – by making the clothing for the 49ers. Strauss wasn't a miner. He wasn't chasing the gold. But he was implicit to the success of that industry and era.
- It's entirely feasible right now for somebody to create an entirely self-contained, portable, private LLM hardware device. It would need a lot of RAM, and a decent GPU as part of its SOC. Sure, it'd be expensive. It could take any format. It could be like a phone. It could be a wearable, like a wrist. A tabletop device, maybe. But this isn't tomorrow's technology. It's not even today's. We could've done it five or even ten years ago.
- There is a desperate need for power reduction in the server farms running LLMs. A company that is pioneering in its development of ARM processors could do well there.
- One of the biggest concerns about AI right now is privacy. A company committed to 100% privacy could do well by, say, running LLMs entirely on-device and off-loading to their privacy-focussed infrastructure when required.
Federighi found out about chat GPT a year after its launch, how can they say he is useful?
He is good to make ridiculous keynotes at best.
Since he took over the quality of the software went down the drain. They need a reality check and they won’t have it until the stock crashes.
He is good to make ridiculous keynotes at best.
Since he took over the quality of the software went down the drain. They need a reality check and they won’t have it until the stock crashes.
You’re right. Even now, for me, iCloud
safari tabs shows tabs I shut months ago and should’ve been purged.
If apple still can’t get basic stuff like this to work reliably, what hope does it have to get cutting edge AI working?
To all of those on the thread who are saying that Siri ‘works great for them’, this is a completely true experience that I had yesterday:
(Puts on AirPods Pro 2)
‘Hey Siri, turn on adaptive sound mode’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean’.
(Puts on AirPods Pro 2)
‘Hey Siri, turn on adaptive sound mode’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean’.
The grim reaper that is Siri continues to leave a trail of dead executive bodies behind her... Siri is Apple's true killer product
Well, that makes me feel better. Microsoft AI hasn’t exactly been resounding success – I mean it’s better than Apple has done with Siri but certainly not up to par with ChatGPT or Gemini. Knowing he’s only been at Microsoft a few months makes me think he can be the real asset Apple seems to think he will be.
Umm news flash, they still haven't gotten Siri right over the last decade, what makes you think they will with AI?
Same. I bet my list looks much like yours.
I had the same thing happen around iOS 13 era, too. My iPad was iOS 14 my iPhone was iOS 13, my Mac was whatever era-equivalent macOS at then time, and iCloud tabs was a mess. Then I also updated my iPhone (begrudgingly) to iOS 14, and MacBook went to whatever next version, and it surprisingly got purged. Now I’m back to mismatched iOS and macOS versions and it’s a disaster again.
IIRC, at one point Apple promised “2 versions back” of compatibility for features like this. Maybe that was my issue, but now it’s all such a wreck I don’t think they even know anymore.
Yep, I get same crap Siri results too.
Try the “DnD while driving” focus bug, and ask Siri “turn on low power mode”. She confirms it is/was done, but LPM never activates. Or is this bug fixed on newer flavors?
Not Siri related, but about the keyboard bugs and stupidity like:
* turn off the wacky keyboard trickery and unhelpful edit options, and you get the “undo/redo” arrows but the undo only goes back 1 level and the redo doesn’t work
* wtf is up with the idiotic “two fingers and the keyboard turns into a cursor that selects all your text and deletes it”? You can’t turn this lunacy off anywhere (accessibility options don’t exist for it either). I want my keyboard to be a functional keyboard again like it was in iOS 12.
* combine the second with the first and you have no way to recover the failure of the keyboard crap….
Siri can barely add items to my Grocery reminders list. She can’t identify when food items are different and make them separate entries. I have to talk to her like a 3 yr old child, very slowly with gaps between words so that triggers the “separation” of words. Apples, cereal, and zucchini are not a single item.
It’s a combo bug of Siri and mail, but I can’t rely on Siri to send email or reply to email and correctly choose the “from” address account. I have 5 or 6 different mail accounts and my iCloud has another 5 or 6 “from” addresses due to my “custom mail domain” I have setup. Siri+Mail always picks the wrong one and it’s not the same wrong one. I gave up on mail with Siri. Siri just turns lights on/off, sets a HomeKit scene, occasionally dictates a text/iMessage, and sometimes checks weather. Which is all the same crap it did in 2011/2012.
If Apple actually responded to, and accepted, bug reports I’d report them but we’ve seen that they don’t.
I only want to know what the apple execs do for their iPhones. Do they run a special version of iOS that gets them a magic bug-fixed iso version? There is NO WAY they use the same version we all do. Impossible.
Honestly, I think that the Apple execs all must have executive assistants and likely someone in their personal lives that does the same for them, plus they are obviously very busy being Apple executives.
The upshot of it is that I don’t think they use their iPhones and macs like regular people do.
That’s the only reason I can think of ie why persistent bugs and - increasingly - the pervasive feeling of a lack of quality and attention to detail throughout their platforms