Apple Could Use ChatGPT or Claude to Power Siri

[Ad47uk]

I can't remember ever using Siri. I've had iPhones since 2008, it was always a gimmick.

They are gimmicks to be honest, I don't use Google Assistant and disabled their Gemini , Tell a lie I have used Assitant a couple of times when I have heard some music and got it to recognise it, but not done that for months.
I have a load of Echo units in the house, just a gimmick most of the time, useful for music and for turning lights on and off.

I had a muck around with Siri on my Mac when I first had it, but no microphone permanently plugged in, so had to use keyboard, disabled now, and the AI stuff.

 

[Ad47uk]

can we get grok as an option? Thank you

Is that one of Musk things? If so then no, thanks

 

[Ad47uk]

This made me laugh in the article.
sparking customer outrage

Really? oh good grief.
The more they keep AI out of my devices, the happier I will be. As long as there is a proper way to disable it, then fine, not like MS Ai on Windows,.
One reason why I went for the MAc, is because I hoped that when AI did come to the Mac, they would allow us to turn it off with ease.

 

[Ferrandix]

It's a smart move by Apple, because the intelligent thing is to know what your strengths are — and what they aren’t. If you can’t build your own AI model, license the best one on the market and pay for it.
The iPhone itself is made up of dozens of parts from different manufacturers, because Apple can't do everything alone.
It seems Apple might need five years or more just to build a solid AI team, a clear vision, and the leadership to launch its own AI.
What surprises me most about all of this, though, is that after nearly two decades of earning billions in profits, I had always assumed that when a threat eventually emerged, Apple — with so much money in the bank — would simply buy it.

 

[Ad47uk]

It's a smart move by Apple, because the intelligent thing is to know what your strengths are — and what they aren’t. If you can’t build your own AI model, license the best one on the market and pay for it.
The iPhone itself is made up of dozens of parts from different manufacturers, because Apple can't do everything alone.
It seems Apple might need five years or more just to build a solid AI team, a clear vision, and the leadership to launch its own AI.
What surprises me most about all of this, though, is that after nearly two decades of earning billions in profits, I had always assumed that when a threat eventually emerged, Apple — with so much money in the bank — would simply buy it.

I suppose you can't buy everything and maybe one day they may, depending on how things go.
Amazon is using a third party AI thing for Alexa+, Claude, i think. That is when it comes out for the masses.

Not really into this AI stuff myself, I have found some use for it with video stuff, but I don't want it on my devices.

 

[springsup]

As some people hate to admit it, this is all because Apple didnt care about AI for a long time and yet they crippled AI teams thanks to Apple CFO. They cant even make their own AI server as Apple Silicon isn't powerful enough to replace Nvidia GPU. Since they cant even make Apple Silicon version of Mac Pro with powerful GPUs, they will not be able to research, develop, and train their own AI instead of relying on others just like they did with Intel for Mac.

More I see articles about upsetter Apple's AI team, it only proves me right!

Apple is at least 5 years behind in LLMs, but I don’t think you can blame the CFO for all of it. This is a decade of mismanagement - Apple were so distracted by things like self-driving cars that they fell behind when it came to their core product.

Apple is all about human-computer interaction, and LLMs - despite their flaws - are a breakthrough in being able to naturally interface with a computer. Apple should have been all over this… and they kind of had the right idea by making Siri such a big feature of the iPhone 4S.

When it comes to ML models, the training hardware has nothing to do with the inference hardware. The ML models that are already part of the iPhone - e.g. for search in photos - are not trained on iPhones.

When it comes to inference though, Apple’s hardware is actually pretty great. Not everybody has an Nvidia 5090 to run models on, but even the cheapest Apple device can run pretty advanced models well enough to be useful in real applications. Apple don’t directly compete with Nvidia; in fact, it would be reasonable to support those GPUs in the apple silicon Mac Pro.

 

[ashdelacroix]

This is a gigantic failure of leadership. I understand, of course, that Apple wanted to be privacy-first by limiting the use of 'public' LLMs, but they took an all-or-nothing approach that was unrealistic and failed to deliver key benefits after several OS releases. They should have considered proxying AI queries or having clear opt-ins far sooner than they have. It is a disappointing mess from a company drowning in billions of dollars' of assets and full of talented people. Then they had the nerve to front it out by promising big improvements, which have led to what? A glorified spell checker and some very locked-down emoji creator. Siri, technically, is early-21st century technology that should be in a museum. Siri is extraordinarily useless.

 

[svish]

Waiting to hear more on this. Claude integration will be useful. Thought some form of announcement regarding Siri and Apple Intelligence would have happened at WWDC.

 

[MacATDBB]

A Siri front-end with a Claude back-end could be pretty awesome. I've never enabled Siri on my machines due to bugginess and lack of features when briefly testing, but this could change that.

 

[Hkfan45]

Waiting to hear more on this. Claude integration will be useful. Thought some form of announcement regarding Siri and Apple Intelligence would have happened at WWDC.

I think that tells you all that you need to know about Apple “intelligence.”

 

[CloneBB]

I have successfully lived on earth for 64 years without AI. I am sure I can make it another 20 without it.

 

[clg82]

Rumors like this and the rumor of Apple buying Perplexity give me no hope that a decent, working Siri is coming out in Spring. I think they are still very early in the planning stages and just trying to figure out who they can hire, who they can cut a check to, and what they need to do to get out of last place.

I agree, purchasing another company because (biggest tech company in the world Apple) can't get theirs working just screams of desperation.

 

[Hkfan45]

I have successfully lived on earth for 64 years without AI. I am sure I can make it another 20 without it.

I lived fine without an iPhone as well. Sounds like boomer mentality.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Whatever model Apple uses on the back end, it needs an AI chatbot. Consumer habits are changing rapidly. People go to ChatGPT when they have a question. Unlike search engines, ChatGPT automatically records all chats so you can easily return to them.

When I saw the posts saying chatbots were not effecting Google search numbers I knew Google were panicking. Chatbots have many issues, though. They are wrong the whole time. If you know the subject matter you're asking questions about you quickly see the Swiss cheese holes. Another issue with them is they are programmed to not admit when they are wrong. This causes them to waste much of your time. They often use language to suggest the mistake was both of yours, it's quite annoying. "It looks like there is confusion", and other such responses, rather than "I made a mistake". Oftentimes if they (they programmers of the software) would just defer to being straightforward, the conversation could long be over, but instead it drags on until you realise your time is being wasted. But the singulatory is coming any day now.

 

[TheDauterive]

Oh man...

If they force this on users too much or too deeply, some of us will have some big decisions to make.

Don't worry @surferfb, my friend, I'd be voting with my wallet and purchasing decisions (and leaving).

So you think you'll switch to one of the companies taking a principled stand against AI and banning it from their platform? I'm afraid that's called a rotary phone sir.

 

[turbineseaplane]

So you think you'll switch to one of the companies taking a principled stand against AI and banning it from their platform? I'm afraid that's called a rotary phone sir.

There are OS's one can run (desktop and mobile) that aren't infiltrated with AI slop, yes.

 

[michaeljk]

Maybe this is all down to Apple seeing itself as a hardware company--it sells hardware for its customers to use, rather than a software company, which buys hardware for itself to use. AI companies are software companies, and can spend billions on Hardware because they don't have the capital costs of manufacturing their own hardware to sell. So, they buy compute. Apple makes compute, and probably spends way, way less on compute (not meaning storage).

I really don't think Tim, Craig, Eddie and others at Apple understood AI 15 years ago, and still don't. All they needed to do was watch Scottie on Star Trek IV show obvious frustration that he couldn't just ask the computer for what he needed, and had to actually type stuff. Right there!

The really amazing thing about Apple's stupidity is how obvious this is to any observer. I remember writing posts here and elsewhere years ago stating that Apple was going to end up dead in the water if it didn't figure out "AI" (or back then, the new paradigm of a truly personal assistant, as Google and Amazon were marching ahead and Apple was completely fumbling around with it). This is not me bragging. Just the opposite. I am no one. I am not even employed in the tech industry. And if I could see it so easily, how in the world is it possible they completely missed the ball? Unbelievable.

 

[Brien]

Apple could buy Anthropic, why partner?

 

[Wanted797]

The big problem with AI is that people are way more impressed with something that gives you any answer confidently, rather than correctly. It doesn't matter how much hallucinated BS these things throw at people-- half the users don't bother to check it or follow-up, and think that this crap is making everything better when it's actually making things so much worse in the long term...

How’s that only an issue with AI?

 

[Wx_Man]

Rumors like this and the rumor of Apple buying Perplexity give me no hope that a decent, working Siri is coming out in Spring. I think they are still very early in the planning stages and just trying to figure out who they can hire, who they can cut a check to, and what they need to do to get out of last place.

It’s not. New is breaking that Apple’s entire MLX team, tasked with getting ML and AI to run efficiently and effectively on device threaten to quit from lack of focus and vision by Apple. There was a mad scramble by Apple management to to do anything to keep them. With Mark Zuckerberg literally offering just one AI expert 10 million dollars as a sign on bonus to join Meta’s AI team, Apple is very close to having any AI project within Apple collapse.

 

[Wx_Man]

Apple could buy Anthropic, why partner?

You do know that Anthropic is basically Amazon’s AI…right? I mean…Amazon is by far Anthropic’s largest investor and lets Anthropic run on AWS. Also Anthropic is partnering now with military and pervasive surveillance firm Palentir all of which runs on AWS. I highly, HIGHLY doubt Apple had any delusion about buying Anthropic.

 

[Wx_Man]

You're right on it! They've been working just to retain folks, let alone hire more!

View attachment 2524598

This. Apple is quite literally in danger of having their entire AI effort go up in flames. Mark Zuckerberg is literally offering 10s of millions of dollars just for one AI expert to join Meta. It’s insanity in Silicon Valley right now. Because everyone knows that who ever the US Military thinks is the best AI for their purposes that company will be the next AI version of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Boeing. This is why Amazon is capturing so many DoD and US government contracts for AWS services and hosting and also putting Anthropic on AWS along with Anthropic’s partner Palentir, the military surveillance AI company. Meta is now supplying AI and other services for government and the military. And this is the major reason why investor money is quite literally being set on fire in its race to hit the jackpot on who will come out on top.

 

[masterhiggins]

Give us an option to use Grok

 

[turbineseaplane]

This. Apple is quite literally in danger of having their entire AI effort go up in flames. Mark Zuckerberg is literally offering 10s of millions of dollars just for one AI expert to join Meta. It’s insanity in Silicon Valley right now. Because everyone knows that who ever the US Military thinks is the best AI for their purposes that company will be the next AI version of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Boeing. This is why Amazon is capturing so many DoD and US government contracts for AWS services and hosting and also putting Anthropic on AWS along with Anthropic’s partner Palentir, the military surveillance AI company. Meta is now supplying AI and other services for government and the military. And this is the major reason why investor money is quite literally being set on fire in its race to hit the jackpot on who will come out on top.

There's no money like defense contractor money.

It's a line item that never goes down and feels like the USA would spend on at the expense of actual food and water.

Warnings were not observed.

 

[smulji]

This. Apple is quite literally in danger of having their entire AI effort go up in flames. Mark Zuckerberg is literally offering 10s of millions of dollars just for one AI expert to join Meta. It’s insanity in Silicon Valley right now. Because everyone knows that who ever the US Military thinks is the best AI for their purposes that company will be the next AI version of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Boeing. This is why Amazon is capturing so many DoD and US government contracts for AWS services and hosting and also putting Anthropic on AWS along with Anthropic’s partner Palentir, the military surveillance AI company. Meta is now supplying AI and other services for government and the military. And this is the major reason why investor money is quite literally being set on fire in its race to hit the jackpot on who will come out on top.

If the biggest reason for this AI arms race is to be the defacto surveillance tech for the military, I would be worried.