Apple's ChatGPT Rival Moves Forward, But Siri's Future Still Uncertain

[Chungry]

I was looking at getting a Garmin fēnix 8 and found myself thinking that Apple’s biggest problem is that they insist on doing everything proprietary. If they partnered up with Garmin, Apple Watch hardware would make dramatic leaps and Garmin can probably offer a ton of improvements to the garbage heap that is WatchOS.
The same can be said with a lot of the rest of their non-core (pun very intended) offerings.

The difference is night and day. I can't see Garmin doing anything that would give Apple a leg up to become a serious competitor in the fitness watch market. As it stands Apple has scads of health data and doesn't do squat with it. It's nigh worthless. Garmin knows how to bring my metrics together with deadly accuracy: VO2 max, body battery. race readiness, relative effort and recovery. Why would Garmin help Apple figure out how to get weeks of battery life. I don't want Garmin and Apple going anywhere near one another unless it's plugging my Fenix into my MacBook Pro to charge it every three weeks.

 

[svish]

No doubt that in the future Siri and Apple Intelligence will perform well but it has a lot of catching up to do. I think it will be at least 1.5 to 2 years before Apple Intelligence can offer something that is very useful.

 

[bluecoast]

LOL.

Apple can't just buy any company they want...

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple have made some offers to buy some AI providers, and been refused.

I bet you are completely right:

Apple: Here's loads of money for you to come and work at Apple, you'll be rich forever.

Hot AI start-ups: ...And be crushed by corporate inertia, infighting etc. when we are at the innovating at the forefront of the new tech paradigm, drowning in VC money and will probably end up filthy rich anyway? No thanks.

 

[bluecoast]

They're really struggling with AI/voice assistants. Definitely need to be careful on this one. Take the approach they have with Google search, and that they did with Google Maps - offer support and integration for an existing platform. Then gradually introduce their own.

They could go all out with Microsoft and be all 'let's share the stage together', some kind of tie up including on-device privacy as an option.

This. I strongly suspect that deep Gemini integration will be the surprise announcement at WWDC.

As you say, they are losing the race badly, they have the existing search umm 'relationship' with Google and they can't keep on shipping new versions with Siri in the abysmal state that it is in, compared to the competition.

It will give Google a huge advantage, but as you say, it'll buy Apple time to try and bake their own version - and to do it properly this time.

If they can't do that, well... They might as well merge with Google.

 

[Stella]

Just drop the AI nonsense altogether, IMO. Every LLM is supposedly getting better on metrics, but their real world performance, in my experience, is getting worse. It’s almost like how CPU and GPU makers optimize for benchmarking software instead of actual innovation that might not result in “number bigger now — bigger number good”.
I don’t think I have had a single LLM interaction in the past 2 months where I haven’t had to ask it if I was unclear (“No, you were very clear.”), ask it repeatedly to double-check and verify it’s clearly long answer, been gaslit on answers I know are wrong, have been told by the LLM to do a search for the answer, etc, etc.

I hear echos of 'just drop the internet stuff, it's useless' in your comment.

AI is here to stay whether you like it or not. It's not a fad. Add: but we are in the "gold rush" era, just like the internet at the beginning. So it's being shoved down our throats at every turn.

AI immature, but will improve. AI's that use it's own data does lead to less reliable AI models, that's a fact, and something that will be resolved.

People should be embracing it, instead of fighting it. It's going to play an increasing part of our lives.
AI is a tool, and useful at that, as long as you are aware of the shortcoming.

 

[UpsetTheAppleCart]

this may be a controversial opinion, but I don't think Apple should rush it with AI.

No one is actually making money with it at the moment, and it's more important to get it right for the long haul than get it out fast.

AI's biggest business function at the moment is as a marketing tool, but that won't last forever.

AI will be a key component in the age of robotics we're about to enter, and Apple is poised to be a major player in that massive market - but only if they get their AI game right.

I completely agree. And I think Apple looks at it the same way.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

In a post about Large Reasoning Models (LRMs):

My basic understanding after a skim is that the paper shows, or at least strongly suggests, that LRMs don’t “reason” at all. They just use vastly more complex pattern-matching than LLMs. The result is that LRMs effectively overthink on simple problems, outperform LLMs on mid-complexity puzzles, and fail in the same exact way LLMs do on high-complexity tasks and puzzles.

This aligns with my experience with the latest reasoning 4o and o3 models on Chat-GPT.

Apple Researchers Publish Paper on the Limits of Reasoning Models (Showing That They’re Not Really ‘Reasoning’ at All)

Link to: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking

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