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Apple's Real AI Crisis Isn't Siri, But the Talent It's Losing to Rivals
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All I can say is Claude (using Opus, not Sonnet; Sonnet is too willing to hallucinate to make me happy) has become indispensable as a research assistant for me. That's neither gimmicky nor little to me (maybe for others, of course… our mileage may vary).
Apple should ask themselves if they really need to work on AI at all. I don’t see the need for it. If up to me I’d rather be working on the hardware and the software needed to run it.
They're working on hardware and software needed to run it. New chips are being designed to run transformer AI models. Software like MLX makes it run nicely on Apple Silicon.
They need to develop their own AI internally or they'll get left behind.
This strategy would probably start the downfall of Apple. They absolutely need to work on AI. I'm shocked when I come across people who aren't using it in at least some small way.
If Meta is throwing $100MM at each hire (sometimes more), that begs the question… how much money do they plan to make off of their work? And that revenue comes from data scraping and ads… something Apple isn’t fully committed to (yet). So Apple can’t really compete in that arena and I don’t think I want them try to. Just make Siri better and wait for AI craze to calm down. There’s a new wave of software engineers coming.
Some of these people in here are delusional. They’re like “AI? Who needs it anyway? 🤷♂️”
Apple is in serious trouble.
I disagree with the title. Apple's AI crisis is indeed Siri, only that it is further exacerbated by losing people.
It's like saying, "Tom's health crisis is not cancer+loss of blood+HIV+brain damage, but that the doctors are on vacation." No, the crisis is there apart from the doctors.
As for Apple, the real crisis is Tim Cook and others in leadership.
It's like saying, "Tom's health crisis is not cancer+loss of blood+HIV+brain damage, but that the doctors are on vacation." No, the crisis is there apart from the doctors.
As for Apple, the real crisis is Tim Cook and others in leadership.
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The failure lies further up the food chain: being unwilling to make a big bet on what seems to be the emerging (and perhaps overexuberantly bubbled) Next Big Thing.
Tim is taking a pennywise, pound-foolish approach to AI when ‘pound-foolish’ is where the action is. (For good or not—only time will tell.)
Tim is taking a pennywise, pound-foolish approach to AI when ‘pound-foolish’ is where the action is. (For good or not—only time will tell.)
All of these doom and gloom stories hinge around first-mover advantage. We certainly haven't seen that so far - the first movers on the software side are the ones that have lost the most money on it. OpenAI is the biggest loser of them all in that regard, starting out with an operating loss and increasing that loss every year.
Apple may or may not be 'behind', depending on where you think the puck is going to be. So far, there are next to no financially sustainable 'AI' products, so in the race to lose as much money as quickly as possible, Apple may be in last place, but that's not a bad thing...
On the other hand, Apple may have genuinely screwed up on an emerging technology and never recover. Though plausible, that seems like one of the less likely outcomes in the longer run. This is not (yet) Blackberry, Nokia, or Intel. We can't really accuse Apple of failing to thrive in an area that in many senses doesn't yet exist (and may never exist in certain senses). It will be some years before we can draw that conclusion.
Apple may or may not be 'behind', depending on where you think the puck is going to be. So far, there are next to no financially sustainable 'AI' products, so in the race to lose as much money as quickly as possible, Apple may be in last place, but that's not a bad thing...
On the other hand, Apple may have genuinely screwed up on an emerging technology and never recover. Though plausible, that seems like one of the less likely outcomes in the longer run. This is not (yet) Blackberry, Nokia, or Intel. We can't really accuse Apple of failing to thrive in an area that in many senses doesn't yet exist (and may never exist in certain senses). It will be some years before we can draw that conclusion.
Completely a problem of their making. They didn’t do squat with AI for years and allowed competitors to gain a massive advantage. Siri is so useless that it’s embarrassing it’s even included on a flagship phone. No surprise top talent wants to leave.
This. Anybody that thinks AI isn’t useful is a complete idiot. LLMs are game changing for me.
Prepare to be shocked. I don't use it, at all, and I never use voice assistants. I used Siri a handful of times after I bought my 4S, but rarely since then. No vendetta, I just have no use for either.
As for Apple, they could use another company back-end with Siri on top. Not everything has to be in house.
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Siri will be a smash hit if it's half as good as Grok is in my Tesla. Holy LLMs! I have spent more time talking to Grok in my car in the last month than I have to Siri over 7 years! Speaking to Grok is close to "computer" on Star Trek...
They spent two years telling their AI team to catch up to rivals and then gutting them on what was already a hardware compromise.
Everyone else is using huge server farms filled with the latest 400w, 2,000GB/sec NVidia hardware, the lower rung is trying their best on the latest 750w, 5,300GB/sec. AMD hardware, and the Apple team asks for dogfooded Mac hardware topping out at 300w, 800GB/sec. and THAT allotment gets chopped in half? Yeah, no **** morale divebombed.
They're behind on sparsity-capable GPU shaders, they're behind on memory bandwidth for those GPUs, they're behind on cache architecture for those GPUs, they're comically behind on network interconnect for the systems hosting those GPUs, they're behind on power curves for GPUs plugged into the wall, and they somehow expect their AI team to outpace other companies using actually good hardware.
Everyone else is using huge server farms filled with the latest 400w, 2,000GB/sec NVidia hardware, the lower rung is trying their best on the latest 750w, 5,300GB/sec. AMD hardware, and the Apple team asks for dogfooded Mac hardware topping out at 300w, 800GB/sec. and THAT allotment gets chopped in half? Yeah, no **** morale divebombed.
They're behind on sparsity-capable GPU shaders, they're behind on memory bandwidth for those GPUs, they're behind on cache architecture for those GPUs, they're comically behind on network interconnect for the systems hosting those GPUs, they're behind on power curves for GPUs plugged into the wall, and they somehow expect their AI team to outpace other companies using actually good hardware.
Here’s a list of people that will still be working to ensure what they create is available on Apple devices.
I wish Apple would figure out a way to allow users to pick the assistant they would like in place of Siri. It's frustrating to know the technology to make your phone exponentially more useful is here, but gated by the device itself.
Folks here will remember when Jobs didn't want third party apps for the iPhone. It didn't take long for them to realize the potential of what became iOS with respect to revenue and innovation. Since then, I reckon we can credit the App Store for advancing a slew of ideas within iOS itself.
Similarly, I think if Apple were to open up a framework and play host to all of this innovation, Siri would fall in line not unlike Maps did.. only with way more impact?
Folks here will remember when Jobs didn't want third party apps for the iPhone. It didn't take long for them to realize the potential of what became iOS with respect to revenue and innovation. Since then, I reckon we can credit the App Store for advancing a slew of ideas within iOS itself.
Similarly, I think if Apple were to open up a framework and play host to all of this innovation, Siri would fall in line not unlike Maps did.. only with way more impact?
Don't get me wrong, Siri is useless, I barely use it.
But AI tools I use everywhere for work and personal, don't know what I'd do without them. There are tasks that would take me hours/days that are now completed (in some cases autonomously) in minutes.
I can't use AI at work (clinical healthcare). We have a zero tolerance no-AI rule here, and all the domains are blocked by IT.
I don't do a lot of things on my personal devices that AI could help with.