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iOS 18 Reportedly Won't Feature Apple's Own ChatGPT-Like Chatbot
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Apple dialled down what Siri could say & every possible response was manually curated so it wouldn't cause offence or anything like that. Ask it anything that wasn't manually approved for a response then it's essentially a "sorry I can't do that" or "here's a webpage" that's completely unrelated to what you were asking for. There's no intelligence to Siri, artificial or otherwise.
It's why Siri is so utterly dog sh*t, highly limited & broken.
I'm not sure whether people fully understand the impact of what they call "chatbots". Within 2 years max, Android and potentially new vendors will not be smartphones anymore, but exceptionally smart personal assistants, able to perform literally any task at a level a good human professional would do.
It is completely transformative, we will start using our devices in a radically different way.
Anyone who is quite familiar with some AI tools knows that we are already there technology wise and performance wise, it "just" needs to be implemented. But it's not really a "choice", it is something completely inevitable that will rapidly render totally obsolete anything that was before.
For Apple it won't be a "choice" whether to have a competitive assistant built in or not, because nobody in its sane mind will use a device without such integrated AI.
It would be like trying to sell radios in a TV market.
It is completely transformative, we will start using our devices in a radically different way.
Anyone who is quite familiar with some AI tools knows that we are already there technology wise and performance wise, it "just" needs to be implemented. But it's not really a "choice", it is something completely inevitable that will rapidly render totally obsolete anything that was before.
For Apple it won't be a "choice" whether to have a competitive assistant built in or not, because nobody in its sane mind will use a device without such integrated AI.
It would be like trying to sell radios in a TV market.
That's a chatbot. Siri is a chatbot – not a very good one, but a chatbot nonetheless.
It's been stagnant because Apple took the wrong approach, one that requires it to be manually programmed and that was never scalable. It got worse the larger it became. Generative AI will fix that but from the sounds of it, Apple is so far behind on GPT that they're going to have to license one from their competitor. Embarrassing.
Tim Cook missed the train and only got on it when he could hear the whistle as it approached the station. Steve Jobs anticipated conversational UI which is why he acquired Siri just before his death. Tim Cook never saw it. He let Siri fall behind and never understood its importance to the future of the company. Apple can recover because of their resources but they can't rely on that forever. Steve Jobs got Apple to where it is because he anticipated the trajectory of technology and user experiences years and even decades in advance. Apple needs a visionary.
While I like your argument, making Cook solely responsible for this is a bit too much. He has been COO, mainly in production, he is not a software guy neither he is a genius like Jobs (no one is). So why all those bright and smart vice presidents at Apple failed to advice Cook on AI or why they *who are running iOS and MacOS divisions, actually failed themselves to improve Siri and lead in AI?
I once pulled out chatGPT voice chat in a brainstorming session where my team was stuck. I put my phone in the middle of the table and chatGPT became a full participant. It took all of our ideas and helped us organize all the points expressed and come up with some options that we then took and further developed.
Everyone's jaw was dropped by the end of the session. It wasn't doing the work for us, it wasn't replacing humans, it was supercharging our abilities and creativity by giving us tools to organize and present easily digestible options that enabled us to stop thinking so analytically and having to manage the meeting, and instead focus on being creative.
I think a lot of people, general users and even tech enthusiasts, are still unaware how transformational this is going to be.
Sure, but ultimately it's the CEO's job to set a vision for the company, to choose his senior executives and to take or decline their advice and points of view. Tim Cook has been a fantastic company manager but he is not the COO anymore, he's the CEO, responsible for planning the roadmap of the company. It's not his senior executives' role to decide the future of the company, only to provide their opinion and expertise to the CEO. If the CEO picked the wrong VPs or took the wrong advice, that's on him.
Apple under Steve Jobs was organized in a non-conventional way. The CEO (Steve) was very hands on, but it's that micromanaging and that vision from the very top that got Apple to stratospheric levels. When Steve was fired in the 90s, the company lost its way. It got back on track when Jobs was hired back. That wasn't a coincidence.
Apple can only go so far on Steve's old roadmap. If they miss something as big as AI, what else are they missing? Is the next "Apple" being developed in someone's garage and is Apple going to end up being IBM and Hewlett Packard? Tim Cook either has to surround himself by visionaries or he has to be replaced by one.
Yes. Inject Siri with Jarvis and the knowledge navigator function.