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NYT: Apple's AI Struggles Began with 2023 Chip Budget Dispute

I would love to see Apple Intelligence in Notes and Music.

Notes to be able to create a lattice work of summaries and Insights from connections amongst notes, thoughts, projects and meeting participants.

Music - be able to create a playlist that is exactly as I want with simple prompts, similar artists, tempo, genre etc
 
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rymc02 said:
What politics have to do with it? Seems like a lack of coherent leadership from the top if these reports are true.
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Exactly! Laying down a mission statement that clearly outlines priorities, making subordinates responsible for executing it, and holding those who don’t accountable, all begins and ends with the CEO in this case.

Either he failed at this, or the priorities he laid down had way more to do with stock price than user experience. The CEO is still responsible.
 
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Jarman74 said:
What’s most staggering here is that Siri’s abysmal performance compared to the competition went unnoticed or was brushed off, even in light of ChatGPT’s obvious superiority at the beginning of 2023—especially when GPT-4 was released.

I’m all for sensible investment and spending, but if you failed to notice that Siri was being outperformed by every other assistant year after year—and despite sitting on an unfathomable pile of cash, you remained hellbent on penny-pinching—the full responsibility for the Apple Intelligence debacle falls squarely on you. It leaves me wondering whether Maestri was shown the door when the mistakes could no longer be swept under the rug.
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We’ve all complained about putting the bean counters in charge and it seems that’s exactly what happened in this case. I don’t know how the CEO could approve it and then the CFO gets to undercut that. Way too many companies where the financial people are (or think they are) untouchable. It’s not good for anyone.
 
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This entire Siri and Siri AI has been a total cluster **** by Apple and is an utter embarrassment for a tech company worth trillions of dollars. It truly makes them look like complete rank amateurs, rightfully receiving criticism over their mess from all sides.

And to top it off iOS still has plenty of glaring bugs that are dragging on release after release..

Apples hardware is racing far far ahead of it’s software and has been for a while now. I mean they have no announcement for when Apple Watch will get AI, one of the key places to put it!
 
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beltzak said:
The CFO always diversifying money where more is needed, their own bloody pockets. Such visionary people.

I understand their job but if there isn’t any opposed force to overtake their bad decisions you’re screwed.
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Happens when you have weak management or management that is unsure of itself. Cook is way over his head.
 
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jlc1978 said:
It's hard to say what actually happened; but at any company I worked for if the CEO said spend it it got spent.

Some CFOs, can be your friend. At one, the CEO required a signature for any computer costing over X; back in the days when even laptops had replaceable HD's and memory. Our CFO came up with a great solution as most machines we needed cost about 1.1 to 1.3 x. So he bought the machine at .75 X without memory or HD, the HS and memory at about .4x without a signature, and the supplier 'put the two together' , getting us what we needed and not having to justify every purchase, saving time.




Corporate politics may have been at play here, we really don't know. It does seem like decisions were made in a bit of a vacuum, and unlike Apple under Jobs people feel more free to change decisions made by the CEO.
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Holy crap you had a good CFO. Basically every CFO I've ever personally had to deal with was far more of a roadblock than a problem solver.

And sadly the company owners/CEOs tend to let them do whatever they want because they know they'll make sure the owners/partners get theirs, even if the lights get cut off.

I don't deal with businesses anywhere near as large as Apple, but large or small the politics don't seem to change.

Edit: though re-reading your post it sounds like a case of the bike shed problem where the CEO doesn't actually know how much a computer should cost and decided that $x sounds good. The fact that you had to work around that instead of the CEO listening to IT's recommendations is just as classic as CFOs cutting budgets for no good reason.

As you explained the math worked out about the same, but the political game had to be played regardless.
 
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Falco McGregor said:
So now we have John Giannandrea or people close to him leaking to the press that the Apple Intelligence issues aren’t his fault. Reports from Bloomberg, The Information and now The NY Times on this are basically spinning narratives from the different camps at Apple to pin the blame. And at the end of the day, it sounds like most of these features will be out by September anyway. Embarrassing for sure but not nearly as big a story as the macro-economic forces that are far more a threat to Apple in the next three years.
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He'd be out on his rear end for such a stunt. This is mere speculation.
 
triom said:
I think Apple’s approach of not creating their own LLM is great. They should also let the user choose their own model (and not limit to ChatGPT). Where they’ve gone wrong is their ability to write software and ship code.
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LLMs are such a basic feature that apple probably needs to make one but LLMs and image generation both conflict with a central apple tenet - the privacy security achieved by doing everything on phone or computer. LLMs are too big for most phones and good image generation is too big for most phones in terms of size and computational power. So they made some reasonable tradeoff that result in some garbage.
 
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Why does a bean counter get to make technical decissions in such a complex field? Does Maestri understand AI?
 
The American Prospect (prospect.org) has a good article from the April issue up on their web site: Bubble Trouble. It is an excellent summary of how little there is there is the current LLM-based "AI" bubble, how much it is costing in money and physical resources, and what the consequences will be when the bubble pops.

(And here we haven't even finished replacing all relational databases with blockchain and yet another bubble engulfs us...)
 
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senttoschool said:
Apple should have went all in on AI. LLMs directly threaten Apple's business.

Eventually, LLMs might get good enough that you do most of your things inside it, and not in iOS.
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Nope. I don't think you even understand what an LLM is.

The future will always be everyday familiar UI that has the power of AI behind it, invisible in the background. The future is not chat bots. They are a proof of concept for the AI's capabilities. They can replace search engines sure, but that was ripe for replacement.
 
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