Report: Apple to 'Re-Examine' AI Development

[buckwheet]

The problem is that the best don't fit into Apple's management structure or environment. Why do you think Apple chased off the original Siri leadership it purchased.

Yeah, interesting point... I guess I was just pointing out that they can do good work (and have done), and the field is much "flatter" than it used to be, in a way—at least for companies with deep pockets for ML training.

Speaking of ML and "intelligence", the spellcheck just tried to get me to use "flatter then" rather than "flatter than"... hilarious. 🤣🤣

 

[buckwheet]

I think the issue is less to do with the actual tech and more with perceptions. Every Apple user “knows” that Siri is garbage, and it’s been shown to be garbage again and again and again for more than a decade. If Apple comes out with a new Siri tomorrow that blows Google and Alexa out of the water, it will still take years to convince people to bother trying it again. Apple let Siri die a long time ago and I’m not sure they care enough to revive it.

Yeah, for sure. But I don't think this necessarily has anything to do with Siri. I mean, Siri would be improved with an improved effort on generative AI, but there's a lot more to the field than virtual assistants.

 

[Sigvard]

Surely you aren’t telling me that Apple is just now looking at re-examining Siri? If so, I agree with @Macalway that this is the most pathetic story of the year.

At this point, I liken Siri to the Apple Maps situation. Apple will never catch up. They’re just too far behind. The only way forward, as some others have suggested, is to purchase some companies that already have established technology. It’s the only way I can see them moving up to a decent baseline.

FWIW I love Maps for navigation but it’s awful with discovery.

 

[groove-agent]

Re-examining AI? You don't say. Siri has been stupid since it's inception and has barely improved throughout the years. Hardly up to Apple's standards although I'm slowly discovering Apple's standards have been waning as of late.

 

[3xBoom]

Or they can realize that Generative AI produces bland and uninspired copy. If everyone uses it, the entire world’s output will slowly start looking the same. It’s a garbage tool

I see your point, but I must admit, I am impressed with it. I think it could be a remarkable tool when used by folks with specific needs and knowledge. For instance, current biomedical research produces so much data that it is hard to keep track of the literature, never mind careful analysis. Apps like Elicit and other emerging tools could be of great help. It will allow scientists to go beyond PubMed searches that are severy limited, even with booleans. A person with knowledge in the area can and should be able to find support for any claims made by a GPT model. That being said, one has to be careful with chatGPT - I have encountered numerous examples of hallucinations (bogus studies and claims referenced(!)), wrong DOI and PMID numbers, etc.

 

[Zest28]

Apple has been beaten for ages. And it wasn't even Microsoft / ChatGPT, Siri isn't even that good in comparison to other voice assistants.

 

[alchemistmuffin]

While the company recently held its annual AI summit for employees, the following sessions reportedly focused on aspects like healthcare, privacy, and computer vision, rather than its own generative AI technologies

And I think this is where Apple’s vision of AI’s going based on that: Machine Learning AI on device instead of cloud.

Which means Apple is likely going to accelerate the development of their neural engine in Apple Silicon to be more smarter so it can do lot of stuff that ChatGPT or Dall-E can do but on device instead of cloud.

If this is the case, Apple Silicon, within next few years, will likely have the smartest chip in the world unlike any other with advanced machine learning capable of doing intense AI related tasks on device.

 

[ian87w]

It's sad that Apple used to lead in so many areas and a $2 trillion company can't walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm afraid they've become too stagnant over the years. Their last big thing was the Apple Watch and even that could be improved in so many ways. Like, we still don't even have custom watch faces. So many areas of their products and software are messy and outdated. Imagine how advanced Siri could be by now. Even little things like automatic captions in Final Cut or iMovie would be welcomed. If you zoom out, taking your eye off the ball is how industry leaders eventually fall behind. Thank goodness for the iPhone but they can't be too comfy at the top forever.

It’s the classic “resting on its laurel.” The iPhone makes so much money for Apple that Apple got too comfortable just making iPhones. As you pointed out, even their own software, are getting a backseat. I remember the old Apple where they used to demo their pro apps and software. They never do that anymore nowadays.

 

[DakotaGuy]

In all seriousness, I'd love to see Apple run by Forstall. Never going to happen with how he was removed from the company but it's a great thought experiment.

Never say never. If memory serves me correctly Steve Jobs was also removed from the company pretty unceremoniously only to return many years later as CEO.

 

[derekamoss]

At Apples AI keynote Cook walks in the stage.

"Guys, we have something new to show you today and we think you will just love it.

We are announcing today chatgpt AI you can talk to that looks like an emoji! We are the first ones to do ANYTHING like this with AI. It really is just magical. It takes a lot of courage to do this.... Improvise my ass!"

 

[allenvanhellen]

I (think that I) want more human intervention and control with Siri. She still from time to time incorrectly dictates the names of my family members, even though we’ve got family sharing up and running and they’re in my contacts list. Autocorrect, too.

 

[amartinez1660]

All talk and no action… here we are years later with all this silicon power with all the Neural Engines while the likes of FCP has none of the revolutionary and/or utilitarian AI tools that After Effects, (the free) DaVinci Resolve, Pixelmator Pro, Topazlabs, Luminar Ai, etc have been having for some odd years now.

Bumped recently into a video and I think it has to do with this, yes I know, lets let the man rest… but look at the engagement, boldness, interaction with the public that was available at the time:

Now compare that to the extremely filtered sentences, sanitized and validated by armies of correctness experts that make every single innovation or news message feel stiff, robotic and a clone of a previous one.

 

[svish]

Siri has a lot of catching up to do.

 

[GadgetBen]

I’ve already turned Siri into an AI assistant using ChatGPT. Never going back.

 

[Fraserpatty]

Siri has a lot of catching up to do.

As I said before, I would be happy if Apple would just let Siri catch up with the things that it used to be able to do. Why Apple gives Siri a function, even brags about it at its events and then takes it away is well beyond me. Just bring back the things that she used to be able to do, add some more obvious functionality, especially off-line functionality, and I would be content. I don’t necessarily want to see Apple enter the generative AI world for Siri, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be a whole lot better in the narrow AI world.

 

[Fraserpatty]

 

[Northgrove]

OK, so these are my thoughts and speculations with zero insight at Apple.

AI at Apple: I feel like Apple has become a bit too comfortable and tradionalist when it comes to AI. With AI, they think of specific, niched applications. Still the decade old mindset. Not the offensive "disrupt markets" mindset. Neural Engine is there, sure, but it falls woefully short to run the AI models that are developed today. It is no help, as this MacRumors article seems to imply. It is no head start. This engine is developed for low power (and must be developed only for low power) applications like heavily optimized face recognition etc. Custom models for single niches to not be too resource demanding.

Siri: That Siri is nowadays also able to run locally is also an indicator of just how basic Siri really is, which is evident in the kind of conversational ability she has. It was always a basic model that is pretty stupid in today's terms. It precedes even GPT-1 by like seven years. She just about reaches the bar of being able to communicate in natural language. But Apple won't be able to improve it. Not unless they go back to the cloud. The models being run today require powerful GPU's and there is no match on low power devices for the foreseeable future. Apple now needs solutions much earlier than that. Siri? Siri is so far behind the best they can do is to keep the brand name... Siri is a product from a different era.

So, Apple needs to "think big" here and probably once again, in this back and forth dance, leave the devices and their privacy and send your conversations to them. Or in fact... Not really. Because it is no longer considered thinking big. It's considered normal. ChatGPT is the new normal. The problem is maybe rather that Apple is thinking small.

 

[Bob1985]

Changing their chips a little is not gonna help. Large language models require a huge amount of memory and AI compute power that are found only on, say, NVidia servers. And LLMs are growing in size.

 

[BenRacicot]

Investment in LLM at this point can be relatively small to get results. Tech like ChatGPT at this time is very accessible and Apple can easily "catch up" with relatively low investment in relatively short time. The "moat" with LLM AI models is not as wide as people think. LLMs are becoming very common.

Apple just requires vision and direction. Neither of which they have displayed with Siri (IMO) so that needs solving first.

Yes! And they will be forced to soon. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2023/03/08/video-super-resolution-in-microsoft-edge/
Several AI products are starting to arrive like video upscaling by default with super resolution (above) if PC users never have to watch < 1080p videos Safari is going to look stoneage. Especially if Chrome doesn’t build it for MacOS.

But not just video. Image generation seems to be hugely PC. Even if you believe that these AI products are not that important you have to wonder Still “what has apple been doing this entire time”? Healthcare?

If you say VR/AR then missing the AI features gets even more perplexing. Don’t they have like a tril just hanging around?

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Well, this is interesting…

 

[phenste]

microsoft is not “maintain[ing] its lead in AI” when it took someone causing their AI Bing Search to have an existential crisis in order for them to re-evaluate

 

[Fraserpatty]

OK, so these are my thoughts and speculations with zero insight at Apple.

AI at Apple: I feel like Apple has become a bit too comfortable and tradionalist when it comes to AI. With AI, they think of specific, niched applications. Still the decade old mindset. Not the offensive "disrupt markets" mindset. Neural Engine is there, sure, but it falls woefully short to run the AI models that are developed today. It is no help, as this MacRumors article seems to imply. It is no head start. This engine is developed for low power (and must be developed only for low power) applications like heavily optimized face recognition etc. Custom models for single niches to not be too resource demanding.

Siri: That Siri is nowadays also able to run locally is also an indicator of just how basic Siri really is, which is evident in the kind of conversational ability she has. It was always a basic model that is pretty stupid in today's terms. It precedes even GPT-1 by like seven years. She just about reaches the bar of being able to communicate in natural language. But Apple won't be able to improve it. Not unless they go back to the cloud. The models being run today require powerful GPU's and there is no match on low power devices for the foreseeable future. Apple now needs solutions much earlier than that. Siri? Siri is so far behind the best they can do is to keep the brand name... Siri is a product from a different era.

wow, that’s harsh. But unfortunately, true. Siri is indeed a product from a different era, but it doesn’t have to be. As I say, there are many people who are not necessarily wanting to see Siri become a generative AI bot, but majorly bumping up its functionality, and actually alerting people to those upgrades-not just waiting for us to find it out on helpful YouTube videos (that’s a bad look and doesn’t toot your own much needed horn), is some thing that Apple seriously needs to do. And when Apple takes a step forward, they should not take two steps backwards by taking away helpful functionality that Siri users have come to depend on.

 

[MacFarmer]

haha, Apple is so behind this, they shouldn't even start.. They have no expertise in this, just look at Siri. The only thing they can do, is buy chatgtp. And I don't think it is for sale

 

[zoomp]

Apple willl need to refocus on server side LLM if they want to stay alive. It's not about assistants, it's about using voice to interface with your iPhone to do anything and everything. When this comes to google assistant, it will be hard for apple. "Summarize my new emails in bullet points" "Play me the first album of hip hop ever made" "Show me a photo of my baby when he was 2 years old" "How many packs of beer I can fit in my Honda?" It will be gameover for apple.

 

[_Spinn_]

This could be very interesting. Especially if Apple finds a way to keep it all local on device.