Report Details Turmoil Behind Apple's AI Efforts, 'Siri X,' and Headset Voice Controls

[Lounge vibes 05]

Apple could see itself become the next Blackberry if they're not very careful.

And before anyone says "can't happen" -- well, that's what everyone thought about Blackberry. Until it did happen. And almost overnight.

The blackberry of what?
Apple’s four biggest markets are phones, iPads, macs and wearables.
ChatGPT isn’t replacing any of that.
Even with ChatGPT, there are still thousands of uses for iPhones, Apple watches, AirPods, MacBooks…
Apple could literally come out publicly and say “we’re going to leave all this AI stuff up to everyone else” and they’d be just fine.
Apple stays out of way more markets than they enter, and that’s how it has always been.

 

[AppleFan735]

Siri is complete joke. Often when me or my gf ask it to "set a timer for 10min" we get "a timer cannot be set for a time of day so I've set your time (alarm) for 8pm instead". Like what? My favourite was when I asked Siri on my Apple Watch to set a timer and it responded that a Timer app is not installed and linked to a random HIIT cardio workout app on the App Store.

When GPT-4 came out I was completely mind blown (and still am) of what it was able to do. With ambition Siri could have been GPT-4. Siri had a 10+ year lead of actually being deployed and shipped in hundreds of millions of devices. How dysfunctional and unimaginative Apple's Siri & larger leadership team had to be to squander a lead like that? Unreal.

 

[smythey]

….the company prefers ‌Siri‌'s responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers…..

Excuse me - what??

Please hold my hat while I rotflmfao.

 

[DaveN]

Well, that’s disappointing.

 

[rp2011]

Apple is fine. This is only the beginning. There is no urgency for Apple to jump head first into this. It now takes far less time and resources to train AI models and the progress is exponential.
This is one area that Apple is absolutely correct to tread lightly and carefully. As long as Apple works behind the scenes to get it right that is all that matters.
With governments across the globe panicking and threatening legislation to leash in and control AI, there is plenty of time.
Apple is not behind anything that Open AI is paving the way for. AI is going to be as ubiquitous as spell-check on every device.

The genie is out of the bottle. It is not about Apple being “behind”, that’s the least of it. Apple’s first priority with AI should be protection, mitigation and control. Keeping users safe in the age of AI should be the highest priority. Whoever truly understands that, wins.

 

[Schizoid]

Hey Siri, what is “organisational dysfunction?”

…

“I found this on the internet for organ donation charity functions…”

 

[aidler]

I believe that Apple under Tim Cook lost the ability to be truly innovative in large parts. They are still able to produce awesome hardware, but without functionality, service or simply put purpose, this hardware is and will not be useful for consumers or professionals.

For all these reasons, I'm very pessimistic about the upcoming launch of Apples AR/VR goggles. I really hope Apple can surprise us like they did in 2006, but I wouldn't bet any money on it.

 

[1mark1]

If Apple doesn't show any Siri/AI integration at WWDC, I will have to sell my stock because it will go down. Sharply.

 

[woolypants]

Apple had the lead in intelligent assistants. This lead could've been built upon. But Apple squandered the lead maybe even a decade ago. They're not even in a position to play catch-up right now but, even if they were, that's not an advantageous position to be in — and an extraordinary position for one of the world's largest tech companies to be in.

The only way forward for Apple is acquisition. But that's impossible because, since GPT exploded onto the scene, anything and anybody remotely connected to large-scale ML has been bought up by Apple's competitors.

Apple was blindsided.

In short, even Apple, with all its resources, is going to truly struggle to come back from running Siri into the ground – and this is a hugely important game-changer technology.

I don't own Apple shares but, if I did, I'd be worried. I think the rot is setting in. Apple's coasting right now, and has been doing so for years. As a two-decades Apple fan, I haven't been excited by anything Apple's produced in years.* "Innovations" recently haven't been in product but in things like the Apple banking system, which is NOT something Jobs would've created. It's a greedy cash grab and I suspect historians will call it out a epitomising the Tim Cook era (for better or worse).

* Apple Silicon was the last thing that remotely raised my pulse. The thought of even thinking about buying another iPhone fills me with dread. A marginally better camera! Well, OK, thanks.

 

[phenste]

what a depressing read.

's design team is not meant to have so much power that they can stifle development on the voice assistant that’s been the butt of the joke since…voice assistants became a thing.

weird, outlier case of this company being first to a new technology—and failing miserably in the process.

 

[PeteBurgh]

Well to be fair, the gap between ChatGPT and all the other traditional speech assistants is enormous.

Absolutely. All sorts of things are very different between this new generation of virtual assistants and Siri, Alexa et al - not least the tolerance for random inappropriate content, and general weirdness.

Nonetheless, the huge gap is functionality is obviously not sustainable or tolerable - I am fascinated to see how Apple tackles this.

 

[mrothroc]

The only way forward for Apple is acquisition.

No, I don't think so. The transformer model that is used in LLMs is well understood and easy to replicate. The hard part is getting the training, which until now has been hugely expensive. However, while I disagree with other parts of the post, this is true:

It now takes far less time and resources to train AI models and the progress is exponential.

OpenAI spent a huge amount of money adding more parameters. But even they say that the returns of "even bigger" aren't worth it. Smaller companies are now rolling out competitive products (including open source!) that they trained for a fraction of the cost. This came because people are finding clever ways to get "good enough" performance out of smaller models.

 

[Jensend]

Siri engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released.

This is understandable. When Google attempts to answer my questions, rather than just link me to other sites, I find that its accuracy is often abysmal.
The newest and best AI chat bots can be fun, but I also find that the replies are a mixture of correct and incorrect information.

 

[bankshot]

Alexa keeps trying to sell me subscriptions to Amazon Music whenever it forgets it’s paused something, but otherwise definitely has a lot going for it. It’d be great to see more capabilities with Siri that catch up to competitors.

Well, at least Apple has caught up in that feature. Since iOS 16 (or maybe it was 15??) Siri tells me to subscribe to Apple Music if I ask it to play anything that's locally synced to my library. I don't have an Apple Music subscription - everything is synced via Music on the Mac.

"Hey Siri, play album 'album name'"

"You'll need to update your Apple Music subscription if you want to do that."

After months of frustration I finally found the magic words - I now have to add "in my library" to the end of the command. Because Siri is too damn stupid to figure out that the music already exists in the synced library, and no, I don't need to stream it.

The cynic would say they did this deliberately to pressure more subscriptions. But honestly I doubt it. Given the disarray described in this article, I'm guessing some code update never even considered local sync and just assumed the user would mean Apple Music - because who syncs music in 2023? Everyone streams now, right? Even if someone on the team noticed, it was probably deemed too insignificant to bother fixing.

 

[maflynn]

and gimmicky.

Didn't people say that regarding the iPod, iPhone, and what not?

Apple seriously missed the boat on AI. And reading about their disfunction, only compounds the uphill struggle to catch up to those who had a head start.

What makes it more sad, is the people who tried to make it work left for Google's AI program.

 

[sos47]

The single biggest thing that Apple needs to improve right now. And by a large margin. And a huge level of improvement. And yesterday. In fact, about 5 years ago. Please Apple, it's so embarrassing. And so frustrating. Get on top of this. This is a spectacular failure of leadership.

the biggest thing maybe for you. not for me.

i am an apple fanboy for many many years and my household is 100% APL, Homekit, TV, Mac, iPads, homePods, etc.

But for sure my life is extra comfortable without the need of siri or any other voice assistance.

relax

 

[toobravetosave]

I have virtually stopped googling things and simply ask chatgpt or bing now. I only google if I want to find specific studies or research and I’m sure that need will disappear once more effective internet connected models begin to roll out.

Anyone who thinks “ai” is a gimmick is sorely mistaken and apple better buy someone else’s hard work quick and do it more justice than darksky.

 

[dysamoria]

It seems absolutely EVERYTHING about Apple is struggling under the weight of arrogance, bureaucracy, and Wall Street pathology. New major revisions come too fast with questionable new features, every year, with next to zero effort finishing, optimizing, and debugging existing functionality.

I am ABSOLUTELY in favor of privacy/security and accuracy concerns, and ChatGPT-type stuff isn't remotely designed for either, so any engineers pushing for fast and loose adoption of said tech isn't going to get my vote, but the rest of this story sounds like a failure on so many levels, and ultimately at the hands of leadership. The little fiefdoms and silos at Apple are an historic known quality of the company, and it has often been regarded as a positive for "invention" or whatever, but it's clearly not, or at least not under this leadership. The company has not had vision or attention to detail for a decade now and it's extremely frustrating to continue to be an Apple customer simply because it's the least bad option, rather than what it used to be: the superior option.

 

[sidewinder3000]

Let’s be honest Siri is and always has been a complete POS. I dread using it, Amazon‘s Alexa for example, is light years ahead of Siri in terms of functionality.

It’s not, actually. There are plenty of functionality tests and reviews done by credible third parties that consistently show Google Assistant first, Siri second, and Alexa third. Siri can and should undergo massive changes and improvements, becasue Apple customers deserve the #1 voice assistant. But Alexa has plenty of its own problems, and Amazon is losing tons of money in that division, laying off thousands and trying to figure out how to move forward.

 

[Tagbert]

[My experience with Siri in nutshell]

Me: "Hey Siri, play George Harrison's Album All Things Must Pass"
Siri: "Ok, playing songs from a Passed Album of things by people named George"

FYI Siri does much better on playing songs if you phrase it as "play song by artist". If you do that the accuracy is much much better.

Otherwise it tries to parse out your meaning and can mix up what is artist and what is song.

 

[sidewinder3000]

It seems absolutely EVERYTHING about Apple is struggling under the weight of arrogance, bureaucracy, and Wall Street pathology. New major revisions come too fast with questionable new features, every year, with next to zero effort finishing, optimizing, and debugging existing functionality.

I am ABSOLUTELY in favor of privacy/security and accuracy concerns, and ChatGPT-type stuff isn't remotely designed for either, so any engineers pushing for fast and loose adoption of said tech isn't going to get my vote, but the rest of this story sounds like a failure on so many levels, and ultimately at the hands of leadership. The little fiefdoms and silos at Apple are an historic known quality of the company, and it has often been regarded as a positive for "invention" or whatever, but it's clearly not, or at least not under this leadership. The company has not had vision or attention to detail for a decade now and it's extremely frustrating to continue to be an Apple customer simply because it's the least bad option, rather than what it used to be: the superior option.

Well said. Really. This should be on a full page New York Times ad.

 

[Tagbert]

And speaking of setting timers, why is it the $30 Alexa in my kitchen can set multiple timers and my $1000 iPhone 14 Pro can only set one?

But the HomePod can set multiple?
Why is it special and not the phone?
Weird arbitrary limitation.

 

[Pianoplayah]

I’d rather send my request to a mothership. There should be an option in the settings: if you accept to have remote processing you get a more feature rich experience, if you decide that everything has to be processed locally you accept the current subpar experience.

It wouldn’t be subpar if it could ACTUALLY do things on device like control basic functions like “start a workout” without internet access. And why can’t I make a note from my Apple Watch, wtf?

 

[aforty]

It’s fascinating to hear that Apple does not even know how or when people use Siri. That actually explains a lot, such data would give them insight into how little people trust and therefore us it.

 

[TwoBytes]

The blackberry of what?
Apple’s four biggest markets are phones, iPads, macs and wearables.
ChatGPT isn’t replacing any of that.
Even with ChatGPT, there are still thousands of uses for iPhones, Apple watches, AirPods, MacBooks…
Apple could literally come out publicly and say “we’re going to leave all this AI stuff up to everyone else” and they’d be just fine.
Apple stays out of way more markets than they enter, and that’s how it has always been.

What if there was a ChatGPT phone?
With AI so integrated you could talk to it like a real personal assistant....

"tell my partner something romantic, find some time after lunch in a park when it's not raining to book sally and steve for that meeting - send a poll and find the best time and add all the ingredients to my reminders app to bake a lemon pie and order the ingredients to the isle layout in my local supermarket"

If I could do that, I'm dumping my lovely iPhone, it's innovative 'dynamic love island' with an action button..for ACTION.. a beautiful brushed aluminium piece of non-functional junk in the bin and geting this!

I'm caring less for 'pretty' as i get older and grumpier and wiser and just want to use my phone, not look at it.