Tim Cook Responds to Rise of ChatGPT, Says AI's Potential is 'Very Interesting'

[bankshot]

My iOS keyboard can’t even accurately autocorrect “we’re” versus “were” from context and that’s a really basic form of AI.

It's worse than that. The iOS keyboard usually insists on using "we'll" instead of "well" at the beginning of a sentence, and I've recently begun catching it adding apostrophe's to plural's. These are things that I typed correctly and it then changed. I wonder how many times I didn't catch the error before hitting send... 🤦‍♂️

It's learning from the masses who don't know the proper usage anyway, and probably reinforcing those bad habits by "learning" again from text that it already changed! At least that's my best guess.

 

[Realityck]

Tim is an operations guy. He unfortunately lacks the vision to see the potential of emerging technologies, lead Apple into new territories, or disrupt markets like they once did.

From the GQ interview.

And yet Cook is, in the wealth of biographies and hagiography that has grown up around Apple since its founding, an enigma still. “He’s very hard to read,” says Eddy Cue, who has been at Apple since 1989 and now leads its services division. “If you’re looking to make your decision or your beliefs based on reading his facial expressions, you’re probably not going to be good at that. I always joke around with him that he’d be a great poker player, because he’d have four aces and no one would know.”

This suits him: At a moment dense with pathological tech founders who log on daily to pontificate about the collective future of humankind, Cook does not log on all that much. He does not move fast and break things. His even calmness stands as an implicit rebuke to the chaos agents—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on—who often get called to testify in Congress alongside Cook about the increasingly uncertain state of tech in this country.

 

[PsykX]

I don't think he does. In all honestly, Siri died when Steve Jobs passed away and when Jony Ive left Apple. It's embedded on iPhones as a legacy feature now.

What's the link between Ive and Siri ? Did you mean Forstall ?

 

[TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️]

Tim Cook having a blast. That’s interesting. Tim Cook meets AI.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1654496984487669764

 

[Naraxus]

Siri is frustrating because Apple stopped caring for Siri. Siri has been outdated for a long time and Apple has not worked on it in a while now. At this point, Siri is not even a selling point on iPhones anymore. Those days are long gone.

Apple's never given a damn about Siri

 

[Lioness~]

Siri died when Steve Jobs passed away and when Jony Ive left Apple. It's embedded on iPhones as a legacy feature now.

That's a good explanation - Siri is not only a bad and horrible digital assistant, but also a dead one. She might even be one of the few digital assistants that are or might be a 🧛‍♀️

No wonder I stopped using her a long time ago. Life is better without trying to have that kind of conversations she provide with.
I am pretty sure horrible digital assistants can have a very negative effect on people's general communication with other people even.

 

[karranz]

I wish I had the same insight into Apples Secret Project Department as you do. Please share what you "know". I’m assuming you are aware of their plans because you said you were….

Basically Apple don’t go around telling anyone their future plans so we/you/me have no idea how AI is being integrated in their products beyond their amazingly successful integration in the Apple Watch.

Actually there are two or three recent articles in macrumors that talk about the struggles that apple is facing in AI development, these articles include insider reports. Team departures, failed projects, questionable decisions, lack of motivation, etc. Obviously they don't have a plan, or if they do, it will fail against Microsoft, Google, Amazon....

 

[emulator]

I would think a composer AI shouldn’t have too much trouble, it just needs to know the secret chord:
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor falls, the major lifts
And ChatGTP is composing Hallelujah

You needed drugs to compose Hallelujah

 

[Tagbert]

Meanwhile, Siri can’t even play a song you tell it to play. Half the time it’ll play a remix or just play the artist’s radio station.

I have found that if you ask for “play <song name> by <artist>” Siri generally gets it right.
I’ve hear people using “play <artist>’s <song name>” and that seems to trip up the parsing as it is harder to know where the artist name ends and the song name begins. The “by” keyword let’s Siri understand better.

An LLM would probably do better and is one of the reasons I’d like to see some LLM features added to Siri. I don’t see a point in making a ChatGPT clone that focuses more on returning supposed web search results but I would like some of the interaction model of LLMs adopted by Siri.

 

[Nuno Lopes]

Steve Jobs, a visionary, launched the iPhone 4 with Siri. The first ubiquitous AI powered virtual assistant effectively being used. Many, many people got a first touch with AI through it. They were ahead in many ways ...

TC, simply lost the AI bandwagon. Apple facing Generative AI / Chat GPT, kind of looks like when Nokia faced iOS / iPhone. Simply put, without a visionary leading the pack with new disruptive ways of thinking, inevitably any "one" product companies end up with the "milking the cow" approach until something happens and eventually no one cares for their milk and cows anymore.

Will see how this pans out. This is just the beginning of a new tech cycle, and Apple does not look like they have a clue on how to get in. They seam to be stranded to the "iPhone way", at a pace as slow as possible banking on the brand. Will see, how much time have to be outside of the cycle ... it depends on many factors that aren't really on their hands. Many competitors tend to shoot their feet just enough for others to catch up, happens more often than not. Fingers crossed folks.

Cheers.

 

[Tagbert]

Apple's AI is really trash, it's not even funny.

Siri isn’t really AI. It’s a simpler semantic model tied to activity features.

Most of Apple‘s AI is machine learning that does things like photo adjustments, facial recognition, object recognition in Photos, and similar functions. They also use it for a lot of audio processing like noise reduction. Those are quite good and not trash, at all.

 

[Gengar]

I have found that if you ask for “play <song name> by <artist>” Siri generally gets it right.
I’ve hear people using “play <artist>’s <song name>” and that seems to trip up the parsing as it is harder to know where the artist name ends and the song name begins. The “by” keyword let’s Siri understand better.

I do that all the time. For example, I'll be like, "Hey Siri, play 'CUFF IT' by Beyoncé" or something and then Siri will be like, "Now playing 'CUFF IT (Wetter Remix)' by Beyoncé."

 

[Tagbert]

I'm no expert, but that's not AI to me - rather algorithms that process attributes and variables, and possibly learn from them along the way as it detects patterns and such, is machine learning. Pretty static if that's we want to call AI.

When asked if Machine Learning is a kind of AI, ChatGPT says:

“Yes, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers to the creation of intelligent machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. Machine learning is a subset of AI that involves training algorithms to learn patterns and make predictions or decisions based on data, without being explicitly programmed to do so. In other words, machine learning algorithms use statistical methods to learn from data and improve their performance over time, allowing them to adapt to new inputs and solve increasingly complex problems.”

So, yes, ML is AI according to AI.

 

[Tagbert]

I do that all the time. For example, I'll be like, "Hey Siri, play 'CUFF IT' by Beyoncé" or something and then Siri will be like, "Now playing 'CUFF IT (Wetter Remix)' by Beyoncé."

That seems like it is due to too many remixes that are poorly identified by publishers in the music databases.

If Siri had some conversational interactions like LLMs, you could say “no, play the original release version” or “no, play her 2021 remix version” Or “no, play the cover by Weird Al”.

 

[crsh1976]

When asked if Machine Learning is a kind of AI, ChatGPT says:

“Yes, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI). AI refers to the creation of intelligent machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation. Machine learning is a subset of AI that involves training algorithms to learn patterns and make predictions or decisions based on data, without being explicitly programmed to do so. In other words, machine learning algorithms use statistical methods to learn from data and improve their performance over time, allowing them to adapt to new inputs and solve increasingly complex problems.”

So, yes, ML is AI according to AI.

To your point: AI encompasses ML, but ML alone is not AI.

 

[Choco Taco]

I do that all the time. For example, I'll be like, "Hey Siri, play 'CUFF IT' by Beyoncé" or something and then Siri will be like, "Now playing 'CUFF IT (Wetter Remix)' by Beyoncé."

For about a year, Siri would not play music by the band "Red" no matter what I said. She would just keep playing Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's finally fixed, but it made me develop a twitch.

 

[steve09090]

Actually there are two or three recent articles in macrumors that talk about the struggles that apple is facing in AI development, these articles include insider reports. Team departures, failed projects, questionable decisions, lack of motivation, etc. Obviously they don't have a plan, or if they do, it will fail against Microsoft, Google, Amazon....

There have also been more recent articles to the contrary. That’s why they are all rumours.

 

[Tagbert]

To your point: AI encompasses ML, but ML alone is not AI.

ML is a kind of AI.
LLMs are another kind of AI.

Just disagreeing with whoever said that ML was not AI.

 

[BRX1138]

Siri tells me 2-3 times a week that after a text is read on my headphones, she'll listen for a few seconds for a command. In total, I would guess I've heard this "tip" 50+ times.

Excruciatingly annoying.

Sending message via Siri on AirPods:
Me: "Send a message to Mary."
Siri: "It seems like you usually send messages to Mary using the Messages app, so I'll send it there. What would you like the message it to say?"

Receiving message notification on AirPods:
Siri: "You've received a message from Mary that says 'Hi'. By the way, if you'd ever like to reply to a message that you received, just say reply."

Repeat the above paraphrased responses almost every time, and Siri's slow cadence and excessive wordiness makes it even worse. Well-designed tones can usually do the work of multiple words, to indicate understanding a command, to indicate execution of a command, etc. So even though Siri is utterly horrible and understanding context in speech or type, responding to specific queries, even simple ones, etc, the above issue could be improved by simply stopping these redundant messages, and replacing the text with less words, or tones instead when possible.

 

[magnakarma]

Apple CEO Tim Cook today provided some commentary surrounding artificial intelligence amid the surging popularity of ChatGPT and other chatbots.

Speaking on Apple's quarterly earnings call today, Cook said artificial intelligence's potential is "very interesting," but noted that there are a "number of issues that need to be sorted" out with the technology and that it is "very important to be deliberate and thoughtful" in regards to how artificial intelligence is used.

Cook said Apple has already integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning across several of its products and services, pointing out features like Fall Detection, Crash Detection, and the ECG app on the Apple Watch. He added that Apple will continue to weave artificial intelligence into its products on a "very thoughtful basis."

The New York Times in March reported that excitement surrounding chatbots demonstrates how Siri and other traditional voice assistants have "squandered their lead in the A.I. race," as Siri's functionality remains far more limited than chatbots despite launching over a decade ago. The Information last month reported that Apple employees "widely criticize Siri for its shortcomings" and have proposed large language model improvements that they hope will be ready to launch in an iOS version released next year.

Article Link: Tim Cook Responds to Rise of ChatGPT, Says AI's Potential is 'Very Interesting'

They wiped out 65+ staff from Beats by Dre in 2021

 

[Fraserpatty]

I have to say that I am a person who would rather have Siri talk to me. I don’t like tones. We are all different in what we like and dislike . No matter what they do to Siri somebody won’t be happy.

 

[Abazigal]

Siri is just one small aspect of the overall iPhone experience.

I fail to see how Apple is doomed just because they haven't yet announced what their plans for this space are.

Hate on Apple all you want. At least hate right.

 

[Mousse]

Good gawd, the number of people dumping on Tim for channelling his inner Arte Johnson is "veeeerry interesting..."

 

[Solomani]

If you don't mind an off topic question we have all been wondering about. It has to do with the total number of posts you do. Are you GPT in human form? Many of us speculate that you are the Apple equivalent of a Terminator bot only nice. Instead of going back in time to eliminate humanities only hope, you were sent back to talk about Apple products.

If you are an Apple bot from the future, can you please tell us how to increase the context memory of an LLM without having a quadratic cost or drastically decreasing execution time? If you are however a human, please don't be offended.

@TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️ is the real deal.

 

[Solomani]

Siri is just one small aspect of the overall iPhone experience.

I fail to see how Apple is doomed just because they haven't yet announced what their plans for this space are.

Hate on Apple all you want. At least hate right.

Again, great insight @Abazigal.

Pundits here claiming that Apple is doomed because they were not first to go to market with AI…. are the same people saying Google-Android was doomed because Apple was first to dominate smartphones (with iPhone).

Likewise, Tesla is first to dominate EV cars right now, but 12 years from now the likely scenario is that another company (possibly Chinese) will surpass Tesla’s early lead.