Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/business/apple-siri-ai-chatgpt.html

by mistersquid • 2 years ago

26 23 2 years ago

Siri is so bad almost anything would be an improvement.

retskrad• 2 years ago

Why do people have faith in Apple being competitive in the AI race? It’s like betting on Bing reaching the level of search results that Google provides today, 6 months from now.

gensym• 2 years ago

AI companies have learned and struggled for a few years, learning how to make a decent model. Phone and laptop guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

bjtitus• 2 years ago

it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI.

No need for "phone and laptop guys" to "figure this out" when they can just license the models for use with their massive piles of cash.

text0404• 2 years ago

erm... https://machinelearning.apple.com/

com2kid• 2 years ago

Apple sells hardware at a large profit, they don't need to rely on ad revenue.

Google literally cannot release a voice only assistant that solves all of your problems, it would destroy their ad revenue.

This is the same reason why Microsoft never had a chance to win the online market in the early 2000s, they were reliant on large companies buying on-prem licenses for server and client machines. Websites that could be accessed from any device, running any OS, and that could be served from Linux boxes, was against everything MS stood for.

Eventually MS figured out they could make bank by hosting those Linux boxes, or by running the productivity infrastructure that all those business machines connect to (hosted Exchange, web versions of office) and still make money on software.

But Google is too addicted to ad revenue to ever truly revolutionize the world of computing.

fooey• 2 years ago

only destroys their ad revenue if you assume the results it gives you are unbiased by monetary considerations

myfavoritetings• 2 years ago

AI is a lot more than LLMs just because they don't have a public LLM doesn't mean they don't have competent AI strategy. Most of their advancements are around image and video. A lot of companies that are "leaders" in AI right now have no path to profitability for their features because they're not actually that useful

mdhb• 2 years ago

They absolutely do not have a competent AI strategy and are many years behind the competition.

cassianoleal• 2 years ago

just because they don't have a public LLM

They have released OpenELM.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm

https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM

Atreiden2• 2 years ago

Apple's silicon enables them to run incredibly strong models locally, fully offline. This is a huge win over competition that needs clients to connect to a network-connected GPU farm.

Siri wouldn't need to reach out to the web, it's various functions could be abstracted away and driven by embedded models. They've already started positioning for this. The newest M4 Ipad release has a 10 core GPU/16Gi RAM that could be consumed as VRAM.

Could run Llama 3 8Gb Instruct with that and get response content much faster than normal speaking cadence.

lern_too_spel3• 2 years ago

The competition has been running on device models with specialized hardware for longer than Apple has. Even with on-device LLMs, Apple is already far behind. https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-featur...

taldo• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/Awojo

jdminhbg3• 2 years ago

The strategy will also save money. OpenAI spends about 12 cents for each word that ChatGPT generates because of cloud computing costs.

There's a link on "12 cents" that goes to https://www.vantage.sh/blog/gcp-google-gemini-vs-azure-opena...

Searching for "12" on that page leads to a price of $0.12/1k tokens for ChatGPT-4. Which a) is the cost OpenAI charges, not what OpenAI spends and b) is, obviously, off by a factor of 1000.

The NYT's tech coverage is truly, truly terrible.

hollowdene• 2 years ago

Apple: We're going to build an incrediably powerful AI than runs locally on your phone.

Users: Hey Siri, set a 30 minute timer.

dopylitty• 2 years ago

Seriously. I don't want an incredibly powerful chatbot or whatever.

Those are just wastes of electricity and water and result in nature being paved over by data centers.

holsta• 2 years ago

I use Siri for cooking (on the iPhone it can still only handle one timer at a time), for adding to Groceries, turning some lights and fans on/off, and playing music.

I enabled 'Always Show Speech' and even if the text indicates Siri understood what I said, it still often does the wrong thing anyway.

hahajk• 2 years ago

Well, that all Siri can do right now. If it could add something to my grocery list (3rd part app) or tell me what the gym schedule looks like tomorrow (in another app), or turning navigation voice on or off while driving, I would be doing that a lot!

Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors

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