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Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#71

Post by tomgp »

jointpdf wrote: post #34

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcin…

I once mentioned the rapper xxxtentacion in a text message. Now whenever I sign of an email or text to my wife with an ‘x’ iOS decides that what I actually meant to do was write ‘xxxtentacion’ and I’ve normally pressed send before I notice. After a couple of years now this is just how I talk to my wife.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#72

Post by Syeposxr »

It's the decline of Intel and the advancements Apple has made in designing its own processors that I think are really interesting. Having powerful and efficient processors on mobile devices - both laptops and phones - allows Apple to do edge computing in a way other companies haven't been able to, and integrate ML in much more privacy-focused way.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#73

Post by tomgp »

tomgp wrote: post #71
jointpdf wrote: post #34

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcin…

I once mentioned the rapper xxxtentacion in a text message. Now whenever I sign of an email or text to my wife with an ‘x’ iOS decides that what I actually meant to do was write ‘xxxtentacion’ and I’ve normally pressed send before I notice. After a couple of years now this is just how I talk to my wife.

I’m going to blame typing ‘sign of’ instead of ‘sign off’ on autocorrect.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#74

Post by thom »

monadic2 wrote: post #70
jointpdf wrote: post #34

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcin…

I’ve found it’s much easier to disable autocorrect altogether and simply take responsibility for what you type. I mean that with no snark; that’s actually how I view it. Over time you definitely improve at typing if you disable it. I have rather petite hands and fingers, I should note.

I’ve been typing on iOS devices for more than ten years and I don’t think I’ve ever typed a single sentence without errors (even after autocorrect, which thought I typed decides instead of devices up there).

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#75

Post by frandroid »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #65
tedeh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bilingual and write approximately the same amount of messages in both languages using iOS. Autocorrect always suggests words from BOTH languages mid sentence. Like what the hell, they should be able to infer which language I'm using just from the first word.

This also happens on Android if you have several input languages enabled. It looks like it uses all the dictionaries so suggestions appear from all languages for every word you're typing.

The Swype app used to be so much better at this, but Google had to go and buy it, retire the product and absorb none of its algorithms into Gboard. Such a loss.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#76

Post by strogonoff »

culturestate wrote: post #66
strogonoff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can never make iOS write “Hong Kong” when swipe-typing; tried setting up forced text replacement entry (kong->Kong) to zero effect. It is always “Hong kong”.

iOS always capitalizes Hong Kong properly for me, but I write that so much that I guess I could have trained it. Edit: I also bought all of my iOS devices in Hong Kong so, there's that.

I corrected it hundreds of times so it had plenty to learn from. If you don’t have this bug when swipe-typing then I guess it’s much less likely to be fixed for me in an update, oh well.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#77

Post by jdietrich »

jointpdf wrote: post #34

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models? Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcin…

Compare Google and Apple's privacy policies. Autocorrection and autocompletion is far easier if you're willing to hoover up vast amounts of user data to train your models and provide personalisation. It's a similar story with Siri and Google Assistant.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#78

Post by godelski »

jointpdf wrote: post #53
godelski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also happens to me on Android. Working in ML, this is something to point to when people hype it up. We've come a long way, but we still got a long way to go. As for specific errors, does rock capitalize when "the" is before it? (The Rock) The models learn from how users write. But when you think about it, it is actually fairly difficult to predict what words are going to be, you can test it with your friends. Ha…

The most disruptive errors are those that could seemingly be cleaned up with some simple rules (e.g. if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it). This doesn’t seem like a “state of ML” issue—the Gmail text completion is annoyingly good, and you-know-who can compose soliloquies and smut with uncanny skill. And no, I don’t often discuss The Rock, but if I did (“Do you smell what the r...”) I'd expect it to…

It isn't just you that affects the learning.

> if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it

Actually the thing that bugs me the most is that when there's a word that is in the dictionary that's long and complex and it doesn't suggest it, even when I have the right word. It just isn't underlined red. Or a one off error with these words and it has no idea what I'm trying to spell.

They have a long way to go. These systems aren't just ML btw.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#79

Post by dmitriid »

marmshallow wrote: post #16
Spooky23 wrote: post #2

I agree that Apple is underrated here, and I think their rigid user interfaces for things like Photos hides the power of their platform. It seems absurd to let Google Photos slurp up your data server side when your iPhone can do 80+% of the photo categorization automatically. It’s equally absurd that Apple has a glacial pace of change for the user side.

In my and several of my friends' experience, Google Photos search is simply much, much better than Apple Photos. Even though I use Apple Photos personally, I have to admit Google's is just better. My friends always say "if I can't search for my photos easily, what's the point in amassing a large collection?".

It's not just search. Google Photos "slurps" photos at 10-20x the rate of Photos.app with clear indication of what's happening and what's being uploaded.

Photos... just sits there. To get a new photo to my desktop it's faster to open Google Photos on my desktop and download the photo from there than wait for both Photos.apps to finish syncing.

Re: Why Apple believes it’s an AI leader–and why it says critics have it all wrong

#80

Post by bzb4 »

culturestate wrote: post #68
nfg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one the drives me mad the most is when I type a word which it incorrectly autocorrects to a proper noun (which gets capitalised), I then use backspace to delete that word and type the - completely different - correct one, but it insists on upper-casing the first letter to match the original casing of the incorrect autocorrect. It really should keep track of the fact that it introduces the case-change and invalida…

It seems to conflate people's names with words in a sentence, e.g. "I'm crossing the Bridges." Could just be confirmation bias, but whenever I notice that problem it tends to be a name in my address book.

Reminds me of how it capitalises "El Niño" as if I was talking about that climate thing, when I'm just trying to say "the kid" in Spanish.
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