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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

#121

Post by dwighttk »

anorakoverflow wrote: post #86
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…

I know exactly what you mean! This is even more annoying in German, where every noun is capitalised.

Why would it be more annoying? Seems like it would be harder to notice this error in German.

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

#122

Post by calf »

throwaway202020 wrote: post #98
sassypotato wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things was solved in the last 3-4 years though. Some might now be done via AI, but is it done any noteceably better than 3-4 years ago? I certainly don't trust my camera to adjust itself, or the sleep analysis to be any good, or the article recommendation to not recommend based on outrage, or the spam filter to work at all.

That's the whole point. If you are still using classical solutions for these things that are years old, you are far behind best experience and the competition. As an example, noise removal in low light images has advanced tremendously each year with stunning gains. Same goes for grammar correction and auto-correct. You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude. Siri e…

It sounds like you are just advocating the corporate tech transfer model of advanced research in a nascent field, but maybe Apple is philosophically opposed to doing that. Indeed, it's not that they don't have funds for scientific research. It's easy to say Siri is inferior or whatever but that contains such hidden assumptions about what really is valuable for consumer tech.

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

#123

Post by masklinn »

IndySun wrote: post #60
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…

The reason iOS type correction is so piss-poor is, to me at least, because it is not a 'typing' correction mechanism, it is pronunciation correction system. It bases it's auto replace on what the letters appear to be saying or sound like, and NOT, as it should, which would be simply and effectively based on typos on a qwerty keyboard. That is why. And it is like this because Apple want to steal your voice and 'prefer…

The weird part is in my experience their "swift" input works miles better than the regular tapping. It's truly odd. Tapping I have to correct the phone all the time, while using swift (with the same keyboard!) I quite rarely do.

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

#124

Post by ganzuul »

raghavtoshniwal wrote: post #96
the-dude wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrist rejection ?

Recognizing to disregard input from your wrist/palm when it's resting on the iPad surface whilst one is using Apple Pencil.

...Psychosomatic cognitive dissonance?

I don't own or use Apple products so this takes more explaining for me.

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

#125

Post by Krasnol »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #117

Don't have iOS. But I do wish that Android with detect the current language you are writing in. I have 3 languages on my keyboard and sometimes it suggests an autocomplete in the wrong language.

I have German, English and Polish and it works perfectly.

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

#126

Post by dwighttk »

throwaway202020 wrote: post #98
sassypotato wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things was solved in the last 3-4 years though. Some might now be done via AI, but is it done any noteceably better than 3-4 years ago? I certainly don't trust my camera to adjust itself, or the sleep analysis to be any good, or the article recommendation to not recommend based on outrage, or the spam filter to work at all.

That's the whole point. If you are still using classical solutions for these things that are years old, you are far behind best experience and the competition. As an example, noise removal in low light images has advanced tremendously each year with stunning gains. Same goes for grammar correction and auto-correct. You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude. Siri e…

> You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude.

How is this measured?

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

#127

Post by stinos »

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…

Is it actually 2020?

Yes, but if it's not even possible to get auto-rotate to function correctly most of the time (to the point it becomes funny, countless are the times I've seen people yell at their device because either it doesn't rotate when wanted or rotates when not wanted), how do you expect something way more complicated to function appropriately? Only partially kidding here; this isn't criticism of the fact autocorrect doesn't work as good as it should, it's just that it's really hard to solve, but the point of failure imo is that there are other ways not involving AI or ML which might, as long as the former doesn't work better, actually be better suited and lead to results faster. E.g. something as simple as just adding anything ever typed to the dictionary and sort by number of usages - eventually getting rid of items with only one usage ever assuming they were typos or so. Which is roughly how phones used to do it pre-full-keyboard-era, I assume, and at least for me that actually worked pretty well and definitely with less mistakes. Maybe not as fast though. But I'm personally not interested in trading correctness for speed.

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

#128

Post by aspenmayer »

canofbars wrote: post #36
aspenmayer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pixel is Google being aware of their handicap in this in-house hardware prototyping and research area, and ironically and obviously and predictably for Google, they apply ML to it too. Apple can come at this same problem from the hardware and software sides all at once, with their own internal dev cycles aligning with the yearly iOS/iPadOS software drops, and iPhone/iPad hardware drops timed to a month or two of each…

I agree that iOS should have some escape hatch where power users can sideload but the problem is that the current situation is really good for privacy. Apple is able to act as a powerful agent to the powerless user to force companies to respect the users device and privacy. You can see on android the same apps tracking the user in ways that just wouldn't be allowed on iOS. If there was a way to sideload apps then Ama…

That’s not true. Jailbreaks exist, and always will. That’s the current status quo. Opening up sideloading will surface more bugs. Apple already has best-in-class built-in 2fa for Apple ID. To say they can’t just leverage Secure Enclave to do the heavy lifting is just to fail to make Apple’s argument for them. Security would benefit, because Apple would have more devs seeing and reporting more bugs if sideloading were possible. It’s a simple truism. Look at the new Microsoft.

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

#129

Post by tialaramex »

llampx wrote: post #48
moandcompany wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to machine learning, the subtlety here is that there are at least two sides or facets to machine learning: (1) training and (2) inference. It's fair to say that there are multiple areas for AI leadership. It is generally believed that: Model Creation (1) Those with the access to the best (which is not necessarily the most, but often believed to be) data have a strong starting point for training models;…

Re: Prediction at the edge, I would think that it's better if there aren't going to be any updates to the model. Or if internet access is limited. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the ML inference actually takes place on the cloud nowadays, not on-device.

Here's a nice example that like a lot of the best things is always passively present. My Pixel 2 knows what music it hears.

There's a pop song playing, I kinda like it. I could pay attention to the lyrics and try to Google them or ask somebody that might know what it is... no need, I just look at my phone, "Break My Heart by Dua Lipa" it says on the lock screen. The phone will remember it heard this, so if I get home this evening and check what was that... oh, "Break My Heart by Dua Lipa".

Google builds a model and sends it to phones that opted in to enable this service. It's not large, and I actually don't know how often it's updated - every day? Every week? Every month? No clue. But the actual matching happens on the device, where it's most useful and least privacy invading.

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

#130

Post by pas »

shrimpx wrote: post #112
lacker wrote: post #84

"Google is an amazing company, and there's some really great technologists working there," he said. "But fundamentally, their business model is different and they're not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people." What does he mean by this? Google search and Android are both used by more than a billion people. YouTube over 2 billion. These are all bigger than any Apple pr…

I thought that was odd, too. My best guess is that he’s emphasizing “known” as in notorious. Apple is “that company that ships experiences” whereas google is that company that records you while you use their apps or whatever.

Is that even true? I mean on HN sure, but in the general population ... I have no idea what's the perception of Google.
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