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

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141–150 of 217 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're typing on your laptop and you don't want your wrist/palm to accidentally trigger anything on your trackpad, so you employ wrist rejection.

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

#142

You can't be AI leader when every AI leader is staying away from you by 10ft pole. When Ian Goodfellow joined Apple, there was literally rain of criticism on him from ending his career as researcher to bowing down to money. I don't know of any researcher who does want to have continued research career willing to join Apple. They simply don't allow that kind of freedom or publishing results. While Apple has some stron…

My 2c is that goodfellow is probably working on their self-driving project.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's more annoying because when you type a non-noun there is a higher chance that it gets mistakenly autocorrected to something capitalised (as every noun in German is capitalised versus only proper nouns in most other languages). I hate this flaw of iOS as well.

Got it

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

#144
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 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”.

I think you also have to signal iMessages when it got it right by sending the message. I tried a lot of times teaching it how to write Hong Kong and when it got it right, I sent the message. From that point onwards it always writes Hong Kong correctly.

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

#145
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people have underrated the benefits Apple reaps in this area from being so far ahead in chip design and controlling their hardware. As regards to successfully productizing ML I’ve recently become convinced that Apple has been more successful at it than Google so far. Translation was already well within Google’s wheelhouse and they had been doing it for years, and their work with cameras is going to i…

Apple is bad at AI because Apple is bad at software, and increasingly bad at common sense. Being good at hardware won't compensate for that. Example: Apple Maps regularly thinks I need help finding my way home from locations close to where I live. Some basic practical intelligence would understand that I have visited these places before and there's a very good chance I already know my way home. It would know that I w…

I’m not so sure your example is the best at “bad common sense” - I can see a ton of use cases where this is useful for a lot of users. For example, you live in the suburbs next to a highway, and your route home is usually 15 min. You get the notification and see today it’s 30 min because there is an accident. Instead you take the back roads or wait at work a little longer for it to clear. The directions aren’t the value, the time estimates are because in your mind you can’t know current traffic conditions of the highway. It’s a replacement for the 4:30 PM traffic updates on the radio station.

Also it works well with the “share ETA” feature where you can automatically share your ETA with family when you start directions home.

And anecdotally, my google home does the same thing at 5pm every day...but it gives me directions “home” from “work” when it is actually routing me to my old house which I moved from 6 months ago. My home address is updated and the old one removed, so

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue that AI leadership is not limited to just research, and an under appreciated aspect of leadership is making actual things useful for people (e.g. applying AI/ML technology to problems, and making those solutions common or ubiquitous).

It would be hard to be leader without having leaders in the field at your disposal. There are literally 20,000 papers getting published each year. While stunning gains are being reported every month, it would be very hard for you to identify good implementable papers with state of the art results unless you are active in the field. Many of the techniques are amalgamation of other dozen techniques. So its even more ha…

There's more to leadership than research and pushing state of the art in papers.

There's also a lot more to making useful AI/ML-powered technology than having good models.

Defining and limiting the field to just research and models is a common pitfall I've seen.

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

#147

Apple is behind in AI. Google has Google Lens, real-time transcription of audio recordings, live captions. And Google Assistant is leaps and bounds ahead of Siri in nearly every way. What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at?

Yes, Apple is behind in AI research and contributions. In every WWDC or product announcement they will try to convince us that their AI is with 'privacy in mind'. Well all know that's not true.

You have to get that data somewhere.

> What is there in AI that Google doesn't beat Apple at?

Excellent Question. Unless we get Apple's equivalent of OpenAI, DeepMind or FAIR then the answer is always nothing.

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

#148

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?

I think you found the problem

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

#149

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…

Could autocorrect not wait until it sees more of the sentence?

Android autocorrect does this and it's maddening, because it's very bad at it, and now you don't notice the word it changed because you're looking at the subsequent one.

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

#150
> Machine learning is used to help the iPad's software distinguish between a user accidentally pressing their palm against the screen while drawing with the Apple Pencil, and an intentional press meant to provide an input. It's used to monitor users' usage habits to optimize device battery life and charging, both to improve the time users can spend between charges and to protect the battery's longterm viability. It's used to make app recommendations.

The problem with machine learning altering the behavior of a device is it shortcuts human learning. The human brain is very good at learning deep insights about things and its environment and alters its behavior accordingly.

If things change while we're learning about them, it confuses and upsets us. A dumb machine is much easier to use than a "smart" one.

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