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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

#151

Post by rvz »

cwhiz wrote: post #27
tialaramex wrote: post #14

Show don't tell. You don't lead in AI or anything else by insisting everybody who noticed you're bad at something "has it wrong".

Did you read the article? The whole point was that Apple has innovated but that they don’t make a big deal out of it. Marketing, basically.

Yes, it's more marketing than research here. They still push their reality distortion spells on us to believe that they're an AI leader but in reality they innovate on the ideas of others; just like old times.

> Did you read the article?

I really hope you have read the HN guidelines [0]

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#152

Post by georgespencer »

I don't know anyone who believes that Siri is as good as Alexa. I spent four months self-isolating in an apartment with the small hockey puck Alexa devices in random corners and returned to my big open plan apartment with two paired HomePods on the kitchen counter.

The frequency with which Siri shits its pants (can't help, asks me to excuse it being slow as it tries to set a timer, mishears me, etc.) is honestly remarkable.

(Not to mention the fact that my phone continues to alert me to text messages read on my Mac or iPad whole minutes ago.)

Apple is still working to overcome deep problems in both its cloud infrastructure and AI/ML. If they cannot be honest about this, they should not be dishonestly trying to present a picture of all being well.

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

#153

Post by strogonoff »

strogonoff wrote: post #76
culturestate wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bought my iPhone in HK as well, double physical SIM slot is a must have!

Most other devices I bought elsewhere, except for those I was dead sure I’m going to keep. As far as I can tell HK is the only place in the world where Apple retail has a no returns policy.

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

#154

Post by est31 »

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…

Those weapons grade language models take hundreds of gigabytes of storage. But yeah, after downsizing to a few dozen MB they should still be better than what's there currently.

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

#155

Post by cwhiz »

rvz wrote: post #151
cwhiz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? The whole point was that Apple has innovated but that they don’t make a big deal out of it. Marketing, basically.

Yes, it's more marketing than research here. They still push their reality distortion spells on us to believe that they're an AI leader but in reality they innovate on the ideas of others; just like old times. > Did you read the article? I really hope you have read the HN guidelines [0] > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "Th…

I did not read the guidelines. My mistake. You’re right.

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

#156

Post by SilasX »

bzb4 wrote: post #80
culturestate wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. I was going to suggest that was from using the English rather than the Spanish keyboard but I just saw my iPhone do that on the latter as well.

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

#157

Post by le_sigh »

jdietrich wrote: post #77
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.

They have been actively moving to federated learning and analytics so far less data leaves your phone:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/05/federated-analytics-collab...

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

#158

Post by _jal »

zwegner wrote: post #82
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 recently discovered a neat trick for fixing the duck problem, that is, adding swear words to the iOS dictionary: add a contact with the chosen words in the name fields. E.g. I have a contact named "shit shitty fuck fuckin fucking oh shit"

This sort of 'nudge' is stupidly passive aggressive and frankly condescending and infantilizing.

Companies should really just grow the fuck up and stop doing stupid, cutsey things like pretending adults really just typo a reference to a bird regularly.

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

#159

Post by culturestate »

strogonoff wrote: post #153
strogonoff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bought my iPhone in HK as well, double physical SIM slot is a must have! Most other devices I bought elsewhere, except for those I was dead sure I’m going to keep. As far as I can tell HK is the only place in the world where Apple retail has a no returns policy.

> As far as I can tell HK is the only place in the world where Apple retail has a no returns policy.

Yeah, we can thank the x-border gray market for that. In the beginning it was...flexible, in that if you obviously weren’t a smuggler they’d quietly accept the return, but I haven’t needed to test that in a while.

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

#160

Post by kumarvvr »

bambax wrote: post #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…

This might be true for mostly user interface stuff. But for things that are happening under the hood, a human mind will get accustomed to a gradually improving user experience.

Apples mantra seems to be to make everyone use the device as per their whims and fancy, and let the device figure out how to deal with it.

Ultimately what this leads to is a user experience lock in, where other devices that dont adapt feel clumsy or stupid.

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