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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

#171

Post by jmnicolas »

airstrike wrote: post #166
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…

> What is going on? I have no idea what is going on, but the answer is installing SwiftKey

So now everything you type is also sent to Swiftkey servers ...

Fwiw Swiftkey was a paid app a few years ago. Then they became free. How do they still earn money to keep the company running ?

(I always had an Android phone but I assume it's also free on iOS)

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

#172

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by lowdose »

dmitriid wrote: post #79
marmshallow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be nice to have an option to not delete every photo after backing up to Google Photos.

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

#174

Post by cma »

stinos wrote: post #127
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…

To change rotation on iPad and keep it locked you have to do 7 steps:

-swipe down the settings panel

-unlock rotation

-reorient device

-swipe up the settings panel

-let it reorient

-swipe down the settings panel

-lock rotation

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

#175

Post by icefo »

_jal wrote: post #158
zwegner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

St least Gboard let's you turn an option to allow "potentially offensive words" or something like that. I'm surprised it doesn't seem to exist on apple devices

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

#176

Post by one_electron »

amcoastal wrote: post #142
throwaway202020 wrote: post #81

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.

i dont have any inside insight but id be surprised if thats the case. goodfellow's line of research has been adversarial learning [1].

[1] https://scholar.google.ca/citations?hl=en&user=iYN86KEAAAAJ&...

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

#177

Post by mastax »

jmnicolas wrote: post #171
airstrike wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is going on? I have no idea what is going on, but the answer is installing SwiftKey

So now everything you type is also sent to Swiftkey servers ... Fwiw Swiftkey was a paid app a few years ago. Then they became free. How do they still earn money to keep the company running ? (I always had an Android phone but I assume it's also free on iOS)

Swiftkey was bought by Microsoft, they don't need revenue anymore. Or maybe they do?

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

#178

Post by jolux »

Veedrac wrote: post #162
jolux wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s chips are way better so whether they’re doing more locally or not they have the headroom to do a lot more. I would agree with that characterization of Google. They have a very small handful of successes and an enormous pile of failures that they’ve discarded. They give every impression of not really knowing what to do. I think Giannandrea was also referring specifically to the kinds of experiences Apple can p…

Apple's AI accelerator is meaningfully better than the Snapdragon 855's, but way behind the 865's. > I would agree with that characterization of Google. No. It's fine to dislike Google's stuff, but words have meanings. The claim that Google doesn't ship ‘consumer experiences’ to hundreds of millions of people is objectively false.

The 865 is a generation newer than the chips Apple has released. I'll wait and see what happens come September and October of this year.

>No. It's fine to dislike Google's stuff, but words have meanings. The claim that Google doesn't ship ‘consumer experiences’ to hundreds of millions of people is objectively false.

Sure, they have some experience. But their core business is not shipping experiences that consumers pay them for. That is all.

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

#179

Post by Spooky23 »

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?".

Search for object detection on your iPhone. It’s way better than the experience on a Mac.

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

#180

Post by jolux »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #103
jolux wrote: 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…

Yeah, I just completely disagree. I agree that Maps' machine learning isn't very good but I've been completely unimpressed with Google's as well.

>IMO the company is stuck in the past, its software pipeline is so badly broken the quality of the basic OS products is visibly declining, and it's unprepared for the next generation of integrated and invisible AI applications.

This has been a meme for a few years now and I don't know what the basic quality that's declining is. Their development has arguably accelerated and it doesn't seem like it has any more bugs than normal. I agree that Siri has not been advanced as much as it should have been but it seems like they're working on it.

>But because it's an ad company with a bit of a research culture it can't imagine an integrated customer-centric general AI platform - which is where the next big disruption will come from.

I'm not sure what you mean by "general AI" but I think Apple has the best shot at it of any company working right now (unless you mean AGI).

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