Apple signs deal with OpenAI for iOS, still wants Google as an 'option'

What would you be using it for? More and more I fail to see the value in LLMs. Something like Copilot, if used correctly, does have a bit of usefulness, but that's really the main use case right now. You can't trust the LLMs, so you can't use them for anything where you aren't going to go through the output meticulously afterwards.

Then again, I don't see the point in Siri either, it's useful in only a handful of cases.

I would argue that Microsoft do not have the same brand that Apple does. So they’re much more free to pursue OpenAI partnerships regardless of how well it works.

I don’t mean brand as in purely recognition, but what it means to people. Apple are held to a higher standard because of the specific identity they’ve cultivated. (Arguing the specifics of whether that’s deserved or not will be its own essay so I’m leaving that out)

You see this all the time on HN or Reddit, where any negative subject about Apple gains significantly more traction than other companies.

Meanwhile Microsoft has an identify that is more “meh”. Users expect Microsoft products to not have the polish, to have ads and be weird/quirky. Microsoft did Windows phone and the zune, Apple did the iPhone and the iPod.

Does that mean one companies products are better or worse? Maybe? Maybe not.

But it does mean that the brand appeal of every company has different characteristics that need to be accounted for. Siri giving bad answers is much worse perceptually than Cortana/Bing giving the same answers.

It also means Microsoft is more free to experiment and do things that are half baked because their brand identity allows for that. Often that leads to really interesting use cases ahead of its time.

I’d also add that Apple being “behind the curve” perceptually has rarely been an issue. The brand is that they enter late and redefine the segment. Again, not always deserved, but that’s the association. They often ride out trends that way.

What does this mean for Apple’s product positioning on privacy?

I went back to iOS recently, and with AirPods or CarPlay, I found Siri to be a really pleasant surprise. If I need something done, like a text message sent or a quick calculation done, I can just ask without taking my hands or eyes off what I’m doing. It’s also gotten a lot better at taking the hot word + command + arguments without breaks. “hey siri, send a message to dan I’m here” gets you “to dan: I’m here, send it?” For CarPlay, “hey siri, navigate to xyz restaurant” works great to start the navigation if you change your mind about where you’re going once you’re already on the road.

Combine that with “announce notifications” and it really feels like the future, “dan says, are you on your way” and it listens for a few seconds, where you can just say “reply yep I’m 15 minutes away”.

They’re already bringing AI into it a bit, if you get a picture it will try to describe what’s happening in the picture “dan sent a photo of a piece of paper with text on it” which is interesting but it’s not getting enough detail in the descriptions to be of much use just yet. A good multimodal model could definitely improve that, though it must be noted I prefer a worse on-device model to a server based model that can collect a bunch of data.

I think for really off the wall questions/brainstorming, going out to an LLM would yield better results than the current behavior of pointing you towards Google in the browser. “hey siri, what are the typical speeds people achieve on a SPI bus” would be nice if it could give some answer even if it’s not always 100% perfect, it’s kinda like bouncing questions off a slightly unreliable coworker, but you know, better than nothing when you can do it hands/eyes free.

I also have a hope that AI (although maybe not specifically LLMs) would help these assistants handle more complex tasks, like “add eggs to my grocery list” where your grocery list is just in a note and not in some special place. It doesn’t feel out of the question given current technology, I just think nobody’s done it yet.

Probably OpenAI giving the whole direct model(s) to Apple like how you could download LLAMA3 locally. It'd be up to Apple to build the infrastructure to run it at scale for their billions of devices.