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Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

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Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#221

Post by layer8 »

nerdjon wrote: post #22

I disagree, I think the problem with surveys like this is the focus on billing everything as "AI" instead of just what it used to be as a nice feature. A lot of the small things that Apple has introduced, are things that blend in and are not screaming "AI" at you. Which is a good thing. So many of the things that are being pushed by other companies are AI crap that is flashy to show off but either the utility of it i…

The article is specifically about what Apple calls “Apple Intelligence”, not about other AI/ML-based features they have incorporated.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#222

Post by furyofantares »

layer8 wrote: post #200
llm_nerd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they believe in the advantages, to the company, of using these AI tools. Of adding them to the workflow, training their employees, and understanding quickly how it impacts their space. If you just wait and all of your competitors have a workforce enabled and equipped with the best tools, you are at a disadvantage. It's being the company that put off computerization or automation when everyone else went wild.…

> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?

Novel to the programmer.

Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field.

Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve.

Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#223

Post by layer8 »

jdprgm wrote: post #175

I think this is much more on a botched rollout and a lack of vision. Apple should have been working on this for years and have some pretty big advantages. A deeply integrated version of the best o1 chat and vision models with context from all various apps and ability to do complex app interactions could be amazing. They could even have the ability to have AI basically create on demand personalized new applications fo…

I agree, but based on their software track record over the last couple of years, I have little hope that we’ll get much beyond a disparate collection of mostly half-baked features.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#224

Post by rsynnott »

everdrive wrote: post #4

This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…

> Worse are the meeting summaries

These can be quite _funny_, sometimes, but they're certainly not useful, yeah.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#225

Post by ElevenLathe »

dylan604 wrote: post #160
brookst wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than legally sensitive topics, what meetings would you not want recorded? Do people take notes or are they just totally ephemeral?

The number of meetings I attend where no notes are taken dwarfs the number with notes taken. Clearly, I must live in a different universe from the rest of everyone here where notes are taken at every meeting

IMO there is no advantage to having "community" notes taken of a meeting: I take my own notes about decisions made in the meeting that I care about, and items I need to take care of. Therefore, every meeting I'm in has notes taken, though no one else is even aware (unless they are taking their own, which I assume many are). I think this is relatively common (since I can't see how one can function in most knowledge work without some version of this) so I would assume that you probably are in meetings where notes are taken, even if you never see them.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#226

Post by rsynnott »

mukunda_johnson wrote: post #116
ARandumGuy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

I said the same thing to a previous company before I was let go. Confused why they were butchering their business strategy in favor of a gold rush. The main benefit of LLMs was already abundantly clear: literally just chat with it in day to day work when you can. Ask it questions about accounting, other domains it knows, etc. That's like up to 10-20% performance increase on tasks if you align OK. Still, they were in…

> Ask it questions about accounting, other domains it knows

Be very careful here if you're using it for anything important! LLMs are quite good at answering questions about accounting in ways which are superficially convincing-looking, yet also complete nonsense. "But the magic robot told me it was okay" will not fly in a tax audit, say.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#227

Post by llm_nerd »

layer8 wrote: post #200
llm_nerd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they believe in the advantages, to the company, of using these AI tools. Of adding them to the workflow, training their employees, and understanding quickly how it impacts their space. If you just wait and all of your competitors have a workforce enabled and equipped with the best tools, you are at a disadvantage. It's being the company that put off computerization or automation when everyone else went wild.…

> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?

>What do you mean by that?

Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful.

>doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed

A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless".

Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#228

Post by layer8 »

tvararu wrote: post #192

I used to be able to tell Siri "Turn off the lights." Sometimes in 2017 or 2018 they "updated" it and now it replies "Which room?" Followed by slowly listing out the 6 or 7 options including "everywhere." I haven't been able to reprogram myself to say "Turn off all the lights" which works as before. Hearing that reply is the equivalent of hitting your toe on a wardrobe. This update didn't fix this. The functionality…

Similarly, stopping an alarm in another room/on another device doesn’t seem possible without Siri having to ask back about the device/room, and the user having to affirm it. That back and forth takes an unnerving couple of seconds. You can’t just say “Stop the alarm in $room/on $device”. It gets worse when the device you talk to is simultaneously playing back something, because then you first have to stop that playback in order for Siri to not misapply the “stop” command intended for the alarm.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#229

Post by blago »

everdrive wrote: post #4

This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…

> Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race...

Sometimes it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#230

Post by spike021 »

I had to disable it on my 16 Pro the other day.

My phone was freezing or rebooting at least once per day and on a whim I disabled Intelligence. Since then I've had zero problems.

I wasn't even using it much. So whatever it does in the background must have a memory leak or something.

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