Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #280

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who called anyone a name? Luddism? Yes, many HN participants are reacting to AI in a completely common rejection of change / challenge, and it recurs constantly. You should read up on what Luddism and Luddists were actually about. They didn't think the machines were evil or satanic, which is the common cultural read. They assumed (correctly) that the managerial class would take full advantage of increased productiv…

>You should read up on what Luddism and Luddists were actually about. They were primarily opposed to automation because it devalued the work they did and the skills they held. That is the core essence of Luddism. They thought if they destroyed the machines, automation could be stopped. There were some post-facto justifications like product quality, but if that was true they'd have no problem out-competing the machine…

imho a lot of "luddism" so labeled by pro-ai bros is just people furious about shoddy artefacts that degenAI produce. That compares to original luddism, difference being the original 19th-century opposition against industrial revolution had proven them wrong with improved quality whereas genAI hasn't.

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

#302

Post by rchaud » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

ARandumGuy wrote: post #23

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…

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…

> what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs?

Most LLM use at the corporate level is happening through Office 365 where Microsoft has put a Copilot button on everything including Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. Execs didn't necessarily ask for it, it protrudes very conspicuously in the UI now.

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

#303

Post by rchaud » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

_heimdall wrote: post #19

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…

> We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work Unless you work at Microsoft, that's really interesting to me. Can't say I've ever experienced a boss pushing for me to use a certain developer tool.

Execs are simply following the manufactured consensus about AI's impact on productivity and innovation. Go with a name brand like Microsoft and get that promotion for digital transformation or whatever. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

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

#304

Post by numpad0 » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #127

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…

> any sort of LLM writing is a tacit acknowledgement that people don’t really care what they are writing Couldn’t be further from my experience. I work with a distributed team that has four different native languages, with substantial engineering staff for each. LLMs have made our cross-geo communications so much better. I can get a summary of a standup that happened overnight (to me) and in a foreign language (to me…

> I can write idiomatically and naturally without worrying it will be confusing or misinterpreted.

Note that this depends on the language. LLM translations aren't that much more accurate than predecessors other than that it's more strongly constrained to grammatical English, and there's limit to how natural one could be through translations, depending on how much cultural co-development your own background had with the target environment - your framing and storytelling will sound off even through human translators if the cultures are too far apart.

LLMs tends to be a bit more robust than previous MTs, that's for sure.

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

#305

Post by blankx32 » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

Makes it worse that it consumes space on your phone you can’t remove

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

#306

Post by nottorp » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

gilleain wrote: post #170

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And FWIW, I cannot imagine a programmer, in 2024, that remains dismissive of LLMs or the related tooling. Hi. > While they are grossly oversold by the LinkedIn crowd, That is true. > and are still a far ways from so-called "prompt engineers" replacing devs, Also true. > they're a massive accelerator and "second set of eyes", especially if you're doing varied, novel work. That is not even remotely my experience. Lik…

It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. While it's certainly possible that this divide is based on how 'hard' the problems people are using them on, my current theory is that some people use them like the proverbial rubber duck - in other words, a way to explore the code, and generate some stuff to work on, while thinking th…

> It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless.

My take is: if the project is doing something that has been asked a thousand times on stackoverflow and has hundreds of pages in the tutorial content mills, the LLM will tell you something reasonably meaningful about it.

I'd hazard a guess that most people overenthusiastic about those tools are gluing together javascript libs.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, we even asked a LLM today at work to generate some code for a library that we didn't know how to use but seems fairly popular, and the output looked like it would make sense. (Can't tell you how it ended up because I wasn't the one implementing the thing.)

However, we also spent 2 hours in a group debugging session because we're working on a completely custom codebase that isn't documented anywhere on geeksforgeeks, stackoverflow or anywhere else public. I highly doubt that even a local LLM would be able to help, and no way this code is leaving the premises.

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

#307

Post by plaidfuji » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

Over the past year+ I’ve developed a litmus test for whether a new AI feature is valuable or not:

If it were presented to me without using the words “AI” or “Intelligence”, would I give a s%!t about it? Can it even be described without using those words? If not, it is not valuable.

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

#308

Post by cube2222 » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #171

beardedwizard wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot to unpack here, but is your code so interesting that it defies understanding by an AST? Code models are trained to semantically represent code, so unless you use semantics that exist outside of software engineering the claim that your code is too unique for llm is false. Maybe you are imagining a case where the entire codebase is generated by a single prompt?

The shorter and also "not breaching confidentiality" answer I can give is we're dealing with setting up custom sockets over incredibly long range wireless connections that require clear and verified transmission of packets of data, rolling both our own messaging protocol and security features as we go. When last I tried anyway, Copilot was, frankly, useless.

Fwiw, copilot is not a particularly powerful LLM. It's at most glorified smarter autocomplete. I personally use LLMs for coding a lot, but Copilot is not really what I'd have in mind saying that.

Rather, I'd be using something like the Zed editor with its AI Assistant integration and Claude Sonnet 3.5 as the model, where I first provide it context in the chat window (relevant files, pages, database schema, documents it should reference and know) and possibly discuss the problem with it briefly, and only then (with all of that as context in the prompt) do I ask it to author/edit a piece of code (via the inline assist feature, which "sees" the current chat).

But it generally is the most useful for "I know exactly what I want to write or change, but it'll take me 30 minutes to do so, while with the LLM I can do the same in 5 minutes". They're also quite good at "tell me edge-cases I might have not considered in this code" - even if 80% of the suggestions it'll list are likely irrelevant, it'll often come up with something you might've not thought about.

There's definitely problems they're worse than useless at, though.

Where more complex reasoning is warranted, OpenAI o1 series of models can be quite decent, but it's hit or miss, and with the above prompt sizes you're looking at 1-2$ per query.

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

#309

Post by nailer » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

Do you use a search engine? Do you think search engine results pages are more efficient than getting an answer from an LLM?

Apple’s LLM is uniquely useless, because it doesn’t do anything LLM like and Con continually returns “here’s what I found on the web”. Actual consumer LLM apps like Microsoft Copilot are leagues ahead.

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

#310

Post by llm_nerd » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #306

gilleain wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. While it's certainly possible that this divide is based on how 'hard' the problems people are using them on, my current theory is that some people use them like the proverbial rubber duck - in other words, a way to explore the code, and generate some stuff to work on, while thinking th…

> It's interesting that there is this division between programmers who claim LLMs are super helpful, and those saying they are useless. My take is: if the project is doing something that has been asked a thousand times on stackoverflow and has hundreds of pages in the tutorial content mills, the LLM will tell you something reasonably meaningful about it. I'd hazard a guess that most people overenthusiastic about thos…

>if the project is doing something that has been asked a thousand times

There are many billions of lines of high-quality, commented code online, covering just about everything. Millions of projects. All of Linux. All of Android. All of PGSQL and SQLite and MySQL and Apache and Git and OpenSSL and countless encryption libraries and countless data tools, video and audio manipulation, and...

Every single project is absolutely dominated by things that have been done many, many thousands of times. The vast bulk of your projects have zero novelty. They're mixing the same ingredients in different ways. I would think any experienced developer would realize this.

>I'd hazard a guess that most people overenthusiastic about those tools are gluing together javascript libs.

At this point it's comedy how often this "oh I understand that the noobs get value from this, but not us Advanced Programmers". It's absurdist and honestly at this point I just shake my head. My day is filled with C++, Python, Rust, Go, the absolute cutting edge of AI research, and I find these tools absolutely invaluable now. They are a massive accelerator. Zero JavaScript libs or "LOL WEB DEV" programming in my life.