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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

#311

Post by nozzlegear »

Lots of negative comments on this story so far. I've enabled Apple Intelligence and don't have anything negative to say except that it's difficult to figure out where I can and can't use it when I want to. It mostly stays out of the way, and when I do notice it it's been useful, which imo is about exactly what I want in an AI product built into the OS.

My favorite feature has to be the email summarization thing. When I get inexplicably cc'd on a long thread by some clients, it's nice to have a summarization at the top so I can quickly determine whether it's something I need to deal with now or later. Others here worry about the AI hallucinating in the summary, which is a concern of mine too, but I always read the emails anyway – this is just a useful inbox triage tool (for me).

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

#312

Post by llm_nerd »

recursive wrote: post #292
llm_nerd wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're gotcha in the sense that people are intentionally asking LLMs to do things that LLMs are terrible at doing. LLMs are language models. They aren't math models. Or chess models. Or sorting or counting models. They aren't even logic models. So early on the value was completely in language. But you're absolutely correct that for these tools to really be useful they need to be better than that, and slowly we're ge…

If this stuff is getting sold as a revolution in information work, or a watershed moment in technology, or as a cultural step-change, etc, then I think the gotcha is totally fair. There seems to be no limit to the hype or sales pitch. So there need be no bounds for pedantic gotchas either.

I entirely agree with you. Trying to roll out just a raw LLM was always silly, and remains basically a false promise. Simply increasing the number of layers or parameters or transformer complexity will never resolve these core gaps.

But it's rapidly making progress. CoT models coupled with actual domain-specific logic engines (math, chemistry, physics, chess, and so on) will be when the promise is actually met by the reality.

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

#313

Post by browningstreet »

Smaug123 wrote: post #294
browningstreet wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs work best when you go to them and know what you’re getting and how hard you’re going to work to get something good. When it’s just there… you expect something better than that and you can’t quite “work it” the same as when you’re iterating through the native interface, or API. I use LLMs a lot, all day long, but I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence. [I’m also salty how bad typing still is on an iPhone and th…

The fact that the GPT-style models are literally autocomplete engines, while text autocompletion on phone keyboards remains terrible, really maddens me. Is it that they simply aren't using that style of model for autocompletion, or that the GPTs aren't great at guessing me specifically even though they're superhuman at autocompleting the Internet, or that it would be too slow to run a sufficiently good GPT for this o…

I fear this may be the best auto correct will ever be.

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

#314

Post by robotresearcher »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #179
llm_nerd wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But...I'm not doing the same thing. In actuality I'm saying I'm a fairly typical programmer in a common situation: I work across a variety of languages and platforms and toolings and projects, building solutions for problems. The truth is that extraordinarily few programmers are working on anything truly novel. Zero of the readers of this comment are, in all likelihood. The ridiculous notion that someone has so uniqu…

> 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…

> the greedy bastards who owned everything would be the only ones actually benefiting from automation, […] which again: is exactly what happened.

What also happened is that everyone can buy clothes incredibly cheaply. Which seems like a widespread benefit.

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

#315

Post by reilly3000 »

bangaroo wrote: post #218

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate. It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase…

It’s bad because they are using very small local models on device, like on the order of 3 billion parameters as opposed to the trillion+ param models available in the cloud. They could keep the security model and have larger, slower models for summaries (what’s the urgency of a summary?) but that would be a battery killer. It’s clear they need to train on messaging content, but they have promised not to use their users content.

It seems to me they should let the local models train on local content while charging and do reinforcement learning on their summaries as judged by a larger (private cloud) LLM.

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

#316

Post by reilly3000 »

ryantgtg wrote: post #245
bangaroo wrote: post #218

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate. It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase…

When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these b…

There is no icon or anything to indicate it’s “AI”? What a miss.

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

#317

Post by syntaxing »

pid-1 wrote: post #111
syntaxing wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently personally resubscribed to copilot after cancelling my subscription a couple months ago since it was not providing value. But now with the new/beta “Edit” mode and being able to specify to use o1, o1 mini, and sonnet 3.5, the $10 a month feels a lot more worth it. The edit mode has outperformed aider for me.

Sorry, I think we are talking about different stuff. I was referring to Copilot for M365, which costs 30 USD / month and targets biz users. Github Copilot is definitely worth it.

Oh wow, I definitely misunderstood, all the “Copilot” usage by MS/Github got me mixed up

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

#318

Post by nottorp »

llm_nerd wrote: post #310
nottorp wrote: post #306

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. 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 abso…

Yes, you mentioned those things that are documented everywhere. I do use LLMs to give me skeleton code for those parts I'm not familiar with.

How about a full equivalent of Qt that is proprietary and has absolutely nothing public in it? How is a LLM going to help with that? There is no public info anywhere.

> the absolute cutting edge of AI research

No offense but there are billions of public pages about "AI" research since it's the new gold rush. Of course LLMs have material about all your libs.

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

#319

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jjice wrote: post #242
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #199

I am using an iPhone 13 Mini, which will need to be pried from my cold, dead, hands. The new "intelligence" hasn't made any difference that I can note, other than a couple of buttons, and Siri seems a bit less dense. On my Mac, the Xcode auto-fill has improved quite a bit. It is now useful enough for me to use (but I still need to check its work, as it hallucinates weird API calls).

Aren't the newest features that are branded as "Apple Intelligence" (not their other ML stuff that's been around for a while) only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 line? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is... At the bottom: > Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later,…

You are correct.

My Mac is an M4, though.

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

#320

Post by bangaroo »

reilly3000 wrote: post #316
ryantgtg wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these b…

There is no icon or anything to indicate it’s “AI”? What a miss.

there is a little icon that is like... three lines next to an arrow in an L shape, but it's honestly unclear what it means visually (it doesn't read as AI, and I feel like "little sparkles" is the de facto AI icon) and it's also not super visible or distinct, so it's not always immediately apparent at a glance.
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