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Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

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Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#11

Post by jrockway »

I only want one feature from Siri. When I say "hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" while in my kitchen, I'd like it show up as a live activity on my phone. (You can see it in your phone, but it's buried deeply inside the Home app, which is dumb.)

I use a Mac at work, have an Apple Watch and iPhone, and have yet to use any AI features. I just don't need them. I'm overjoyed when I add a meeting in Calendar and it shows up when I tap the date on my watch. I don't need artificial intelligence when the software is well designed and actually works!

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#13

Post by [deleted] »

crooked-v wrote: post #5

The basic problem here for Apple is that LLMs will never actually be able to avoid prompt injection issues, and the entire "personal awareness" set of functionality they're trying to make uses LLMs. Unless somebody at Apple invents a new state of the art, it's not going to happen. With that said, I'm surprised they haven't yet at least replaced the 'dumb' Siri commands with something that's effectively an LLM transla…

[deleted]

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#14

Post by walterbell »

https://archive.is/hj3Om

> Apple’s product marketing organization, marketing communications, software engineering team and AI organization are all culpable.. Given the nature of this collective failure, it’s unlikely to result in management changes on Cook’s executive team.. the whole mess is likely to come to a head this week at Apple’s annual Top 100 offsite. A March tradition since the days of Steve Jobs, this is a meeting of the company’s 100 most important executives.

Since no one was responsible for this collective failure, can a single leader be given responsibility for future Siri success?

  Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.  —Steve Jobs

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#16

Post by danaris »

Jon Gruber's latest long post[0] comments on the oddity that this is only coming from Gurman, with zero other sources able to corroborate it.

Personally, I am ambivalent: I hope that Apple is taking the situation at least as seriously as it seems to be in the apparent leak, and I hope that they do indeed have some of this stuff working in a partial, demo-able fashion.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/a_postscript_on_the_singu...

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#17

Post by pgwhalen »

djohnston wrote: post #2

This problem of non-technical product folks over-promising features is going to get much worse in the age of LLMs. The models are incredibly adept at providing a proof-of-concept. But it's often a monumental endeavour to cross the gap between 70% and 90% accurcacy; 90%-95% even more. This long-tail pain isn't new, but the ability for non-technical folks to poke a model on a chat site and then assume their idea is rea…

I’m getting this sense too, as my own employer is starting to add AI features. The pitches for what is possible are not grounded in what engineers know the system can do, they’re just assumptions about “if we give the LLM these inputs, we’d expect to see these outputs that are accurate enough for meaningful productivity gains.”

I’m not an AI skeptic, but it’ll be interesting to see how we manage the uncertainty in these projects.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#18

Post by krackers »

crooked-v wrote: post #5

The basic problem here for Apple is that LLMs will never actually be able to avoid prompt injection issues, and the entire "personal awareness" set of functionality they're trying to make uses LLMs. Unless somebody at Apple invents a new state of the art, it's not going to happen. With that said, I'm surprised they haven't yet at least replaced the 'dumb' Siri commands with something that's effectively an LLM transla…

All Apple needs to do is allow 3rd party apps to integrate with Siri, then use an LLM as a way to convert natural language into the set of allowed API calls. Basically similar what chatGPT does with function calling. And on osx, they should have already had a head start due to applescript integration everywhere in most apps. I have no idea why they're trying to reinvent the wheel with "Shortcuts" which is severely limited.

They already have everything waiting there for their taking, and they're squandering it for no reason. Siri on osx should have been built on top of AppleScript from the get-go, then the switch to LLM would have been easy.

For that matter, I wonder why on osx I haven't seen any 3rd party apps be a siri replacement using applescript to drive applications directly. So much effort is spent on screen scraping and trying to get "agents" to use computers like humans do, but for decades osx has already had a parallel set of APIs built into every application specifically for machine consumption. And most good 3rd party apps even make use of it.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#19

Post by timewizard »

crooked-v wrote: post #5

The basic problem here for Apple is that LLMs will never actually be able to avoid prompt injection issues, and the entire "personal awareness" set of functionality they're trying to make uses LLMs. Unless somebody at Apple invents a new state of the art, it's not going to happen. With that said, I'm surprised they haven't yet at least replaced the 'dumb' Siri commands with something that's effectively an LLM transla…

Everyone thought LLMs would scale exponentially like everything else in computer science. It's actually linear and they're all stuck holding a bag of mostly worthless goods.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#20

Post by karlgkk »

peatmoss wrote: post #10

I upgraded to an iPhone 16 in part because I was interested in the AI augments to iOS. My assumption was that Apple was likely to do something tasteful, and probably not nuclear-level bad in terms of privacy. I've since disabled everything AI. My feeling is that my phone is much snappier without. Text summary features are pretty bad—in one case a summary of a text thread led me to believe my dad was having an acute h…

Their ai summary really eats shit when it comes to slang heavy, short messages.

It’d be genuinely useful if it kicked on in threads with high amounts of unread messages

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