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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#52

Post by mirekrusin »

worstdevna wrote: post #9
moandcompany wrote: post #6

A few quick cliffs notes plus added info: John "JG" Giannandrea was hired over to Apple around 2018 to head Apple's new AI/ML division, which would include the Siri organization that predates Giannandrea's tenure at Apple. Giannandrea was previously the executive in charge of Google's Research division. Mike Rockwell was hired into Apple from Dolby Labs around 2015 to head a group called "TDG" that would be the R&D a…

It feels like Apple had a dream of a granting easy AI integrations for many different apps and workflows, only to discover that very few people wanted any of those integrations from apple intelligence. At least, not the current iteration of apple intelligence.

The devil is in the details – you do shit clippy-like integration = nobody will use it, you do it well – everybody will, even though nobody currently does in any meaningful way beyond setting a timer.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#53

Post by JSR_FDED »

Apple knows how to call an OpenAI API as well as anyone. I don't think they're struggling with the LLM side of things. The problem is to ensure security (vs prompt injection), and to create an ecosystem of apps and developers who will provide hooks into their apps to let AI perform actions on behalf of the user.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#55

Post by AnonC »

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell.

There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it.

Edit: On a related note, this leak seems to be significant. The Apple I know of would fire the executives (among the “top 100”) who leaked this and probably make sure they’d pay some hefty monetary penalties too.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#56

Post by hu3 »

kelseydh wrote: post #34
bluedevil2k wrote: post #22

The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy - they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic…

Agree, Siri is a damaged brand. Microsoft had the insight to drop Cortana when it flopped too. In the age of LLMs I also increasingly view my experience with "Hey Google" and "Alexa... " with similar contempt. Their output feels so bad compared to what ChatGPT's voice gets me. All of the big tech companies seem to be struggling immensely to deploy the latest in AI advancements.

I never tried advanced things with "Hey Google" but it always gets the basics right for me:

"go home" opens maps app with a route to my home.

"alarm in", "alarm at", "what time is it?" works well too.

In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini.

Alexa is the same with basics, works well for me with "reminder in X hours", "reminder at 10am on every workday", "alarm at", "play The Strokes", "add coffee to the list" (groceries)

Alexa is really bad with any advanced stuff I've tried. Didn't try with "hey Google"

Any other basics that work?

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#58

Post by siva7 »

I'm really buffled what makes it for Apple so difficult to cut off Siri and replace it with state-of-art technology (LLMs). Siri is still akin to a "dumbphone" 4 years into the age of "smartphones" which is a good indicator for a lost case and when it's better to start a product from scratch without the tech debt.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#59

Post by Jyaif »

swatcoder wrote: post #20
LoganDark wrote: post #5

Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs? I get that they're a hardware company, but surely that can't be the full story. They must be suffering from some case of extreme perfectionism or something like that. I would assume it'd be very difficult to get an LLM to perform consistently and reliably without making it useless.

No commercialized LLM product released so far would meet Steve Jobs' standard for a high-profile Apple product, and while that standard is clearly much more lax now, there still is one and still higher than what people accept from OpenAI et al. I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face. I think many inside and outside Apple hoped that the ways that t…

> No commercialized LLM product released so far would meet Steve Jobs' standard for a high-profile Apple product

I can put words into Steve Jobs' mouth as well!

Steve Jobs would reframe LLMs (and other ML-based solution) as creative assistants, insisting that their job is not to get the right answer, but to help you get your creative juice running. To get this to happen, he would have personally convinced engineers that have made cool AI demos to work for Apple to turns these demos into features that form a new Apple creative suite.

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