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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

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

#61

Post by jajko »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #27
worstdevna wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. Apple just doesn’t have anything like that with AI. Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid re…

That 'wow factor' is a thing of the past, very firmly. When I put next to each other say Iphone 16 pro max and Samsung S25 ultra, none sticks out, none has anything 'wow' for regular users. Just different styles of working with device and small + and - all over the place. Same for tablets, notebooks, and so on. Vision pro seems like a failed product even according to Apple.

Its doesn't mean that each product doesn't have something a bit special but competition caught up long time ago, sometimes went ahead (better batteries, bigger cameras etc). These days there is much more 'yawn factor', and its across whole industry.

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

#62

Post by datadeft »

AnonC wrote: post #55

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 be…

True. I would love to have less features in MacOS actually. We are approaching Windows start menu level of crap being installed by default.

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

#63

Post by jonplackett »

AnonC wrote: post #55

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 be…

They need to stop shooting for the moon and just release some incremental improvements.

Like you say, Siri is borderline completely useless. Just timers for me.

Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. They even have this ChatGPT integration that Siri seems totally incapable of using in any meaningful way.

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

#64

Post by vessenes »

We're at an inflection point in the last few months that means Apple might finally be able to do something good with Siri.

Fundamentally, Siri's great promise (well in the last few years) has been that it could hook into all of the scripting facility made available by iOS apps. There are tons and tons of AppleScript hooks on many, many apps -- if only Siri could, you know, access them.

This is traditionally not Apple's strong suit - API access oriented thinking - but I will also say that it turns out to have been a pretty hard problem to actually parse out what 'hooks' to access.

We now refer to this as "tool calling", and know that it's a specific thing an LLM (or even MLM/SLM in many cases) can be trained to do a pretty good job at.

If Apple wants to do all this on device, I think we're not far off in terms of hardware and architectural knowhow to get this done now. I would bet that the Siri team spent a number of years on alternates, essentially relearning the bitter lesson.

I'd guess the best way to make this work on device would be to train and finetune a small model on a massive number of apple app store apps so that it gets good at figuring out which apps it will want to query for tooling functions calls - that's too much to inject in context directly especially on device - then it would call out for a list of available calls -> that's just code -> then it could use a local LLM to choose the proper call and call it -> then if needed it could offload for more heavyweight thinking. To start you could offload the tool call decisions as well, or really the whole thing, except for the local function call.

This would be vastly vastly better than what we have now, and I think does not require huge reintegration efforts from app developers.

"Siri what month is it?"

[... calendar_getcurrentdate requested ] -> [ Mar 21 2025 ]

"It's March".

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

#65

Post by microtherion »

visarga wrote: post #43
kelseydh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people forget that it was only recently that the Photos app on your iPhone could run OCR text search on pictures in your phone. Google had that feature on their phones many years before Apple.

Apple's TTS voices still run on 10 year old technology. Pretty disappointing, at one time the had the best system voices.

Having worked on Apple's TTS for more than a decade, I can state with confidence that this is utter bullshit and you don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Both in terms of quality, and of the underlying technology used, Apple's current TTS is in no way comparable to what existed 10 years ago (at Apple, or anywhere else in the industry).

I challenge you to find a 2014 recording that is on par with a contemporary Siri voice.

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

#66

Post by fernandotakai »

hu3 wrote: post #56
kelseydh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

i have a pixel 9 with gemini. i absolutely hate it. google assistant is miles ahead.

and btw, i'm not the only one complaining https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jdpvnq/gemini...

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

#67

Post by rsynnott »

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.

Theory: a lot of this work was started a few years back, when it was a common belief that LLMs would continue to improve at a breakneck pace. That has now happened, so now they’re stuck with a lot of clearly Not Good Enough stuff.

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

#68

Post by tokioyoyo »

jonplackett wrote: post #63
AnonC wrote: post #55

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 be…

They need to stop shooting for the moon and just release some incremental improvements. Like you say, Siri is borderline completely useless. Just timers for me. Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. They even have this ChatGPT integration that Siri seems totally incapable of using in any meaningful way.

I might be completely wrong, but by making “pro-privacy bets”, they shot themselves in the foot. Average customer ended up really not caring about the benefits that we try to promote, which hinders the development and features in some sense. Also, it’s still a pain for them to integrate AI in their second biggest market — China.

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

#69

Post by spinningarrow »

2dvisio wrote: post #60
haunter wrote: post #47

Siri can’t even answer what month it is so the only way is up from here I guess https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jehkpm/apple_intel...

I had to try to believe and I'm baffled.

Mine told me the entire date instead of just the month.

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

#70

Post by tokioyoyo »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #27
worstdevna wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. Apple just doesn’t have anything like that with AI. Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid re…

They could add some “wow factors”, but the rate of error is still too big to ship it. Like, I don’t think it would be impossible for them to have a live language converter using LLMs when you call somewhere in a different language. But being responsible for stuff is just a can of worms that nobody wants to sign up for.
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