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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

#91
post #79

Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in. From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot. Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dr…

Moravec's Paradox strikes again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

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

#92
post #79

Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in. From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot. Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dr…

I guess development is driven by military and commercial needs, rather than altruistic needs.

The futuristic ads were made for the consumer to feel safe and sound.

The actual money flowing went into military applications (drones, guidance systems, etc) and commercial applications (car factories)

For the above systems, they don't have to be physically capable, just have a restricted set of actions / outcomes, for example, flying a missile. But, they need to be mentally strong, to take decisions at split seconds.

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

#93
post #82
post #79

Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in. From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot. Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dr…

Siri's voice recognition has gone down a lot over the last 5 years actually, it used to be far more accurate, its speech has certainly improved to be more natural sounding. Its capabilities though... yikes

Siri wasn’t great but it was way, way more usable before the “machine learning” update whenever that was. Before it was a verbal command line, but at least you could learn some commands.

Now it’s a crapshoot.

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

#94
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.

> Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement.

I don't think Apple will ever use LLMs, given the offensive output they can generate sometimes. There is just no way to make them safe for all audiences.

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

#95
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

oh nooo! for now they still allow me to stay with the good old Google Assistant.

But it's only a matter of time until some exec removes it to "improve Gemini adoption".

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

#96

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…

>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.

I don't remember them ever doing that. Usually they start with something lacklustre then incrementally improve it until it is strong.

Maps is a great example, it was poor on launch compared to Google Maps but has now got to a level where most people don't bother with Google on the iPhone.

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

#97
I just wish they'd give up the interface already and open it instead of trying to reserve it only to be used by Siri for whenever they have a Siri personality-ified LLM or if ever the LLM works as a universal router for doing anything.

At a basic level i just want the interface to have good voice to text recognition. if it's a question ask an LLM, if it's a special recognized command run it instead.

At a dev/pro-user level let me define statement patterns (regex or semantics) where i can trigger a shortcut and parse some input from a single statement.

By all means, regen the custom responses devs and users setup with the Siri personality LLM so it sounds like Siri all the time. Just set the interface free already.

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

#99
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…

Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else in charge of software who will actually change the way they do things.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact Apple Music has notifications advertising it on my lock screen, or splash screens advertising it once a month when I open Music.app would have been unthinkable pre-Tim Cook.

As a user it feels disrespectful to be so overtly treated as an untapped revenue stream for a premium-price product. It's Samsung-esque.
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