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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

#121

Post by kotaKat »

smcleod wrote: post #82
netcan wrote: 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

They spent more time polishing voices than they did on actual features, if anything, regressing them to the stone ages in terms of its primitive form.

Plus, there’s no more humor. Trying to crack jokes at it used to give funny responses. Even old things like “I need to hide a body” — “I don’t know how to respond to that”. Insult it and it’s a “I won’t respond to that”. Lots of old funnies are now gone and stripped away.

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

#122

Post by kossTKR »

JimDabell wrote: post #99
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…

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…

Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f?

Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..

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

#123

Post by deanc »

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...

Sometimes I ask it the time and it takes time to think and gives up. It's absolutely and utterly useless.

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

#124

Post by korale »

Apple needs a major change in the way they do software overall. AI is one concrete manifestation of their issues but it runs much deeper. They still produce great hardware but it's held back by their software. Would love to see them rethink the entire stack from the OS APIs and SDKs, dev tools, WatchOS, to features like extensibility, Shortcuts, and of course, how they leverage AI. At this point, they should probably retire the name Siri and introduce their next gen AI under a new name. They also need to really step up their approach to testing and software quality across the board.

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

#125

Post by marmarama »

juujian wrote: post #112
hi_hi wrote: post #110

Does Google have an LLM based AI experience for Android? What are they doing differently to avoid the problems plaguing Apple. The core technology in both can't be that different. Or is it an expectation thing? I feel like they may be experiencing that issue where the product is quite good within some core set of features, but the edge cases are where all the paper cuts happen. And when its a singular product on a si…

Android has it, but it has much fewer features then the previous assistant. So what's the point? Yes, they were first, tothey beat apple. Except it doesn't work.

The Gemini Assistant is pretty close to feature parity now with the old Assistant, it got a lot better very quickly. And obviously it's a lot better at conversations.

I don't miss the old Assistant at all now.

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

#126

Post by Lanolderen »

smcleod wrote: post #82
netcan wrote: 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

All of them feel to me like they went backwards. In the beginning you could say you killed someone and it'd show you the nearest park/forest to bury them in. Now you can't even get them to play X on Spotify half the time.

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

#127

Post by ninkendo »

korale wrote: post #124

Apple needs a major change in the way they do software overall. AI is one concrete manifestation of their issues but it runs much deeper. They still produce great hardware but it's held back by their software. Would love to see them rethink the entire stack from the OS APIs and SDKs, dev tools, WatchOS, to features like extensibility, Shortcuts, and of course, how they leverage AI. At this point, they should probably…

There’s no easy answer here, starting from scratch and rethinking everything carries a very high risk of disaster.

They just need to start giving a shit. Care about bugs for once. The whole software org needs to take the time to go through their (clearly) enormous backlog of bugs, and shore up what they have.

The problem isn’t the architecture or vision or rethinking their stack, it’s that what they have is barely holding together under its own weight. They need to do the unsexy work of going through and shoring it up.

As for Siri, just give the job to OpenAI. Let them write the new thing, they’ll probably be done in a month.

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

#128

Post by rchaud »

svnt wrote: post #31
knowriju wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by 'doing' rather than 'deciding' especially at the c-suite level ? I thought that's what c-suites are paid to do - 'strategy' and 'capital allocation'. Any example company you have in mind that has leadership actively 'doing' ?

Parent is saying there are too many middle managers/execs and not enough engineers with agency.

Or in HN parlance, "MBA management".

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

#129

Post by apwell23 »

amelius wrote: post #94
jonplackett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how does current siri manage to be safe for all audiences.

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

#130

Post by pjmlp »

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 is now, there was very little wow factor when Copland was being developed and they were at the edge of bankrupcy, long were the days of Mac Classic and LCs.

What is saving them this time around is the way they have been priting money with iDevices.

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