Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 581 posts

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

#141

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

LoganDark wrote: post #25
swatcoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face. It's very well-known that Apple is perfectionistic. I'm not meaning to say that perfectionism is a negative quality or a bad thing, just that it takes a while.

Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative. The entire company is performing software development instead of actually doing it.

Apple's development process is a marketing pitch-driven hallucination - project management by buzzword and individual career status progression.

It's almost entirely inward-looking. The connection to Rest of World is increasingly mythical and remote.

Some good work gets done in spite of this. But senior management doesn't understand quality - either in the internal sense of having bug-free robust product, or the design sense, where products meet real user needs in a satisfying, creative, and delightful way.

Nice graphic design though. Apple is still the leader there. Processor dev has also been exceptional.

IMO it's time for most of the C-suite to step down and let much younger talent take over and shake things up.

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

#142

Post by rmholt »

rifty wrote: post #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…

But opening the interface would be horribly insecure though. People could make competing products to Apples own offering!

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

#143

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

> Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half.

The concrete value-measure for me is whether I would feel any loss as a user if Siri simply disappeared. The answer is no, I would feel no loss.

But this is also true for me if the subject is Gemini, CoPilot, Alexa, &c. For all the money and energy burned, for all the advertising babble and grotesque valuation, I would not as a user be one jot less productive if the invisible Thanos hand of the market made them all disappear at the end of this sentence.

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

#144

Post by nerdponx »

Culonavirus wrote: post #71
tokioyoyo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe go all in on local on device low latency LLMs? They make their own hardware so they could probably do it and do it well with enough focus and investment.

The M chips are pretty much perfect for this.

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

#145

Post by infecto »

Apple Intelligence was a massive letdown. I'd love to read the post-mortem. They had a huge opportunity to leap ahead, but instead we got some fairly underwhelming, AI-generated images. I’m guessing the models they built—both on-device and in Apple’s cloud just aren’t very good? The integration should’ve been the easy part; they control both the OS and the apps.

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

#146

Post by mtrovo »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #143
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…

> Siri has been close to useless for a decade and a half. The concrete value-measure for me is whether I would feel any loss as a user if Siri simply disappeared. The answer is no, I would feel no loss. But this is also true for me if the subject is Gemini, CoPilot, Alexa, &c. For all the money and energy burned, for all the advertising babble and grotesque valuation, I would not as a user be one jot less productive…

As an Android user I have to disagree, at least if we're comparing apples to apples (could not resist the pun).

Google Assistant with Gemini (or whatever its name is this month) is really remarkable at helping with mundane tasks, and I would really miss it if it were gone. Circle to search, asking questions about my agenda, and setting up new events on my calendar based simply on taking photos of documents or posters is so convenient that I really buy the concept of having an AI personal assistant.

And because this is a very sticky feature when delivered properly, if Apple is not involved it gives a very strong competitive advantage to Android flagships.

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

#147

Post by Telemakhos »

kumarvvr wrote: post #92
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…

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 exam…

I was unaware of Apple’s military drone and missile programs. Could you point me to more information on those? I’m having trouble even imagining what an Apple drone would cost.

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

#148

Post by rightbyte »

Jyaif wrote: post #59
swatcoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Your putting of words in his mouth is better. I think he would sell it as not an AI or LLM or whatever.

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

#149

Post by rightbyte »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #141
LoganDark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face. It's very well-known that Apple is perfectionistic. I'm not meaning to say that perfectionism is a negative quality or a bad thing, just that it takes a while.

Apple is not perfectionistic. Apple is performative. The entire company is performing software development instead of actually doing it. Apple's development process is a marketing pitch-driven hallucination - project management by buzzword and individual career status progression. It's almost entirely inward-looking. The connection to Rest of World is increasingly mythical and remote. Some good work gets done in spit…

Has things gone cracy since I last used OSX for real in 2008 or whatever? Windows have become such a shitshow since Windows 7. I kinda assumed Apple didn't follow suite.

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

#150

Post by Legend2440 »

infecto wrote: post #145

Apple Intelligence was a massive letdown. I'd love to read the post-mortem. They had a huge opportunity to leap ahead, but instead we got some fairly underwhelming, AI-generated images. I’m guessing the models they built—both on-device and in Apple’s cloud just aren’t very good? The integration should’ve been the easy part; they control both the OS and the apps.

They over-promised and under-delivered.

Many of the most interesting features (like LLM Siri) were ultimately cut from ios 18. Maybe next year.

Post reply on HN