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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

#261

Post by officeplant »

scarface_74 wrote: post #202
JKCalhoun wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you're saying, but the Cult of Jobs had its downsides too. I think Apple started to die with the iPod and got worse the more successful it became. Then again, maybe I always prefer the underdog.

You do remember the crash prone classic MacOS, the ridiculous Performa line, the Copland disaster and that Apple was almost bankrupt? Also the classic MacOS where you (the user) had to pre allocate memory per application and where holding down the mouse button stopped any application from running in the background.

It's wild but my own issue free MacOS era was OS9 on my iBook G3 clamshell. Had to replace a harddrive (bounced down a stairwell, but held together) and upgraded the ram, but other than that fine experience.

My next Mac was a 2008 Macbook Pro (non-unibody) that had backlight issues out of the box, failed display cable two years in, and then the GPU failed. (Nvidia plague era, and Steve Jobs silence plague era of shit-ass fan curves)

To this day I still refuse to trust Apple's fan curves and install fan control software. Especially the M1 iMac with the cut down graphics that they only gave one fan and a smaller heatsink. Watched it break 100C regularly.

The m1/m2 mac mini might be the only one I've never had issues with the stock fan curves so far, but I still bump them up anyway for peace of mind. I don't see a reason to let an SoC hit 98C even if its rated to do so.

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

#262

Post by babyent »

dylan604 wrote: post #240
SirMaster wrote: post #218

Do people actually want this AI stuff in their phone? I don't want AI on my desktop/laptop computer and I don't want it on my phone either. None of my family or friends that I talk to seem to want it either.

From the number of people that do say "Hey, Siri", I'd suspect that people do want it. The concept is a nice one. Hands free. Remote control things with your voice. Super convenient by not having to have the device sitting next to you, just within earshot. Not even needing to be a mobile device. Just gizmo somewhere in the room. For non-technical people, it's utterly magic as a concept. For technical people, it's a p…

Is it odd that I’ve never seen anyone say hey siri irl? And I’m in tech in Bay Area.

And whenever they do use Siri, holding the button to talk to her, it is to set a timer.

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

#263

Post by ben7799 »

veidr wrote: post #208
lapcat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS…

Yeah, I personally remember "10.6.0 utterly fucking sucks" (though it got better) — hard to remember the details, which is probably in my personal best interest, but I remember fairly vividly shouting that to friends over beers somewhere. And I also remember 10.7 actually being better and where I thought Mac OS X (and its macOS rebrand) peaked, for interactive/workstation use. However I ran a 10.6.x virtual machine (…

I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective.

I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."

It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.

Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.

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

#264

Post by wtallis »

programmertote wrote: post #177
alexpotato wrote: post #164

I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…

Not relevant to what you are discussing related to attention to detail (which I agree with). This is my imaginary scenario -- if Steve Jobs were to tell me in a meeting, "I see air bubbles coming out of the phone", I (as an engineer) would reply to him, "Dude, that air is carrying excess heat out of the phone via convection. If you don't leave any space in between hot electronic components, your phone will be a toast…

There aren't a lot of phones that have air vents, except for the ones that also have fans. Convection doesn't work at those sizes and power levels. Thermal design for phones is all about conduction, getting the heat out to the surface of the device and spread evenly enough that there's no hotspot that would be uncomfortable for the user holding the device.

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

#265

Post by m3kw9 »

ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

It’s not the person, it’s the culture at Apple. They are too PG rated, privacy focused culturally and AI currently is impossible to have full control of these things. Starting from early Siri, there is almost no change, it’s still randomly stupid af. I’m willing to bet the new guy will not able to steer them either unless he makes some really bold moves to extract themselves from this loop.

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

#266

Post by kccqzy »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #68
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.

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.

Apple doesn't care about privacy in China. Even iCloud data on China was held by a Chinese custodian. The pain they experienced to integrate AI in China was because of the rule that Apple must choose a Chinese partner to integrate with. So they cannot choose OpenAI like they did in the rest of the world. They also couldn't choose Google Gemini or Anthropic obviously. They evaluated at least Alibaba's Qwen and DeepSeek and maybe some more.

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

#267

Post by saghm »

behnamoh wrote: post #166
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…

> It’s not a big deal if it remains so for another half a decade. Nobody outside of Apple has any expectations on it. But when Apple advertises literally all their new devices as "Built for Apple Intelligence" without actually delivering on that promise, that's just false advertising.

Wouldn't it be easier to just stop saying that rather than trying to let the marketing language drive the engineering goals?

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

#268

Post by veidr »

gadders wrote: post #250
veidr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL I did not click the links because I don't want to visit that site (and also have limited interest in what DHH says about Apple Intelligence — not none, but not enough to click it), but I am actually very curious as to why DHH (or anyone, but especially someone like him, with many other places to opine) would post his opinions on LinkedIn of all places...? Can anybody square that circle?

He seems to be quite active on there. I think he also has a blog on hey.com but that's blocked at my employer as it's an email domain.

Oh, that blocking is most likely the reason, then, which does make sense. He posted a more complete version to hey.com:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-does-ai-as-microsoft-did-mob...

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

#269

Post by musictubes »

ksec wrote: post #237
ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…

The biggest thing that Ahrendts did was merge the online and physical stores. People forget that before she came around there was very little overlap. If you bought something online and you wanted to return it you had to ship it back instead of going to a store. It was one of the things that Cook wanted to get done by retail.

Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.

It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.

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

#270

Post by cageface »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #96
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Only in the US. Apple Maps is still far behind Google Maps in most of the rest of the world.
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