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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

#271

Post by kube-system »

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.

Apple Intelligence already uses LLMs today in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.

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

#272

Post by ben7799 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #252
scarface_74 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I feel dumb for asking him :) Yeah I had that game on my Mac LCII back in 1992 and Parena was great too. The point still stands though. The operating systems were horrible back in the mid 90s and both Macs I had back then - the Mac LCII and PowerMac 6100 - were cripple by being a half speed bus. Back before it was necessary.

You're objectively right. I have been running emulators recently with System 6.0 and was surprised at how much crashing I must have just tolerated. I shouldn't have made it appear that I was defending the quality of pre-OSX Mac OS. (Although we were talking about how quality has come down of late.) As an engineer before Jobs came back — and for a few years too after he was back — there was still a sense that engineer…

I was in college in the mid-late 90s. There was this brief period where all of a sudden it became painfully aware how much Mac OS was crashing. I was regularly using SGI, Sun, and IBM Unix workstations and Linux had just become available. I don't think I ever saw any commercial unix workstation "crash" and Linux the crashes were usually my fault.

If you were only using Windows you barely noticed, but if you used much Unix Mac OS got pretty painful. I mostly remember this from taking a digital music/video class and that was basically the only thing I used Macs for at that time. You never really got through an hour or two editing video or audio without a crash or two. We had Avid workstations where they controlled this by tightly controlling the software on the Macs, but I never actually got permission to use them.

There were also behavior patterns. If you only used Mac you were in a behavior pattern where you'd crash the machine less. If you were using Unix workstations a lot your behavior subtly changed and you tried to do more stuff at the same time. If you then went back over to the Mac and overloaded the Mac the same way it was a bad time.

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

#273

Post by dylan604 »

babyent wrote: post #262
dylan604 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe not?? Pretty much everyone that I've seen using Siri are most definitely not techy people. I'm far from the echo chamber SV bubble, so I spend more time around non-techy people than techy people.

Seeing how there are more non-techy than techy people, it feels like Apple has reached their target audience. If Apple depended solely on techy people, they'd need another bail out from MS or Googs to stay solvent.

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

#274

Post by quesera »

tiahura wrote: post #195
acdha wrote: post #169

I have to say that while I’d somewhat like to have a better Siri, it’d make more of a difference in my daily life if they would put those engineers on fixing text input so I didn’t have to change “snd” to “and” dozens of times a day or deal with bizarre and ungrammatical suggestions.

I’d be happy with just being able to accurately position the cursor.

Many people are unaware of the ability to precisely position the cursor with the iOS keyboard by long-pressing the spacebar.

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

#275

Post by dieulot »

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…

> Craig Federighi […] merging iOS and macOS team together.

What year was that?

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

#276

Post by WoodenChair »

numbsafari wrote: post #256
ksec wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Putting too much trust on Eddy Cue I've never understood the love for Eddy Cue. Apple pundits all seem to love him. Personally, I am really unimpressed by everything he's done. My understanding is he's been really good at negotiating big contracts. I just don't think his execution or vision are exciting and, as you are hinting at, I don't think his moral compass points in the right direction. That said, despite som…

Eddy Cue did an amazing job with the original Apple.com online store in the late 90s, the first version of the iTunes Music Store, and the early App Store. Interestingly these were all big WebObjects apps.

I wonder if there’s some interesting server-side technology culture story here and how it trickles down to the way services operate for consumers on the client side. Just pure speculation.

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

#277

Post by rusk »

iainmerrick wrote: post #219
rusk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reason why most apps couldn’t be cloud hosted and devote all the significant local edge compute to such a digital companion.

That seems like the opposite of what they were suggesting? Unless by “edge compute” you meant user’s devices, but I assume you intended the usual meaning of CDN edges.

No I meant user’s device. It’s the edge of the application space.

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

#278

Post by kccqzy »

Spivak wrote: post #183
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…

Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer? The en…

> The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.

That's just bland business-speak. Jobs had a knack for illustrating things in unexpected ways and this was it. I have no doubt that whoever saw the fish tank thing had the same takeaway as if Jobs simply said he wanted the iPhone to be smaller and there would be resources dedicated to it.

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

#279

Post by kube-system »

mrweasel wrote: post #223
kamil55555 wrote: post #98

I just don't understand how a huge company like Apple managed to mess up Siri so badly. Siri used to be useful, now it is a piece of crap.

No one at Apple uses Siri, that would be my guess and it provides no value to the company. Heck I'm surprised when anyone uses voice assistance in general. Voice assistance was the hyped thing sometime before block chain and LLMs. Everyone needed one or was working on one. So Siri got stuck into the iPhone, like Apple Intelligence is now, because "the market" needed Apple to do so to keep stock prices going up. Then…

People don't use it because when it was first introduced, it responded "I found some web results for that" for the complex types of things people wanted to ask it.

The technology exists for much better responses to those types of requests today, but who knows if they can re-train their customers that it'll work for them now.

There are definitely a lot of complicated personal-assistant type tasks that they could do now that people would like.

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

#280

Post by scarface_74 »

veidr wrote: post #212
scarface_74 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple basically _did_ die, after Performa/Copland (and let's not forget Open Transport!!) The resuscitation was truly miraculous.

And QuickDraw GX and another quickly abandoned technology that came with System 7 Pro.
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