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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

#411

Post by sroussey »

eric-hu wrote: post #339
kstrauser wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the tra…

Don’t forget the Touch Bars.

I love the Touch Bar. Should have been above the function keys

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

#412

Post by ianbicking »

AlexandrB wrote: post #91
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…

Moravec's Paradox strikes again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

That's also a nice explanation of why brain size among mammals scales with body size without necessarily leading to higher-order intelligence.

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

#413

Post by jldugger »

visarga wrote: post #43
kelseydh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people forget that it was only recently that the Photos app on your iPhone could run OCR text search on pictures in your phone. Google had that feature on their phones many years before Apple.

Apple's TTS voices still run on 10 year old technology. Pretty disappointing, at one time the had the best system voices.

The ML blog seems to disagree with that take: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/on-device-neural-... (2021)

> Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, such as Tacotron and WaveRNN, have made it possible to construct a fully neural network based TTS system, by coupling the two components together. [...] However, the high computational cost of the system and issues with robustness have limited their usage in real-world speech synthesis applications and products. In this paper, we present key modeling improvements and optimization strategies that enable deploying these models, not only on GPU servers, but also on mobile devices

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

#414

Post by samatman »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #394
kstrauser wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the tra…

> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.

I've never heard from anyone who likes the Apple Mouse enough to use it, but doesn't like the charging from the bottom. It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it, this has become a bit of conventional wisdom. In reality it's a non-issue.

I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.

I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.

If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.

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

#415

Post by ToucanLoucan »

artimaeis wrote: post #399
PaulHoule wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of Microsoft’s bad habit of introducing meaningless superficial changes to the interface but they also keep legacy software working for a long long time. (Office ‘97 works fine on Win 11) The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks —- they…

Lots of people in this thread (correctly!) pointing out Apple's struggles with releasing high quality user software on MacOS. But at least when they changed the System Settings UI in MacOS Ventura (10.13) they managed to stick the landing. Not that I necessarily _like_ the new Settings UI, but there's no jumping into old UIs to configure things. Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, and here we are 13 years later usi…

It really is the worst of both worlds. I don't like change for change's sake which we seem to agree on (though I do like the newer MacOS but we can agree to disagree there, that's strictly a matter of subjective taste) but it is INFURIATING and frankly should be embarrassing what a mess Windows is now. Change for change's sake is bad enough, they're currently doing... change for change's sake but not changing the whole thing because either they can't be fucked to finish the job or it was, for whatever reason, technically infeasible to complete it but they released it half-done anyway, in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10 and now 11. How fucking embarrassing.

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

#416

Post by rvnx »

MPSFounder wrote: post #392
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in c…

Cook has been exceptional for the stock. But we would likely all agree that on the product end (take Siri for example), it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did, I do not believe they would be ok with it being horrendous for over 10 years. Also Apple has had a lot of mishaps under Cook (the wireless Air charger that never got made, butterfly keyboards, Vision Pro, Siri, an OS t…

Also curious to have chosen John Giannandrea who was behind the failure of Google Assistant and from the era where Google was late in AI, to repeat the same failure with Siri

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

#417

Post by Spivak »

kthomson wrote: post #347
rchaud wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Isaacson biography has a section where Jobs speaks to the CEO of Corning (glass screen vendor, CEO was a materials engineer) with absolute Trumpian ignorance ("You don't know what you're doing!"). Corning wanted the business and thus had to coddle him like a baby to get him to see reality. It's tragic that so many business leaders in the US see this kind of bloviating as something to emulate. Reminds me of Altman…

Except this led to Corning repurposing a Kentucky plant and ramping manufacturing to meet the original iPhone launch. And Weeks (Corning CEO) has publicly praised Steve for helping him better assess risk as a leader.

Well yeah, this kind of ass-kissing is what is expected of you if you want to keep their business. Our great leader is so wise and insightful. I don't doubt that Weeks could take some lessons from Jobs in the areas of business he was actually good at.

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

#418

Post by LegNeato »

lapcat wrote: post #174
JimDabell wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish).

The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different.

Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".

AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs.

The Apple v1.1 software updates always fixed critical bugs, because:

1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in v1.1...which was developed concurrently with the end of v1.0 (hence why v1.1s came out right away)

2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested.

A v1.1 was always needed, though the issues they fixed became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices.

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

#419

Post by samtheprogram »

rchaud wrote: post #299
samtheprogram wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of my Samsung phones have ever advertised anything to me. I had a Galaxy S8. It definitely did. > Unlike iOS,there are any number of music player apps on Android that stay out of the way and don't try to be a "platform". iOS has other music players too. It was a choice that e.g. doubleTwist stopped supporting iOS when pivoting to CloudPlayer.

Galaxy S8 came out in 2017, almost a decade ago. I understand some budget and mid-range phones have ads, but I (in Canada) have used everything from S7, S8, S12, A51, Z Fold 3, and have never gotten one. There was a "Samsung Hub" app on the midrange A51 (similar to Google Discover), but that can be disabled.

You have never been encouraged to use Bixby or any other Samsung app?

Let’s define “ad”.

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

#420

Post by FredPret »

lsllc wrote: post #324
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…

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously. You can imagine how it usually works…

I read a very interesting theory in a great book called the Sovereign Individual.

The optimum firm size will go down as the cost of communications goes down. Back when messages had to be delivered on horseback, you wanted all your people in one office building.

But now you can send an email in 10 seconds for $0, so it becomes practical to have many spread-out firms cooperating.

Obviously this is not the only factor, but still.

There's another interesting idea in Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind: when many agents with approximately the same processing power cooperate, the higher-level agents must necessarily be out of touch with the details, and will make big policy decisions that look stupid to many of the lower-level agents who have more of the details but less of the big picture. His agents were all part of the same mind, but it seems eerily similar to politics and big-company management.

So maybe startups should try to hire people with startup experience from the same industry since big-picture politicking is less valuable to a startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size

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