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Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

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Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#11
post #6

I find this all quite baffling. I’m pretty sure I could knock up a decent Siri clone with got4o-mini, because I already did a bootleg Alexa to power our smart home stuff after Amazon removed the privacy controls. The only hard bit was the wake word. Siri is currently so terrible that even something like Mistral 8b could do a decent job. Whey don’t they just run something like that on their own servers instead?

They are competing against Gemini on Android, so it stands to reason that they need something on par with that. Per TFA they are still talking about running those models on Apple's own servers. The more interesting question is how they're going to handle the 180 on all the talk about privacy.

Claude can be used via amazon bedrock technically on your own managed AWS infra...

But yeah you're not trusting Anthropic but Apple + Amazon

I dunno if thats even a win?

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#12

There are rumors around that Apple is trying to buy perplexity which makes no sense to me. Perplexity doesn’t have their own foundation model they just wrap existing models so what good are they? They should buy Mistral instead.

I read on some other thread perplexity / android integration and app was somewhat decent. Might be the easiest way to acquire a team for Android dev?

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#13
I understand apple's strategy. If they had really good AI, their phones and watches would be reduced to a microphone and speaker. No more advantage. So they stick to crappy AI that forces users to tap on their phone frustratingly instead. Their idea about running openAI models is meant to make people disable AI features altogether. Brilliant strategy (/s)

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#14
post #6

I find this all quite baffling. I’m pretty sure I could knock up a decent Siri clone with got4o-mini, because I already did a bootleg Alexa to power our smart home stuff after Amazon removed the privacy controls. The only hard bit was the wake word. Siri is currently so terrible that even something like Mistral 8b could do a decent job. Whey don’t they just run something like that on their own servers instead?

They are competing against Gemini on Android, so it stands to reason that they need something on par with that. Per TFA they are still talking about running those models on Apple's own servers. The more interesting question is how they're going to handle the 180 on all the talk about privacy.

They could secretly make Siri slightly better in intervals. People have a low opinion of Siri anyways. No way they compare Siri to Gemini. For them, Siri might just stop sucking completely at some point and then the comparison is between the Siri of the last several weeks and the old Siri.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#15

Maybe they should just start putting 16gb ram in iPhones from now on and make their local inference job so much easier.

Too late, iphone 17 pro is already in production with 12 GB. They should have done it two years ago, it was such an obvious move.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#16
post #7

At this point, just about anything Apple can do will be way way way better than the absolute turd that is Siri. (It was only impressive 15 years ago). Apple's AI strategy has seriously hurt their reputation. I'd love to be a fly on the wall where they discussed a strategy that amounted to "forget using the most basic LLM to understand combinations of commands like, stop all the timers and just keep the one that has a…

I know this is the leading narrative, but I actually disagree.

Apple has a wonderful set of products without any form of generative AI, and those products continues to exist. Yes there is opportunity to add some fancy natural-language based search / control, but that seems like relatively low hanging fruit compared to the moat they have and defend.

Will adding gen ai natively to apple products have people non-trivially change the way they use iphones or macs? Probably not. So there is literally no rush here.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#18
And here's me trying to figure out what I would need AI on a phone. Apps are going to phone home and use their own AI, not Apple's. I don't need an AI to set a timer, search Google, or add to my calendar. If I write anything, I do it on my main machine.

Really wish this would be optional, but you know it won't be.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#19
post #11
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are competing against Gemini on Android, so it stands to reason that they need something on par with that. Per TFA they are still talking about running those models on Apple's own servers. The more interesting question is how they're going to handle the 180 on all the talk about privacy.

Claude can be used via amazon bedrock technically on your own managed AWS infra... But yeah you're not trusting Anthropic but Apple + Amazon I dunno if thats even a win?

[deleted]

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#20
I’m not surprised that Apple has been struggling to integrate LLMs. By their very stochastic nature they go against Apple’s philosophy of total vertical control of every aspect of their products. There’s no way to guarantee that an LLM will do anything and so they would be ceding control of the user experience to a random number generator.
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