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Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#21

Post by halJordan »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #16
atonse wrote: 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-trivial…

Obviously reasonable minds may disagree. And i do i disagree with your disagree-al. Your reasonable response necessarily stems from a foundation that llms are just stochastic parrots incapable of non-trivially changing someone's usage. That isn't true, and has been shown to be untrue in many domains at this point. And that's only from the chatbot form of llms. Tool usage and agents will reveal more new paradigms

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#22

Post by martinald »

jonplackett wrote: post #4

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?

Absolutely lost what is going on. Awni Hannun on Twitter works for Apple on the MLX team and is always completely up to date on all the local LLM models and their capabilities. They literally have a team of people building MLX for doing model inference on Apple Silicon.

Does someone need to send someone an email to realise you don't need a huge frontier model to do basic tool calling like this?

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#23

Post by hylaride »

WA wrote: post #14
int_19h wrote: 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.

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.

> 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.

The same thing did happen to Apple Maps, but many people still default to google (though google maps is still significantly better at finding businesses). But Apple was humiliated by the Apple Maps rollout. Siri has just been a slow-burning joke that's only really useful for setting a timer or reminder.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#24

Post by thejazzman »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #16
atonse wrote: 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-trivial…

> Siri, open the east door

> Siri, open the east door They kinda really super suck. Siri used to work better than it does today. It's often a bigger chore than opening the app and tapping the button.

These quirks hit me on a daily basis when all I want to do is control my lights and locks

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#25

Post by mrtesthah »

seydor wrote: post #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)

Oh wow, you just came up with a smartphone killer! How can I invest in your multibillion dollar idea?

/s

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#26

Post by jurgenaut23 »

atonse wrote: 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…

It doesn’t matter. No one buys an iPhone for Siri and no one switches to Android for whatever they call this thing. I have owned an iPhone for more than 15 years, and I have used Siri a dozen times.

They will implement something using GPT-4 or Claude and this whole mess will be forgotten.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#27

Post by cheeze »

blakesterz wrote: post #9

I would've held off on buying a new phone another year (AT LEAST) had I known all that Apple Intelligence hype was just hype.

Did people actually think "we've added AI" was a selling point for the new flagships?

Felt like the most obvious "CEO says we need to do this, doesn't matter if it isn't ready" kinda thing. Straight up checking a box for parity with Samsung et al.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#28

Post by halJordan »

int_19h wrote: post #6
jonplackett wrote: post #4

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.

If the model runs on apple servers then the data isn't leaking anywhere. There's no 180 to discuss.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#29

Post by hylaride »

canjobear wrote: post #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.

The problem with Apple is that their corporate culture doesn't vibe well with a lot of new tech. Their culture of secrecy held them back with the original "smart assistants" as all the best talent were PhDs who wanted to publish, but apple wouldn't allow that; on top of that, they didn't pay top dollar like Google or Amazon did at the time, either (whom also let their employees publish on top of that!).

Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology to possibly keep up unless they loosen up. But they're being run by a bunch of 50+ year old white guys trying to still be cool, but not understanding what's really going on. I'm not saying they need to publish a roadmap or anything, but they need to tell their marketing dept. to piss off and that not everything needs to be a "delightful surprise" on stage.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#30

Post by halJordan »

drexlspivey wrote: post #3

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.

That rumor was a rumor about apple replacing its search engine. Perplexity has a home grown search engine.

Regardless i dont accept the false constraint the Apple simply must buy a foundation model or whatever that means. Perplexity's "wrapper" does a better job than chatgpt or geminiin its domain.

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