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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

#41

Post by atonse »

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…

It's not about being fancy. My examples are so utterly dull.

Being able to say "turn on the lights in the living room and turn off the fans in the kids' rooms" – is not a crazy use case.

Instead, I literally have to say:

- Turn on Living Room light

- wait

- turn off bedroom fan

- wait

- turn off bedroom fan

Yes, I could actually say "turn off all the fans" (I believe Siri understands that) but that's usually not what I want.

Another example, you have 3-4 timers going: Let's say I'm cooking and have an oven timer, but also have a timer for my kids to stop their device time. I may have a few going. But being able to say "cancel all the timers except the longest one" is TRIVIAL for a first year programmer to implement. But instead, it's a slog with Siri.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#42

Post by bilsbie »

It’s getting kind of silly that we don’t have AI on phones in a usable way.

My wishlist:

Let me talk to AI about anything on my screen. Hey AI why did this guy email me? Hey AI what’s this webpage about? Etc

AI designs the UI on the fly depending on the task I’m doing. No more specific apps? just a fluid interface for whatever I need.

Leave AI in listening or video mode and ask about my environment or have a conversation.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#43

Post by leumon »

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.

They actually once used a neural net on-device in iOS 14, when they introduced the translate app. It worked offline, but actually sometimes produced some bad or hilarious translations.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#44

Post by imglorp »

jurgenaut23 wrote: post #26
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.

I would. Hands free in the car or when mowing the grass, chatting with the AI would be huge.

"Text my wife and say I'll be late." is still too much to ask: it responds with 20 questions about all the parameters.

"turn up the volume" does actually work for the first time, lately. (Bravo, Android).

"open app antenna pod and begin playing" is way out of the question. Suck.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#45

Post by adabyron »

IMO Apple's play here is to be the host that runs something like mcp servers and allows/encourages App devs to allow users to ask Siri to make requests that utilize their apps.

Then we can interact with multiple apps all via Siri and have them work together. To me that's a huge win.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#46

Post by minimaxir »

bilsbie wrote: post #42

It’s getting kind of silly that we don’t have AI on phones in a usable way. My wishlist: Let me talk to AI about anything on my screen. Hey AI why did this guy email me? Hey AI what’s this webpage about? Etc AI designs the UI on the fly depending on the task I’m doing. No more specific apps? just a fluid interface for whatever I need. Leave AI in listening or video mode and ask about my environment or have a conversa…

The bottleneck for AI on the phones is more hardware/compute, which due to the development lifecycle always lags a bit and the 2 years since the LLM boom tracks for changes that would need to be met to match the moment (e.g. iPhones shipping with more RAM for Apple Intelligence).

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#47

Post by jaredwiener »

sandspar wrote: post #32
jurgenaut23 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice, and marketing agencies already consider Gen Alpha to be “voice native.” I once saw a small child help his grandfather with a phone issue. The grandfather fumbled with the GUI, but the child opened Siri and solved it by voice. If Apple drops the ball on voice, it may not hurt them today - but they risk losing the next decade.

My in-laws use Siri/voice interactions almost exclusively, dictating text messages out-loud, searching for shows on Roku using the voice remote, etc.

Even my 2.5 year old will ask Alexa and Siri to do things, sometimes far away from any device that could respond.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#48

Post by int_19h »

halJordan wrote: post #28
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.

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

There's a big difference between running on a local device and running on Apple's servers, and their previous stance was that most things would be in the former category. Switching to cloud (even if it's Apple's cloud) for regular Siri stuff would be a big 180.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#49

Post by drexlspivey »

halJordan wrote: post #30
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.

Apple needs a team that knows how to train an LLM. Why would they need to buy perplexity to use their search engine?

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#50

Post by bitpush »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38
hylaride wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bein…

> problem with Apple is that their corporate culture doesn't vibe well with a lot of new tech Apple has never been the company that does it first. They're the company that does it right. Arguably, their fuckup with LLMs was rushing a garbage product to market instead of waiting and watching and perfecting in the background. > Apple is being far too conservative with a far too fast a developing piece of technology Str…

People love to parrot this, yet if you think for a second this isnt true at all in all the many ways.

1. Siri - not the first assistant, absolute garbage.

2. Apple Maps (original) - utter garbage at launch, slightly better today in US.

3. Vision Pro - Not the first VR headset. Massive failure.

If anything, Apple has been tremendously successful few times when they were not first (phones, tablets, silicon ..) but they have also been tremendously faltered when they were not first.

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