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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

#61

Post by tzs »

I don't use Siri much, but I have noticed sometime over the last few months a problem in something that Siri uses. That's the voice dictation. I use it all the time on iPad to enter search terms.

So for instance if I wanted information on public transit options in London I'd tap the search bar in Safari, tap the mic icon, and say "Public transit options in London" and that used to work pretty much all the time. It would even work if I had a loud TV on or loud music on, and it was great about realizing when I'd stopped speaking and automatically starting the search.

Lately it has tended to cut off early, so I only get "Public transit options" entered. I can get it to work if I try again and say each word very loud and with a distinct short gap between the words.

My understanding is that modern dictation systems make heavy use of deep learning so I'd expect it shares from underlying technology with Siri. I wonder if there is a problem with that underlying technology?

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#62

Post by amluto »

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 would argue that the problem with Siri isn’t the model. Siri is perfectly fine at transcribing speech, although it seems to struggle with figuring out when an instruction ends. But Siri is awful at doing anything with even simple instructions:

- It regularly displays an accurate transcription with exactly the same text that usually works and then sits there, apparently indefinitely, doing nothing.

- Sometimes it’s very slow to react. This seems to be separate from the above “takes literally forever” issue.

- Siri is apparently incapable of doing a lot of things that ought to work. For example, for years, trying to use Siri on a watch to place a call on Bluetooth (while the phone is right there) would have nonsensical effects.

These won’t be fixed with a better model. They will be fixed with a better architecture. OpenAI and Anthopic can’t provide that except insofar as they might inspire Apple to wire useful functionality up to something like MCP to allow the model to do useful things.

> Even my son suggested things like "I wish your phone had ChatGPT and you could ask it to organize all your apps into folders" – we can all come up with really basic things they could've done so easily, with privacy built in.

I’m not convinced the industry knows how to expose uncontrolled data like one’s folders to an LLM without gaping exploit opportunities. Apple won’t exploit you deliberately, as that’s not their MO, but they are not immune to letting things resembling instructions that are in one of your folders exploit you.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#63

Post by anon373839 »

martinald wrote: post #22
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?

Not only that, but funneling every user query to Sam Altman isn’t exactly on-brand for Apple, also.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#66

Post by msgodel »

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…

This approach would be fine if users were empowered to add AI integration they wanted on their own.

They are not though. Absolute control over the platform means Apple has the responsibility to have more vision for the future than anyone else. They do not and will fail to satisfy their users. It will result in either a dramatic change of leadership and strategy and or drive the customers elsewhere.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#67

Post by barkerja »

nickthegreek wrote: post #59
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.

I really like perplexity. It’s now my default search. there are ways to get perplexity pro for extremely cheap. I recommend those with a passing interest try it out.

Perplexity is great. I’ve been a happy paying customer for a while.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#68

Post by barkerja »

bitpush wrote: post #50
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To be fair, Apple Maps is FAR better today than when it first launched.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#69

Post by barkerja »

adabyron wrote: post #45

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.

That’s essentially what app intents are.

Re: Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri

#70

Post by bitpush »

barkerja wrote: post #68
bitpush wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, Apple Maps is FAR better today than when it first launched.

Yup, but limited in scope. And occasionally fails spectacularly.
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