Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#12IMO the problem is he was going for "real AI" instead of "fake it until you make it" AI.
Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#13I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.
Nah, ksec had a great post in a thread a few months ago about a number of senior execs Tim Cook has promoted to positions to which they're ill-suited. John Giannandrea was just one of many such people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436174
An organization of Apple's size doesn't fail due to the mistakes of a single person, unless that person is the CEO.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#14IMO the problem is he was going for "real AI" instead of "fake it until you make it" AI. Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."
But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s
Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#15Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.
Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl). Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..
I remember buying the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it being the first iPhone to ship with Siri. It's 2025, and Siri is still fundamentally useless.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#16Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#17From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.
People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#18Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
I use it almost daily, to set timers and alarms
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl). Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..
I remember buying the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it being the first iPhone to ship with Siri. It's 2025, and Siri is still fundamentally useless.
Well, it's still powered by the old codebase doing slot-filling named entity/intent detection that will route you to safari the moment it gets stuck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#20Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.
Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds. Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).
Just like a person would!