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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#71

Post by ianferrel »

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to " This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to " and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#72

Post by DrewADesign »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #59
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

"Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume" "Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

Ah I never felt inspired to use it on a computer and always use physical volume controls in the car and through headphones, so I wouldn’t have run into that. It does seem like something that should be a day-one sort of feature.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#73

Post by alex1138 »

ecshafer wrote: post #47
elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst drivi…

You would think it's the opposite. "I'll tell you where the gas station is because it's preferable to you looking at a screen in your death can"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#74

Post by syntaxing »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From 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 i…

I find it hard to believe privacy is the issue. Chinese companies have no issue releasing great self hostable models (and some admittedly nearly impossible to self host due to the sheer size)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#75

Post by benoau »

torben-friis wrote: post #36
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From 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 i…

If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though. Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time. They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product. I don't get why they went for the rush.…

Because today they're racing against regulators for the privilege of setting their own service as the preinstalled, exclusive, default with APIs only they are allowed to use.

They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.

If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#76

Post by dawnerd »

ianferrel wrote: post #71
elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my…

I back this, it used to work very well for me. Timers, music, etc. Now it's like I'm trying to ask a toddler.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#77

Post by jagged-chisel »

smelendez wrote: post #55
npunt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.

Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor? A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.

I can set location-based alerts manually. For me, or for those who voluntarily already share their location with me. No reason Siri can’t drive those same notifications.

Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#78

Post by swyx »

eurekin wrote: post #61
swyx wrote: post #10

brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google 2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT) 2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under on…

This is quite a spectacular CV. Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.

the truth is ~none of us in the HN peanut gallery have any appreciation for what its like managing AI inside software inside Apple. it's less a technical role and more of an executive/politics/leadership role. im sure the disappointing progress shares a lot of blame and he was unfortunately the fall guy. estimated compensation $10-30m/yr for last 7 years tho...

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#79

Post by drob518 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #65
yunwal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never been able to play music with Siri. Even something as simple as “play this specific album” gets completely bungled.

Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service? I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request prob…

It’s extremely hit or miss for me. Sometimes it works and I’m amazed. Other times it fails to play my main playlist that I’ve played 1000 times before.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#80

Post by djohnston »

sethops1 wrote: post #41
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From 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 i…

If total invasion of privacy is the only way to make AI useful, then maybe it isn't useful?

You'd have to expand on that because I don't see why one is related to the other. People get value out of giving their data to OpenAI. They don't care. So what?
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