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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#221

Post by 1d22a »

PopePompus wrote: post #170
sfblah wrote: post #11

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?

The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far,…

Not to mention all the useless LLM fluff Gemini has. I turned off Gemini because simple questions like "What's 1 USD in AUD" would be met with 30 seconds of "As a large language model, I can't provide investment advice, so it's always important to check information yourself [...], but one Australian dollar is approximately $0.65" (note the conversion in the wrong direction). By comparison, Google Assistant just gives you a number straight away.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#222

Post by Mistletoe »

Why does the title of this post keep changing? I think this is at least the third iteration of it now. I don't understand the HN obsession with titles. Now half the comments don't even make sense or people wonder why they keep talking about Siri.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#223

Post by projektfu »

dididn284d wrote: post #215
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. "Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

Wow, I now feel old.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#224

Post by nahikoa »

drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

I had a nearly identical anecdote. I was driving my car to work soon I had moved to the Bay Area. I wanted to know what city I was currently on.

"Hey Siri, what city am I in?"

"Calling Ian"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#225

Post by barkerja »

syntaxing wrote: post #74
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)

China does not care about personal privacy, they only care about privacy beyond their political boundaries.

If you've never been to China, you need to look no further than the streets to understand this (cameras everywhere, social credit system, etc.)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#226

Post by jldugger »

ignoramous wrote: post #148
warbaker wrote: post #141

Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.

> Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri... From TFA Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year ... Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked Giannandrea ... Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership for when he eventually assumes the CEO role…

>Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership

Nah, IS&T has always been under the CFO, and apparently some fraction of AIML is headed under them.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#227

Post by mietek »

bsimpson wrote: post #163
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…

The tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker. A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at…

My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#228

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

epistasis wrote: post #49
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 was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…

I didn’t know for years that you can ask it to do things remotely over SSH.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#229

Post by the_mar »

singularity2001 wrote: post #99
estimator7292 wrote: post #60

Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever. We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent. In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me…

We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.

look if you don't care about privacy, just buy a google phone

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#230

Post by dpark »

labrador wrote: post #199
andy_ppp wrote: post #125

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

It's ironic because Microsoft took their eye off smart phones to make Windows 8 transparent aqua interface

I don’t remember Windows 8 being particularly transparent. Windows 8 is remembered for the start screen with the modern tiles.
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