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OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

jakequist.com

141–150 of 440 posts

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe this was ever confirmed by Apple, but there was widespread speculation at the time[1] that the delay was due to the very prompt injection attacks OpenClaw users are now discovering. It would be genuinely catastrophic to ship an insecure system with this kind of data access, even with an ‘unsafe mode’. These kinds of risks can only be _consented to_ by technical people who correctly understand them, le…

Exactly. Apple operates at a scale where it's very difficult to deploy this technology for its sexy applications. The tech is simply too broken and flawed at this point. (Whatever Apple does deploy, you can bet it will be heavily guardrailed.) With ~2.5 billion devices in active use, they can't take the Tesla approach of letting AI drive cars into fire trucks.

This is so obvious I'm kind of surprised the author used to be a software engineer at Google (based on his Linkedin).

OpenClaw is very much a greenfield idea and there's plenty of startups like Raycast working in this area.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#142
I used to have little cron jobs that would fire small python scripts daily to help me detect when certain clothes were on sale or in stock on a website it scraped and then send me an email or text. I was proud of that “automation”.

I guess now I’ll just use an AI agent to do the same thing instantly :(

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd enough of a project that everybody basically expects it to be secure, right? It is some wild niche thing for people who like to play with new types of programs. This is not a train that Apple has missed, this is a bunch of people who’ve tied, nailed, tacked, and taped their unicycles and skateboards together. Of course every cool project starts like that, but nobody is selling tickets for that ride.

I think a lot of people have been spoiled (beneficially) by using large, professionally-run SaaS services where your only serious security concerns were keeping your credentials secret, and mitigating the downstream effects of data breaches. I could see having a fundamentally different understanding of security having only experienced that. What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.

> What people are talking about doing with OpenClaw I find absolutely insane.

Based on their homepage the project is two months old and the guy described it as something he "hacked together over a weekend project" [1] and published it on github. So this is very much the Raspberry Pi crowd coming up with crazy ideas and most of them probably don't work well, but the potential excites them enough to dabble in risky areas.

[1] https://openclaw.ai/blog/introducing-openclaw

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#144

The author is a bit extreme for expecting apple to have done something as complex as ooenclaw, not even OpenAI or Anthropic have really done it yet. However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years.

> However this does not excuse Apple to sit with their thumbs up their asses for all these years.

They've been wildly successful for all of those years. They've never been in the novel software business. Siri though one could argue was neglected, but it was also neglected at Amazon Alexa and Google home stuff still sucks too (mostly because none of them made any money and most of their big ideas for voice assistants never came true).

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who's "afraid" of green bubbles? it's like saying a toyota corolla driver is afraid of the ford pinto

No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android

Apple chose the colors well. For whatever reason the shade of green they chose just gives a bit of ick.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#146
post #69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to?

Probably the Mac Mini. A few OpenClaw users are buying the agent a dedicated device so that it can integrate with their Apple account. For example: https://x.com/michael_chomsky/status/2017686846910959668 .

Why would it need more than 1? Couldn't they do this with any Mac with an Apple account?

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#147
My opinion is it seems counter to what made Apple so successful in the first place: second mover advantage, see where everyone else fails and plug the gap.

You're right on the liability front - Apple still won because everyone bought their hardware and their margins are insanely good. It's not that they're sitting by waiting to become irrelevant, they're playing the long game as they always do.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#149
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version. Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless. I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of. > Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no othe…

In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things? There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio. AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.

We're talking about Apple Intelligence here and its ... "precursor" ... Siri.

Both of which have been absolutely underwhelming if not outright laughable in certain ways.

Apple has done plenty right. These two, which are the closest to the article, are not it.

Re: OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

#150
post #78

people are buying Mac Minis specifically to run AI agents with computer use. They’re setting up headless machines whose sole job is to automate their workflows. OpenClaw—the open-source framework that lets you run Claude, GPT-4, or whatever model you want to actually control your computer—has become the killer app for Mac hardware That makes little sense. Buying mac mini would imply for the fused v-ram with the gpu c…

It has nothing to do with running models locally, its perfect because its incredibly cheap, capable, small, and quiet.
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