Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 271 posts

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#181

Post by b112 »

nilkn wrote: post #26
dabinat wrote: post #14

I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next. Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are al…

Just my opinion: Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big s…

What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design.

did best. did.

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#182

Post by tobr »

b112 wrote: post #181
nilkn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my opinion: Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big s…

What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. did best. did.

Their hardware and integration between hardware and software is extremely good, still. The software on its own has gone downhill for a long time.

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#183

Post by danhau »

xnx wrote: post #149
fartfeatures wrote: post #8

This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.

No amount of prior work would have achieved what anyone can now cobble together from an open weights LLM.

Siri was outdated even before the rise or LLMs.

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#184

Post by MattRix »

mrweasel wrote: post #116

It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago. There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include…

This is an absurd take. Of course tons of people use Siri. It’s by far the fastest way to create alarms, reminders, and events. If Apple got rid of it, I would feel like a cave man, having to unlock my phone and navigate multiple screens just to do basic tasks. I’d immediately switch to Android.

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#185

Post by MattRix »

cantalopes wrote: post #16

Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly

I’ve been using it a dozen times a day for the past 14 years with very few issues. Certainly not enough issues that I would ever want to go back to adding things like alarms and reminders and events by hand.

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#186

Post by alex43578 »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #175
alex43578 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.

I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next…

With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI.

Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#187

Post by doctor_blood »

sockaddr wrote: post #80
owlbite wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.

Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.

Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.

Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#188

Post by randallsquared »

lxgr wrote: post #131
mingus88 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “failing hilariously” bit is critical for this road-tripping use case. It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation to lose faith in simply handing over a whole day’s itinerary to an LLM. Honestly that can go so bad very easily. We are decades into the GPS navigation era and I still don’t trust the route my vehicle suggests. I have been burned so many times that we liter…

> It’s only going to take one bad suggestion that leaves someone in a dangerous situation I feel like if one bad suggestion can leave somebody in a dangerous situation, many other things must have failed before, such as informing oneself of the general condition of roads in a given place and the current season, having a fallback plan in case digital navigation fails or a road is unexpectedly closed etc.

You expect the human to do all the actual work of planning the trip, but leave the only interesting parts to the LLM?

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#189

Post by einr »

alex43578 wrote: post #186
rubyn00bie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next…

With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far…

This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers.

It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?*

And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows.

* (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)

Re: Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

#190

Post by graemep »

nilkn wrote: post #26
dabinat wrote: post #14

I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next. Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are al…

Just my opinion: Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business. What Apple does best lies at the combination of hardware, software, physical materials, and human-computer interface design. This is why they're spending so much more on mixed reality than AI, even knowing that a product like the Vision Pro today isn't going to be a big s…

> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business in the same way that search engines aren't core to their business.

Does the management know this?

From whose point if view is it not core? I very much doubt any tech business not focusing on AI at the moment is maximising their share price.

Post reply on HN