Live data from Hacker News

Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

macrumors.com

21–30 of 164 posts

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#21
post #10

This is a very clever platform play. If you make Siri / your mac the central access point for all AI related workflows and make models interchangeable, then Apple has a huge weapon in the AI race.

I don't disagree, but I do feel the need to point out this was not Apple's plan A. Luckily for them they have so many tools and options at their disposal, that they are able to massively fail at developing their own models and still end up in a good position.

Apple “genius” has been to accept their plan A failed (the original Apple Intelligence), and instead of doubling down, let the others explore the space, then offer a good interface (I say that, I haven’t seen if it’s actually good).

So many other actors in the industry would have just doubled down and follow the race to the bottom

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#22

Just playing the devil advocate: what happens when the answers from a not-Apple LLM are garbage? Who the users are going to blame, Apple or OpenAI, Anthropic, etc..? I'm not 100% on Apple side on this, I would love to chose whatever I want, even local models, but I get why trey trying to control 100% of the user experience. If they could trust any provider with customers data, they would let them in, since they're no…

If you are smart enough to change the default, you would know which LLM you picked and could point the finger at it.

Apple is in the game of providing an application platform. Maybe in the future they will provide their own LLM.

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#25

Just playing the devil advocate: what happens when the answers from a not-Apple LLM are garbage? Who the users are going to blame, Apple or OpenAI, Anthropic, etc..? I'm not 100% on Apple side on this, I would love to chose whatever I want, even local models, but I get why trey trying to control 100% of the user experience. If they could trust any provider with customers data, they would let them in, since they're no…

Are people blaming Apple when Google search in Safari gives garbage results? Some probably are, but that really shouldn’t be a relevant discussion, in particular when the user explicitly chose which AI backend to use.

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#26
Neat. Now let me point it to an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint of my choosing, like a Mac Mini running Hermes on my LAN.

I do not want my personal data or the queries against it to leave my network boundaries if at all possible. This should be a default option.

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#27

That’s actually a good solution. Create a platform where app actions can be invoked with a permission model by any AI model. Maybe apple can even have something similar to MCPs for tool invocations of apps and publish it so all models can actually be trained to use that framework

I actually think this is what they ended up doing - just regular conversations with tool calling into your various apps, behind a Siri AI API. not HTTP based mcps (for now) but rather local ones.

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but I do feel the need to point out this was not Apple's plan A. Luckily for them they have so many tools and options at their disposal, that they are able to massively fail at developing their own models and still end up in a good position.

Apple “genius” has been to accept their plan A failed (the original Apple Intelligence), and instead of doubling down, let the others explore the space, then offer a good interface (I say that, I haven’t seen if it’s actually good). So many other actors in the industry would have just doubled down and follow the race to the bottom

Genius would have been for Apple to get Siri in a better state after so many years.

This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.

Re: Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows

#29
post #12

It’d be short sighted to not have a wrapper around which AI to use, even without implementation for them. Like, having an abstract parent class with a Siri implementation of it would be baseline good software engineering.

Yeah; plus we know they're designing with potential future local-only Vs. hybrid Vs. cloud-only in mind depending on hardware/market changes. So having it be this flexible buys them a ton of future potential.

People have speculated that with FPGAs or even an ASIC you could take some smaller models we have today, turn the chip into essentially that model-as-hardware, and get some really compelling performance/power-usage characteristics.

At that point running a GOOD quantized Q8 model on a phone is not beyond the realm.

Post reply on HN