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Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

bloomberg.com

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Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#121

Post by fzzzy »

heavyset_go wrote: post #106
Isamu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen. When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form. Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the ke…

There were several slate phones before the iPhone

They had slider keyboards yeah?

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#122

Post by lapcat »

weikju wrote: post #120
lapcat wrote: post #53

Serious question: Did Apple employees need rallying? Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was. If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.

> current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in. Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, my understanding was that they actually are barred from doing just that

Where do you think Mark Gurman's story came from?

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#123

Post by potatolicious »

aunty_helen wrote: post #85
potatolicious wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?" This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP). I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the tru…

You split up the tasks into sub agents. This is something my company builds on top of langgraph.

Sure, go try it and evaluate it rigorously end-to-end, over a sufficient number and variety of tools.

For the purposes of the exercise, let's conservatively say, maybe ~2000 tools covering ~100 major verticals of use cases. Even that may be too narrow for a true general purpose assistant, but it's at least a good start. You can slice the sub-agents however you'd like.

If you can get recall, for real user utterances (not contrived eval utterances authored by your devs and MLEs), over 70% across all the verticals/use cases/tool uses, I'd be extremely impressed. Heck, my thoughts on this won't matter - if you can get the recall for such a system over the bar you'd have cracked something nobody else has and should actively try to sell it to Google for nine figures.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#125

Post by mensetmanusman »

nchmy wrote: post #91
reactordev wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t go that far. Tim Cook doesn’t really care what people think of him, he only cares about one group of people - shareholders. It was probably marketing that came up with it. Tim is totally fine being the finance guy and the vision he sold the board was “I’ll keep Apple from imploding” which he has been very successful at. Like Nadella, you need someone from the early years, who knows the business, to run it.…

Nadella seems to have incomparably more vision...

Ads in my start menu, amazing vision.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#126

Post by bentocorp »

lapcat wrote: post #53

Serious question: Did Apple employees need rallying? Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was. If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.

From the reports from Bloomberg etc, yes, it does sound like some Apple AI employees may need rallying.

Though it sounds like what they actually got was fairly in-substantive statements without a clearly articulated AI strategy.

Doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a promising AI strategy though, if so, it wasn't communicated in this Pep Talk: so what was the point?

Perhaps to look like they are doing something? Are empty words better than no words at all?

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#127

Post by dangus »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #22
dangus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy. While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined. Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone contin…

Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products. Excessive greed obliterates goodwill. You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark. Current Apple has a deep, systemic la…

What I’m saying is that these are all garbage opinions backed by nothing. “Cool” is “just your opinion, man.”

They layperson thinks of Apple quite positively. Nobody cares what us nerds here think is cool. The bazillion people who happily bought AirPods don’t care that a tiny group of nerds are still mad that Apple took away their dork expansion slot and dweeb ports.

Apple is more trusted than any other tech company with privacy in consumer surveys.

Apple is the smartphone company with the highest customer satisfaction ratings (over 80%).

Consumer reports ranks Apple first in computer support customer service.

These are quantitative measures.

Apple very clearly has command of their messaging and there really aren’t any cracks in their strategy.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#128

Post by soraminazuki »

hollerith wrote: post #81

I thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research. I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI. Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.

> because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.

I think you're focusing on the wrong things. AI can be used in harmful ways, but not because they're outsmarting human beings despite all the cult-like hype. In fact, they don't need to be actually competent for the rich to take advantage of the tech in destructive ways. They just need to convince the public that they're competent enough so that they have an excuse to cut jobs. Even if AI does a poorer job, it won't matter if consumers don't have alternatives, which is unfortunately the case in many situations. We face a much bigger threat of data breaches from vibe coded apps than conscious robots manipulating humans through the Matrix.

Just look at Google support. It's a bunch of mindless robots that can kick you out of their platform on a whim. Their "dispute process" is another robot that passive-aggressively ragebaits you. [1][2] They're incompetent, yet it helps one of the richest companies in the world save money.

Also, let's not forget Google's AI flagged multiple desperate parents sharing medical pics of their kids to their doctors. Only when the media contacted them did a human being come out, only to falsely accuse the parents of being pedos. [3] People were harmed, and it's not because of competency.

Another greater concern is the ability of LLMs to mass-produce spam or troll content with minimal effort. It's a major threat to democracies all around the globe, and it turns out we don't need a superintelligence for demagogues to misuse it and cause harm.

There are more real concerns regarding AI other than the perpetually "just around the corner" superintelligence. What we need is a push for stronger regulatory protection for workers, consumers, and constituents. Not boycotting Macbooks because of AI.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#129

Post by JasonBee »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #124

Apple failed so hard, and it was so easy to succeed. I should be able to replace Siri with any AI provider over a year ago. (Eg hold power button and immediately talk to gpt4) How’s something so easy so hard for Apple?

Maybe it’s not so easy?

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#130

Post by viraptor »

mingus88 wrote: post #84
viraptor wrote: post #29

> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote. Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement: > iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophi…

Can you source the apple PR claiming they invented the mp3 player or the smartphone? I recall marketing comparing iPhones to blackberries. They even had iTunes running on Motorola phone https://www.makeuseof.com/itunes-phone-before-the-iphone-exp... Nobody claimed Apple was the first at this. They were just the best, eventually. But it’s been 20 years

They didn't, that's why I explicitly wrote "or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages".

But they sure write releases like that's implied.

> iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers.

Large display existed before, "just fingers" control was... always the case, the interface was quite polished, but it existed elsewhere, etc. But if you didn't know that, reading the announcement sure sounds like it's never been done before. It's the multi touch that makes the combination novel.

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