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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#131

Post by thecupisblue »

travisgriggs wrote: post #4

I wonder if there’s any “doers” in that top 100? Or is it all just “discussers” and “deciders”. I’ve owned Apple products forever. But as long as Pournelles Law of Bureaucracy remains on full display, these shuffling of the titanic deck chairs will continue. I wish it could be otherwise. I wish a company could introspect on itself and say “hey, our doer/decider balance is out of whack, let’s correct” but that just ne…

Well, that is the problem with them making Siri useful for everyone - it is made for discussers and deciders.

Summarise a meeting here. Summarise the report there. Summarise the email from marketing. Schedule a meeting with Jim. Turn the lights on in the kitchen for the housekeeper.

While yes, there is some usefulness in having something summarise things for you, most people in their day to day lives don't handle a "100 emails from everyone" and "30 meetings with 40 different department heads" or whatever these people do.

Quite a big gap from the market they are targeting with Siri.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#132

Post by korale »

ninkendo wrote: post #127
korale wrote: post #124

Apple needs a major change in the way they do software overall. AI is one concrete manifestation of their issues but it runs much deeper. They still produce great hardware but it's held back by their software. Would love to see them rethink the entire stack from the OS APIs and SDKs, dev tools, WatchOS, to features like extensibility, Shortcuts, and of course, how they leverage AI. At this point, they should probably…

There’s no easy answer here, starting from scratch and rethinking everything carries a very high risk of disaster. They just need to start giving a shit. Care about bugs for once. The whole software org needs to take the time to go through their (clearly) enormous backlog of bugs, and shore up what they have. The problem isn’t the architecture or vision or rethinking their stack, it’s that what they have is barely ho…

Agree that they can't start from scratch. But they could acknowledge their shortcomings wrt to software and start moving things in the right direction. I had never seen so many complaints about software quality at Apple than the last release of MacOS with their networking issues and many other.

They are in a decent position where they already set expectations that they will deprecate and retire old stuff on a regular basis compared to Microsoft which is trying to preserve backwards compatibility forever.

Giving it to OpenAI won't solve their problem with Siri (although some of that expertise could help). Part of it has to be engineered into their platform with better extensibility while also preserving privacy, security, etc. And that work could also enable their platform APIs, Shortcuts and such to have access to a much more powerful set of things.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#133

Post by 42772827 »

__loam wrote: post #57

Hopefully the new guys take the existing GenAI bullshit and fuck off from turning it back on after every update despite me turning it off 3 times already.

When my phone downloaded Image Playground I legitimately thought my phone had been hacked.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#134

Post by ejoso »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #96
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. Apple just doesn’t have anything like that with AI. Furthermore, the challenge with AI is that even though it can deliver some shockingly impressive results, it also generates some bafflingly stupid re…

>I suspect the most significant thing holding Apple back in the realm of AI is the fact that Apple prides itself as a company that delivers revolutionary products with ‘wow factor’ that is leagues above the competition. I don't remember them ever doing that. Usually they start with something lacklustre then incrementally improve it until it is strong. Maps is a great example, it was poor on launch compared to Google…

Google Maps largely exists because of Apple. Do you remember when the iPhone was released? AirPods? The iMac? The Mac? The Apple II? Broaden scope a bit to understand what this comment meant. You’re right that Apple botches things in the small scale and especially in software, but they’ve been a great aggregator of amazing tech in the total lifespan.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#135

Post by michelb »

apwell23 wrote: post #129
amelius wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. I don't think Apple will ever use LLMs, given the offensive output they can generate sometimes. There is just no way to make them safe for all audiences.

how does current siri manage to be safe for all audiences.

It's not an LLM, just a bunch of templates.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#136

Post by ramesh31 »

kossTKR wrote: post #122
JimDabell wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple have never learnt how to build software sustainably. They let the bugs, misfeatures, and tech debt pile up over time. They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it, but never resolved the root of the problem, so it started to build up again. Now it seems like they don’t care enough about software quality to even do that. They need somebody else…

Amen to that. Please for the love of all things remember your future defining ‘human design’ with brilliant UX in early macos and hypercard. Now you have unlimited money and don’t give a single f? Do better please! Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism? Hardware is great but software gets worse and worse..

>Where is the passion, catering to pro’s, any idealism?

It died 14 years ago.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#137

Post by michelb »

This whole process sucks, but I'm not betting against Apple. I believe that the best AI integration happens at the OS level, and Apple has all the components to do it, they need to find a path to execute. No chance I'm going to let an external LLM have access to certain parts of my data/OS.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#138

Post by sgt »

saagarjha wrote: post #115
sgt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App intents have a purpose but not anywhere nearly as impressive as AppleScript hooks.

Yes but they don't work on iOS

Of course, iOS has the AppleScript ecosystem which is superior in most ways. I would not want Android intents there.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#139

Post by ivell »

csharpminor wrote: post #29
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good enough bullshitter will easily answer that question.

Jobs was kind of infamous for making people put their app / product in front of him while he sat in silence and used it. Harder to fake. But lots of execs don't know enough about their own products to interrogate like that. So they settle for BS presentations.

So kind of a chief test officer? We need more CEOs to have that kind of responsibility.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#140

Post by michelb »

kamil55555 wrote: post #98

I just don't understand how a huge company like Apple managed to mess up Siri so badly. Siri used to be useful, now it is a piece of crap.

Windows Vista happened and Microsoft still exists. And many other products from huge companies failed hard. I think these things are quite common for large companies. The fact that it's Apple just makes it more interesting.
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