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Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

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Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#131

Post by drewbeck »

hollerith wrote: post #119
pstuart wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away. The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.

>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control. I haven't see…

Of the companies mentioned I believe apple is the only one that does not provide their own chat bot. If they aren’t opening an interface for open ended interaction with their AI tools I think your concern is much less relevant. I’m curious if you’d disagree though.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#132

Post by drewbeck »

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?

You can do it today with the action button and various apps (including OpenAI). And I believe you could do it a year ago as well.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#133

Post by braebo »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #59
bni wrote: post #37

What other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products? To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.

Are you implying Apple integrated AI successfully? How do you use AI in Apple products?

The “proof read” feature in macOS Mail is very nice.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#134

Post by hollerith »

drewbeck wrote: post #131
hollerith wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control. I haven't see…

Of the companies mentioned I believe apple is the only one that does not provide their own chat bot. If they aren’t opening an interface for open ended interaction with their AI tools I think your concern is much less relevant. I’m curious if you’d disagree though.

Siri is not AFIAK a competitive offering in the chatbot space, but it is a chatbot; is it not? I guess I just don't understand your argument.

Maybe this will help: AI labs have tried out 100s of different designs for AIs and if they aren't stopped (e.g., by the governments of the developed world) they are going to try out 1000s of additional designs. Most of us who worry about AI takeover or about human extinction caused by AI do not claim to be able to tell which design will be the first design capable of taking over or of extincting humanity -- even if we had complete access to the source code and the training data and we could ask the researchers behind the design questions. (The researchers do not know either IMHO.) But once an design has been widely deployed for many months, we know that that design is not the one that is going to take over. Gemini 2.5 for example has been widely deployed since January. It has been given plentiful access to very gullible people, very desperate people and plentiful compute resources. (When a customer asks an AI to write code, then runs that code without first understanding the code himself, that is giving the AI access to whatever compute resource the code gets run on.) If Gemini 2.5 were able to take over the world, it would have done so already. Ergo, I consider it morally permissible for me to use Gemini 2.5. Now Google is not going to stop with Gemini 2.5: it will continue to try out different designs, which is why I consider it my obligation to avoid helping Google, e.g., by giving it money, which is why so far I've stayed on the free tier of Gemini.

Gemini 2.5 is not very agenty: it does not learn continuously, it is extremely unlikely that its can work effectively towards any long-range plan or devise a plan that can withstand determined human opposition. So in the particular case of Gemini 2.5 and its competitors, we really didn't need many months of wide deployment to go by before we can conclude with high certainty that Gemini 2.5 is incapable of taking over the world. But most AI researchers and most leaders in AI labs consider the fact that the current crop of deployed AIs cannot learn continuously very well and cannot formulate and work towards long-range plans as deficiencies to be overcome.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#135

Post by heavyset_go »

MrDarcy wrote: post #112
heavyset_go wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name some "new exciting features" iPhones gained in the last 5 years that made their way into music videos like the iPod did

I’m excited to shoot my own music videos with my iPhone now. Last weekend my grade school friend visited and we took a boat out on Puget Sound. We followed two orca whales for 45 minutes and I shot multiple videos of them in 4k 60fps. They look beautiful and played seamlessly on my TV without any crappy ads. I shared them with our two families easily through airdrop and later through iCloud when we got back to land.…

I think we have different definitions of cool

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#136

Post by rsanheim »

WhereIsTheTruth wrote: post #78
lapcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Thursday, Apple reported yet another record financial quarter.

That doesn't seem to help Apple achieve AGI

The top folks at big ai labs and research can't even agree on what AGI means or if it is a useful term or taget. I guarantee the folks building opus 5 or GPT 6oMiniPlus5.5++ are not concerned about if the new model 'achieves AGI', regardless of how much marketing and PR folks want to throw that term around for every new release or blog post.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#137

Post by rsanheim »

potatolicious wrote: post #123
aunty_helen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

Yeah, it turns out many nerds don't consider the fact that the amazing tools we are using to do constrained tasks aren't that great for more general purpose things. Writing a spike, spitting out unit tests, or vibe coding a front end feature is not the same as planning a trip to europe, balancing accounts, or managing a schedule.

So much attention, effort, and tooling has focused on getting llms better at writing more and more code. They can grep and curl and run scripts and iterate and build things really fast, and maybe even maintain it if given enough guardrails and direction.

But it turns out we have had a _ton_ of useful training data for models to work with for software. Not just books or docs, but examples, tests, snippets and full programs for just about any language. Show me a stackoverflow with playwright scripts or API calls (hah, as if thats possible) to build itineraries from delta, aa, united, priceline, expedia, etc, .... which is one part of one piece of the ai assistant pipe-dream.

I don't think its impossible as these tools get much smarter and more generally capable that we get decent assistants in other constrained, non-software domains, but it will take very good companies focusing on it for a long time. Much like any product that try to do these sorts of things.

Its so easy for programmers in our bubble to overlook the complexity involved in automating or even _describing_ simple tasks that humans navigate everyday via habit, learning, experience, and perception...all things that llms struggle with constantly.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#138

Post by mensetmanusman »

drewbeck wrote: post #132
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?

You can do it today with the action button and various apps (including OpenAI). And I believe you could do it a year ago as well.

This is what Apple would say, but it’s not the same. To activate the shortcut I have to unlock the phone whereas Siri works in any situation.

The friction of one button press to 3-4 interactions is significant enough to make it not worth the action button, especially since holding the power button is supposed to do the same thing.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#139

Post by hollerith »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #118
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.

You might enjoy the Aussie saying “pissing into the wind”.

It is pissing in the wind, but at least I'm not contributing to the catastrophic outcome by cooperating or doing business with Apple.

It's not my fault that the reality in which humanity find itself turned out to be more dangerous than almost anyone suspected. My only moral obligation is to do what I can to make the future turn out okay even though what I can do is very very little.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#140

Post by therealpygon »

qrios wrote: post #98
mingus88 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s answer to that is Private Compute Cloud

Isn't "Private Compute Cloud" just a marketing term with some restrict sec architecture? The real personal assistant LLM would mean to have the realtime data available in hot memory (to make sure to give instant responses). Audio, video, screen recordings, etc. from a single customer could be something between 1 and 10 GByte per day on average. After training you might get something like 3 MByte in additional model s…

That assumes you are trying to compress every bit of information ingested at all times. We have a document so we can reference it, we don’t need video of the steps to create it. If we know we drove to work and nothing significant happened, we don’t need to store every detail from the drive.

When distilled, most people’s days consist of very few actual newly discovered facts, decisions and changes to context.

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