131–140 of 380 posts
Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?
Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…
From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…
If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though. Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time. They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product. I don't get why they went for the rush.…
For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure.
For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing nothing. They need to enter late with a good product, and having a good product takes R&D, which takes time. With MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets, they didn't exactly wait until the industry was burnt through before they came in with their offering; they were just later (with the successful product) than some other people who did it worse. They were still doing R&D during those years when they were "waiting."
Apple could still "show up late" to AI in a few more years or a decade, using their current toe-dipping to inform something better, and it would still fit into the picture you have of how they "should've done it." Not to mention, Apple's also lost its way before with things like convoluted product lines (a dozen models of everything) and experimental products (the Newton then, Apple Vision now); messing up for a while also isn't exactly bucking history.
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Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst drivi…
Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”. It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage. Timers and alarm clocks it is.
If it doesn't know where you are then you might live in a Faraday cage.
From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…
Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data.
> Subramanya, who Apple describes as a "renowned AI researcher," spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Gemini. He left Google earlier this year for Microsoft. In a press release, Apple said that Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi and will "be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation."
I don't see how Google + Copilot mindset even touches on privacy. I wouldn't be surprised if we users will be forced to pay even more personal data in the near future.
My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.
This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like. I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple. I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices). At this point, their investment…
I worked pretty closely with him and his team for a bit at Google, and he seemed like a great human being, in addition to being a great engineer. I wouldn't read too much into a few-month stint at Microsoft.
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Where did they fail besides Siri? The rest look like fine achievements to me.
Netscape was the market leading browser into the early 2000s, corresponding with JG leaving it. Never heard of Tellme, but it sounds impressive on a resume. Metaweb was a good open-source fact database which subsequently got walled off once Google bought it. Google Search works significantly worse now than it did under Amit, and I say that as both a user and a websearch Xoogler. (JG took over about a year after I lef…
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Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze. I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfac…
> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while. If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single func…