Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon) both has massive wiffs on AI
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
151–160 of 380 posts
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#152Siri 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…
I used it exactly so (timers and alarm clocks) until after some updates it wouldn’t react to my voice even half the time. I haven’t tried it since in 10 years.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#153IMO the problem is he was going for "real AI" instead of "fake it until you make it" AI. Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."
But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.
Full disclosure: I've known jg since 1986. I have no insight into the Apple goings on, but the story that "he's the guy that made Siri suck" sounds very very unlikely to me.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#154Siri 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…
Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…
In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures.
All chat bots suffer this flaw.
GUIs solve it.
CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#155Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.
> Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri... From TFA Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year ... Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked Giannandrea ... Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership for when he eventually assumes the CEO role…
odd, why not Craig? he's by far the popular pick + probably actually right leader for apple's ai phase
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#156Siri is great for setting timers as long as they aren’t for 15 or 50 minutes.
Haven’t found anything else it’s useful for.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going…
This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and bec…
> once you give them enough tools
are there solutions to the error rates when picking from dozens or even hundreds of tools i'm not aware of?
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#158I tried Siri once when it first came out to play a song while I was driving and instead it started calling my ex-girlfriend. After that I swore it off for good.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#159So what is going on here? The reason is definitely not that Apple couldn't even train a small local LLM to power Siri, right?
"couldnt even" is a high bar. it is an unsolved problem to make small models (truly, no bullshit) perform at human intelligence level than to make large models do the same. the bar JG had to pass was a bit lower than that, but Apple's marketing team unfortunately overpromised.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Are you referring to https://security.apple.com/com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ ? The only way that AI will ever be able to replace each of us, is if it gathers our entire audio, text, etc history. PCC seemed like the only viable option for a pro-AI, yet pro-privacy p…
They are solving for privacy before solving for the UX. They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.
Making privacy some end-goal that PMs cut to meet targets is how you end up with Google redefining privacy to mean "only we have access to every aspect of your life, now and in the future".
If Apple takes the position that the UX has to fit in around the privacy requirements, so what? Privacy is a core pillar of their product identity—a built-in hallucinating compliments machine isn't.