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Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

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Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue that face recognition, event detection and share recommendations are nice features. They are all done locally on your device for the last decade, at least.

[flagged]

You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then, as every ML thing has been retroactively rebranded as "AI."

Remember the term "smart" as applied to any device or software mode that made ~any assumptions beyond "stay on while trigger is held"? "AI" is the new "smart." Even expert systems, decision trees, and fulltext search are "AI" now.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#22
post #9
post #7

That's because people don't trust AI that much... and most people don't differentiate between a really cool feature and AI so it's more confusing marketing than anything.

I think it's more because they're way behind on AI and they literally have nothing to actually tell us.

in some ways (hardware) they're ahead, their dominance in mobile chip power lets them do a lot more machine learning on-device

also hard to find a better laptop for running an LLM locally too

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#23

This is a non-story. This was a hardware event. Apple is releasing many new AI features as part of iOS 26 which will launch along side the new iPhones. AI is software. And yet, a number of the features are clearly powered by AI models such as camera enhancements, health monitoring and live translation. Also GPU performance continues to increase in the A19, with CPU remaining presumably fairly flat since no numbers we…

If Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality.

The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#25
post #21
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then, as every ML thing has been retroactively rebranded as "AI." Remember the term "smart" as applied to any device or software mode that made ~any assumptions beyond "stay on while trigger is held"? "AI" is the new "smart." Even expert systems, decision trees, and fulltext search are "AI" now.

> You're letting the hype men set the goalposts for you, then

Not really, I'm taking the hint. If they call a feature "AI", there's a 99% chance it's empty hype. If they call a feature "machine learning", there may be something useful in there.

Notice how Apple, in this event even, uses the term "machine learning" for some features (like some of their image processing stuff) and "AI" for other features. Their usage of the terms more or less matches my line of features I want and features I don't want.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#26

They did talk about ML in their image processing software for their cameras, though. And I don’t think they mentioned AI when talking about their babelfish AirPods, but it’s clearly there, as well.

They talk about "Apple Intelligence models" running on the phone. They dropped that name for their AI stuff in a few other spots, too.

Yeah. I think they talked about ML for the Watch workout feature as well (or was it the AirPods?) And I think for other features as well but I am not certain and I am not rewatching the whole thing.

They’ve been putting AI in a lot of places over the years.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#27
If you've read the Steve Jibs biography, you’d know his obsession with creating the future products.

I feel like he’d be obsessively working to combine AI, robotics and battery technology into the classic sci fi android.

Instead, modern Apple seems to be innovating essentially nothing unless you count the VR thing and the rumors of an Apple car, which sounds to me much like the Apple Newton.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#28
I feel like they don’t want to get burned the way they did with the AVR/metaverse thing. Those headsets are worthless. Probably a lot of ptsd going on with people thinking how Jobs would have had their ass over it. I suspect they’re being very cautious with “AI”.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#29
post #2

I think this is the correct approach on a phone. I don't want AI front-and-center. I want it in the background quietly making everything better. To me, that's a much more useful form of AI.

Actually if Siri ever worked when I really need it, they could finally catch up with their promises made in 2011.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll argue that face recognition, event detection and share recommendations are nice features. They are all done locally on your device for the last decade, at least.

[flagged]

Semantically, AI has always been a superset of ML. So it's always been correct to call machine learning AI.

All machine learning is AI, not all AI is machine learning.

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