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AI is a technology not a product

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Re: AI is a technology not a product

#21

Post by amazingamazing »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #20
amazingamazing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before? Using a LLM instead of a template seems like ridiculous overkill imho but thanks for the anecdote.

> Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before? Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.

I don’t see how a llm solves this. It’s not like a llm hosts the website. Sites like squarespace and Wordpress let you modify your site without ever seeing code. They have graphical editors that you can stay in if you wish. I agree llms help, though if you use a product.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#22

Post by WillAdams »

coffeefirst wrote: post #11

Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does…

The thing which kills me is a lot of this was working back in the Newton days.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#23

Post by shalmanese »

amazingamazing wrote: post #10

GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America. To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to…

Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.

A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.

In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.

But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#24

Post by tancop »

oulipo2 wrote: post #3

[flagged]

another "ai is inherently evil" take coming from the "ai is inherently evil" blog.

i agree that specific implementations of a technology (claude, gemini, qwen) are never neutral but any tech itself (llms as a concept) is neutral you can implement it in any way you want. you can make a llm trained on diverse data, tuned for anti fascist opinions, using solar power and recycled hardware to be carbon neutral. the reason nobody is really doing it is just good old wealth inequality. as long as only big corporations can afford to use and develop llms or any other tech it will be biased to benefit them, thats why its so important to democratize it.

and for the open source part, the fact that it started as a libertarian movment dont mean it cant also be socialist. its going against the capitalist norm of exclusive property rights (including ip) and profit at all costs. sharing the product of your labor with everyone for free is one of the biggest things you can do to help, its like the online equivalent of putting food in the community fridge.

open llms let you fine tune them to add the missing under represented perspectives. you can run them locally with zero climate impact. analyze them in depth to reveal biases the devs never noticed or dont want you to see. none of that possible with closed source. the right thing to do is not avoid using ai at all costs but do everything you can to make it good. your skills and hardware access are a privilege. use it.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#26

Post by otterley »

rglover wrote: post #2

Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago: "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss

"Working backwards" is also, famously, Amazon's philosophy. It's one of my most cherished takeaways from working there.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#27

Post by bonesss »

coffeefirst wrote: post #11

Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does…

I have a grander vision for an ideal Apple “AI”: anti-AI.

I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.

In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#28

Post by simianwords »

amazingamazing wrote: post #10

GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America. To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to…

You can't easily articulate the way in which mRNA vaccines were possible by internet. But internet definitely played an important part.

Internet

- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet

- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet

- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet

Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#29

Post by paulddraper »

rglover wrote: post #2

Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago: "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss

What was Siri?

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#30

Post by kordlessagain »

It’s a lot of noise out there. That's the problem with these threads—everyone wants to sound profound, so they end up debating abstractions instead of building something that actually works. "AI is a political ideology" or "AI is a fascist artifact"—that’s just academic posturing. It’s a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a skull; the hammer doesn't have an opinion. The people using it do. The person talking about Siri? That's the only one in that whole thread actually making sense. Everyone else is tripping over themselves to define "AI," but they're missing the point. If your device can't pull up the context for your dinner reservation, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand agents living in your pocket. It’s useless. I’m tired of hearing about "AI products." We didn't build a "Microprocessor Product." We built a computer. The technology is the foundation, not the house. I'm going to look at the state of the local models. If everyone is so worried about corporate bias and closed systems, the only answer is to make the tech small enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough that anyone can run it on their own hardware. Then we'll see who's still talking about politics.
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