Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far • Hacker News Board

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#241

Post by sharkjacobs » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #156

pera wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is in the linked survey: https://www.sellcell.com/blog/iphone-vs-samsung-ai-survey/ - 11.1% of iPhone's users felt the AI features were "very valuable" - 5.9% of Samsung Galaxy's users felt the AI features were "very valuable"

So what's the 3rd category since the numbers do not add to 100?

    11.1% Yes, they're very valuable
    15.9% Somewhat valuable but not significantly valuable
    64.7% Not very valuable, other features are more important
    8.3% No, they add little to no value

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#242

Post by jjice » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #199

I am using an iPhone 13 Mini, which will need to be pried from my cold, dead, hands. The new "intelligence" hasn't made any difference that I can note, other than a couple of buttons, and Siri seems a bit less dense. On my Mac, the Xcode auto-fill has improved quite a bit. It is now useful enough for me to use (but I still need to check its work, as it hallucinates weird API calls).

Aren't the newest features that are branded as "Apple Intelligence" (not their other ML stuff that's been around for a while) only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 line?

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-intelligence-is...

At the bottom:

> Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, iPhone 16 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad with A17 Pro or M1 and later, and Mac with M1 and later.

Unless you're referring to it on a Mac or iPad or something.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#243

Post by Merad » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #210

jsheard wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when ChatGPT starts getting these simple gotcha questions right it's often because they applied some brittle heuristic that doesn't generalize. For example you can directly ask it to solve a simple math problem, which nowadays it will usually do correctly by generating and executing a Python script, but then ask it to write a speech announcing the solution to the same problem, to which it will probably still hal…

4o and o1 get this right. LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers. Basically all of the easy gotcha stuff that people use to point out errors are things that they shouldn't do. And you pointed out something they do now which is creating and run a python script. That really is a pretty solid, sustainable heuristic and is actually a pretty great approach. They nee…

> LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers.

But these aren't "gotcha questions", these are just some of the basic interactions that people will want to have with intelligent assistants. Literally just two days ago I was doing some things with the compound interest formula - I asked Claude to solve for a particular variable of the formula, then plug in some numbers to calculate the results (it was able to do it). Could I have used Mathematica or something like that? Yes of course. But supposedly the whole purpose of a general purpose AI is that I can use it to do just about anything that I need to do. Likewise there have been multiple occasions where I've needed ChatGPT or Claude to work with tables or lists of data where I needed the results to be sorted.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#244

Post by hansonkd » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

harrall wrote: post #215

ARandumGuy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

I’ll tell you why this happens. You might use ChatGPT for a bit and your initial impressions will be great. It does what I ask of it! You might be aware that it makes mistakes sometimes, but when you use it, you don’t notice it because you’re using it interactively. Now if LLMs are just effective as your experience says, they are indeed extremely useful and you absolutely should see if they can help you. It’s only wh…

The other problem I find is that LLMs are changing so fast, that what you evaluated 6-12 months ago, might be completely different now with newer models.

So the strengths and weaknesses quickly can become outdated as the strengths grow and weaknesses diminish.

When the first batch of LLMs people tried in 2023 had a lot of weaknesses. At the end of 2024, we can see increases in performance in speed and the complexity of output. People are creating frameworks on top of the LLMs that further increase their value. We went from thousands of tokens in context to millions of tokens pretty fast.

I can see myself dividing problems up into 4 groups:

    1. LLMs currently solve the problem
    2. It doesn't solve it now, but we are within a couple iteration of next generation models or frameworks to be able to solve it 
    3. LLMs are still years off from being able to solve this effectively so wait and implement it when it can.
    4. LLMs will never solve this.

I think a lot of people building products are in group 2 right now.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#245

Post by ryantgtg » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

bangaroo wrote: post #218

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate. It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase…

When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these bizarre things.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#246

Post by tananan » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

harrall wrote: post #215

ARandumGuy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

I’ll tell you why this happens. You might use ChatGPT for a bit and your initial impressions will be great. It does what I ask of it! You might be aware that it makes mistakes sometimes, but when you use it, you don’t notice it because you’re using it interactively. Now if LLMs are just effective as your experience says, they are indeed extremely useful and you absolutely should see if they can help you. It’s only wh…

This definitely resonates but I'm left wondering why there hasn't been a collective "sobering up" on this front. Not on a personal/team/company level, but just in terms of the general push to cram AI into everything. For how much longer will new s assault us in software where it ostensibly won't be that useful?

It seems that the effort required to make an LLM work robustly within a single context (spreadsheet, worddoc, email, whatever) is so gargantuan (honestly) that the returns or even the initial manpower wouldn't be there. So any new feels more or less like bloat, and if not fully useless, then at least a bit anxiety inducing in that you have no clue how much you can rely on it.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#247

Post by mrtranscendence » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #131

dylan604 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing to me means that people are okay with recording 100% of every meeting they ever have. I've been in plenty of meetings where you just don't want things recorded, and no, that does not mean the meeting was shady.

Other than legally sensitive topics, what meetings would you not want recorded? Do people take notes or are they just totally ephemeral?

We're not allowed to record meetings at work, with some exceptions such as trainings. I'm not at all sure why, but I believe it has to do with merger plans. We're not working on anything particularly shady, to my knowledge.

Notes are often taken but not always. Depends on the people in the meeting.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#248

Post by internet101010 » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #232

ARandumGuy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is, what benefit is there for 99% of companies to get in on the ground floor of LLMs? If you're not developing your own model, you're effectively just beta testing someone else's model. And if the sales pitch of LLMs being able to do basically anything comes true, wouldn't most companies still get the same benefit if they just wait? It seems like a lot of companies are so terrified of missing…

We're still in the buzzword stage where "AI" increases sales more than it decreases them, regardless of what your product is, whether it actually uses AI, or what it uses it for. So if your business sells pickles, better add "now with AI!" because more people will buy your pickles if they have AI than will stop buying it. (This comment is mainly facetiousness borne out of frustration, but the point stands)

Pure anecdote but in the meetings I have been in eyes glaze over when the SaaS salesman mentions AI in a generic way without providing any examples of how we can use it. The only way it gets any traction is when the technical wingman can answer questions about how it will account for required business logic and permissions.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#249

Post by Clubber » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

llm_nerd wrote: post #162

Clubber wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>with a Luddism that somehow actually becomes a rather hilarious attempt at superiority >The people who usually think LLMs aren't valuable to coders generally work on the most boring, copy/paste prattle. Here you are doing the same thing, aren't you? Instead of calling people names, the biggest tell of a weak argument, why don't you explain the type of work you do and how using an LLM is faster than if you coded it y…

But...I'm not doing the same thing. In actuality I'm saying I'm a fairly typical programmer in a common situation: I work across a variety of languages and platforms and toolings and projects, building solutions for problems. The truth is that extraordinarily few programmers are working on anything truly novel. Zero of the readers of this comment are, in all likelihood. The ridiculous notion that someone has so uniqu…

>Who called anyone a name? Luddism?

Sorry, perhaps I misinterpreted it.

>In reality I spend my day asking questions, getting broad strokes, getting code commented, asking for API or resources, etc.

Can you give me some concrete examples? I'd like to use it, but I'm currently of the mind:

  1. If it's boring code, I can write it faster than asking LLM to do it and fixing its issues.

  2. If it's not boring code, like say a rules engine or something, I'm not sure the LLM will give me a good result based on the domain.

I mainly stick to back end work, automation, building WebAPI's and DSS engines for the medical field.

Maybe I'm under and over thinking it at the same time. FWIW, I typically stick to a single main language, but where I usually work, the companies dictate a GP language for all our stuff: C# in my example. I do a small amount of Python for LLM training, but I'm just starting out with Python. I can see it being useful saying, "convert this C# to Python," but honestly, I'd rather just learn the Python.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#250

Post by tomrod » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 4:34 PM UTC

computerphage wrote: post #123

vargr616 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally know people that would claim a phoneless phone is useful, right away, without having used the device once, as long at it was released by Apple.

To be clear, I think a "phone" as in smartphone, that can't make calls would be mostly as useful for me, personally. But you might be claiming "people would buy an empty box, if apple put its logo on the box"

Like an ipod touch!