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Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

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Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means. AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc. If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out. LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneou…

> it’s not real intelligence Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving. Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.

None of these exhibit any accepted definitions of intelligence markers. The intelligence isn’t artificial, it doesn’t exist is my point. If you apply the commonly accepted definitions of what is considered display of intelligent behavior. One aspect of which is the ability to adapt to new circumstances that you haven’t experienced before.

There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill.

Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence.

It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system.

Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent.

I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even camera improvements are overblown. I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.

Me too! If anything, iPhone photos became more over-processed over the last decade.

Few years ago there was usual 'Apple look' on Instagram where every photo was taken at golden hour, all skin blemishes and moles ironed out into oblivion. Everybody was doing it in some form, but Apple was (is?) going furthest, into territory of painting more than representing reality (I compared my Samsung ultra with wife's iphone and its consistently this... but generally all reviews I saw few years ago stated the same).

Now pendulum has swung so all go for 'realistic look', but I expect people actually want rather milder version of above.

Phone photos look OK on phones, but enlarged even the top contender from current dxomark show very much how hardware limits work. Its just not presentable, maybe apart from very bright scenes. Now I wouldn't go bashing phones per se, its marvel what they achieve from those tiny plastic lenses and some CPU time. And they are always there. But any low hanging fruit in phone photography was picked up long time ago by whole market, what lies ahead are slow computational improvements, coupled with very slow increase in size and thickness of camera section of phones to capture more light.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#253

Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are…

They’ve all been hyped, only to be forgotten as consumers consistently revert to what they actually care about

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data is in the article >So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? 14% find it helpful >Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? 6% are willing to pay >66% have no privacy concerns? no stat on this but I think we can assume based on the others that it is not split evenly because that was not the methodology

Thanks. That’s clearer! Ok my next comeback - people are treating AI tools like a musical instrument. It’s like picking up a guitar for the first time, twanging a few strings and saying ‘Nah, this sounds shit’. Guitars are useless. I’d never pay for a guitar. Even chatGPT has a learning curve. I save myself hours or days per day using it for all sorts of things. Anyone who says they can’t find a use for AI is just la…

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Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#255

Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are…

Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago. Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.

These days, manufacturers seem to focus on more niche improvements (like for mobile gamers)

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to…

FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.

When something is called CarPlay and actively marketed as a way to use your phone services whilst driving, you would expect it to have a good enough UX that doesnt detract from safe driving to use it.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#257
post #3

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit.

Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late? Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed” Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is compe…

Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so the…

I don’t even think you need machine learning for this, it’s an API problem mostly like I said.

Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.

For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poll is very weirdly constructed. It looks like they gave people a set of checkboxes to check rather than asking people to rank their opinions on a scale. 25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box. 45% are reluctant to pay, but only 6% said they were willing to. So again, 49% simply didn't say one way or the other. 12% straight-up d…

> 25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box. But why include people who didn’t pick anything? Surely they should be ignored and it ends up being 64/36.

Yeah, it's bad. Excluding the people who checked neither is probably better, but it's still not perfect because it leaves out the people who read both options and would have said "undecided" if it were a choice.

It's just a bad poll.

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