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

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

#261
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What do you mean by that? Varied and novel to the programmer . If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful. >doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed A core disconne…

It's alright that you like LLMs but you don't need to name-call ("luddites", "snowflakes") those who don't find them as useful as you do.

Neither case are name-calling, and I don't think pearl clutching for effect is useful here.

Everyone is working in unique domains and spaces with weird rules and restrictions and needs. The whole point of the special snowflake comment is specifically that people aren't remotely unique in being a special snowflake.

And the Luddism argument isn't "name-calling", it's an observation of an absolute truth on here.

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

#262

This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…

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…

Our competitors are getting in on the ground floor of LLMs.

Do you want to be trying to raise money against them with nothing to tell potential investors about your company's usage of AI?

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

#263
post #136

IMO the most useful features are the summarizations – something I'm not sure the average user even recognizes as "AI". Image/emoji generation isn't really useful but I expect the photo editing capabilities will get a lot better over the next few years. The camera is one of the biggest reasons people buy a new iPhone but most consumers don't realize how much computational photography is involved. I can definitely see…

You only need it to summarise badly once to stop finding it useful though. There was a BBC notification that it summarised as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself" a few days ago.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Yes, many HN participants are reacting to AI in a completely common rejection of change / challenge, and it recurs constantly. You should read up on what Luddism and Luddists were actually about. They didn't think the machines were evil or satanic, which is the common cultural read. They assumed (correctly) that the managerial class would take full advantage of increased productiv…

>And considering the state of the textile industry today, I think that was a pretty solid set of projections.

I think it's just about all industries these days.

Yes, so many quote meanings have been malformed over the years, such as "a rolling stone gathers no moss," is considered good, while originally bad. "Blood is thicker than water," "Money is the root of all evil," etc.

The Luddites were right.

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

#265
When Apple announced Apple Intelligence I was very curious about how they would go about it. I expected a very innovative and elegant implementation but so far it feels very clunky. And the results aren't very good. ChatGPT is way better.

Putting it at front and center of every sales presentation and then rolling it out slowly in small steps didn't help either. Siri still sucks.

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

#266
post #103

The E-mail categorization is so bad that it's totally useless. Most of my E-mails are categorized wrong. I can't see how anyone thought it was a good idea to deploy this.

$3 trillion dollar company. What are they doing with the money? I'm baffled they could still be putting out anything less than exceptional quality.

Money and quality are rarely correlated.

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

#267
The Writing Tools are a gimmick, but the improvements to Siri on the iPhone 16 are great. I haven't used the visual intelligence yet, but I always thought Google Lens was cool, so I hope it works just as well. Image Playground and Genmoji are pretty stupid, I have no idea why they wasted time on that.

Message/email summaries are super weird. They show up when they want to, which is barely at all.

Say what you want about this Apple Intelligence stuff, but it's nowhere near as intrusive or annoying as Gemini or Copilot. You can turn it off and ignore it.

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

#268
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 number…

They're gotcha in the sense that people are intentionally asking LLMs to do things that LLMs are terrible at doing. LLMs are language models. They aren't math models. Or chess models. Or sorting or counting models. They aren't even logic models.

So early on the value was completely in language. But you're absolutely correct that for these tools to really be useful they need to be better than that, and slowly we're getting there. If you're asking a math question as a component of your question, firstly delegate that to an appropriate math engine while performing a series of CoT steps. And so forth.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said the same thing to a previous company before I was let go. Confused why they were butchering their business strategy in favor of a gold rush. The main benefit of LLMs was already abundantly clear: literally just chat with it in day to day work when you can. Ask it questions about accounting, other domains it knows, etc. That's like up to 10-20% performance increase on tasks if you align OK. Still, they were in…

> Ask it questions about accounting, other domains it knows Be very careful here if you're using it for anything important! LLMs are quite good at answering questions about accounting in ways which are superficially convincing-looking, yet also complete nonsense. "But the magic robot told me it was okay" will not fly in a tax audit, say.

Exactly my immediate reaction. Accounting has to follow very strict rules and needs some application of judgement.

It might answer questions in a useful way, but you have to make sure you understand the answers and that they match accounting standards or tax rules (and one danger, at least in some places, is that they are different and you might apply the wrong one).

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