Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by kredd » Sat, Oct 26, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #118

kredd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.

No, the problem is that "AI" just isn't any good at almost anything.

You can argue that, but there are legitimate "AI" workflows that have already been adapted in workplaces where things function well enough. I'm sure 99% of it is just slop, most companies will fail, but some things will survive, become commoditized and taken for granted in about 5 years.

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

#332

Post by rbanffy » Sat, Oct 26, 2024, 8:18 PM UTC

hifromwork wrote: post #295

rbanffy wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false. For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.

That sounds like an useful tool for willing users, but if forced that sounds genuinely dystopian. And I'm afraid the people who would benefit the most (conspiracy theorists) wouldn't opt into that.

> And I'm afraid the people who would benefit the most (conspiracy theorists) wouldn't opt into that.

It's an unfortunate fact that the people most sick will refuse treatment until it's too late. Seen from the inside, insanity looks like lucidity.

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

#333

Post by immibis » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 12:15 PM UTC

alt227 wrote: post #256

immibis wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The law doesn't care what marketing you received and neither does physics. Don't crash your car over a radio.

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

#334

Post by dageshi » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 12:34 PM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #327

dageshi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

By "it has been tried" you mean that they sold some crappy phone for almost the same price as a way better one?

Well that's also an issue, the audience that wants a smaller phone is also spread across all the price points that the regular audience is. So it's even less viable for manufacturers to make small phones.

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

#335

Post by fao_ » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 3:59 PM UTC

qup wrote: post #172

fao_ wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork. The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the…

He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.

> Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

I'm not sure how a bunch of probably-correct keywords that miss a lot of the important aforementioned details in the image is more useful than the image itself, or it's metadata. Both of which would be lost. My point applies equally with respect to image classification, too.

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

#336

Post by aiono » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #281

aiono wrote: post #102

AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.

Here, it is more like the smartphone market is stagnating and manufacturers need something to encourage people to buy new smartphones instead of keeping the one they already have. They are already doing planned obsolescence, with hard to replace batteries, limited software support combined with closed systems, etc... But they can't abuse it, as regulatory agencies are already after them and customers are starting to…

For that "AI" this level of investment was not necessary though. What I mean is about companies that develops LLMs for general problem solving. They require huge investment yet their value yield is still very low.

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

#337

Post by xvector » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #318

xvector wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use their cloud instead of local compute if you'd like: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ Building a privacy aware cloud is a lot harder than you think it is. Apple is going the whole way with remote attestation, hardware root of trust, software BOM, etc. https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/

They are, and I actually believe that they’ve done a good job of all that stuff (though suspect that using their weird Mac hardware in the DC can’t possibly be a truly superior option to the NVIDIA hardware the entire rest of the world is using, but let’s assume I’m wrong). But are you suggesting I will be able to flip a switch to use their cloud for all the same AI stuff instead of my battery-powered phone? That wou…

> But are you suggesting I will be able to flip a switch to use their cloud for all the same AI stuff instead of my battery-powered phone?

Yup! That's the idea. Compute negligible tasks run locally, but for requests that would hog battery and compute (or even be impossible to run on your iPhone), the data center will be used!

> though suspect that using their weird Mac hardware in the DC can’t possibly be a truly superior option to the NVIDIA hardware

So they are doing this for two reasons:

1. They get remote attestation and hardware root of trust when using their own hardware. No need to load proprietary blobs from Nvidia, introduce a new unvetted third-party supply chain, etc

2. Apple Silicon is actually much more cost effective than Nvidia's GPUs for inference. You can get a 48GB Apple Silicon Mac for like $4k and run large models - it's $40k for similar VRAM from Nvidia. I imagine Apple's costs are much lower than $4k as well.

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

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Post by xvector » Sun, Oct 27, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

xk_id wrote: post #308

no_wizard wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m more annoyed by the sheer amount of effort and time we’re spending now as a society to rationalise the AI bullshit and argue against it. For example everything you said is valid, but you were provoked into painstakingly writing this elaborate rebuttal, by a bunch of parasitic VCs, who have zero intellectual integrity and are simply trying to advertise their investment.

I dunno about that. Peter Norvig would disagree with both of you. He argues we reached AGI some time ago. It's a good read - https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

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

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Post by soco » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 9:43 AM UTC

diggan wrote: post #29

tra3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.

> I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big. My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the…

There still are people using tablets for calling, taking selfies and whatever else. I think it was a more common sight earlier (the times of the first iPads) but they are definitely still around. I can explain this even less...

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

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Post by soco » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 9:48 AM UTC

slashdave wrote: post #173

nerdjon wrote: post #10

My opinion is that most of the real uses of AI (like ML has always been) will be largely hidden things that are LLM based but not screaming at your face "AI". Particularly once the bubble pops and money stops being shoved into things just sticking an LLM in a pretty package with little to no value. Some of the things coming in iOS like notification summaries and similar features are big examples. It's clearly LLM bas…

Photo manipulation is another example. You can see the wisdom of how Apple is approaching this. In particular, to be on device whenever possible so as not to be dependent on network bandwidth, and to tie features to new hardware (to drive sales).

How I wish this would actually work properly. One can have only so many sepia filters and cat ears before realizing photo manipulation still does the same it was doing ten years ago. I have yet to see an app actually improving the photo quality - and no, doubling the pixels is not that. Yes, you cannot create details where they are missing, but sometimes they should be obvious, like fixing the foliage (leaves in the distance always look like... leaves), trying to clarify the contours (not only by bumping the contrast) and I could go on. Yet no, every new AI-powered image processor only brings a new approach to sepia filters and adding cat ears.