Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#371

Post by PaulHoule » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

losvedir wrote: post #292

SirMaster wrote: post #218

Do people actually want this AI stuff in their phone? I don't want AI on my desktop/laptop computer and I don't want it on my phone either. None of my family or friends that I talk to seem to want it either.

I absolutely do. The Apple Intelligence pitch where you can ask it "what time is my mom landing?" and it knows who your mom is, can RAG messages and emails from her to obtain a flight number for today, and then use a tool to look it up and respond back is 100% where the future is heading. I'm excited for it, and like Apple's high level privacy protecting narrative with the secure cluster stuff. We'll see if they're e…

Not gonna get there with RAG based on vector spaces…. You need to integrate old-school A.I., database queries and the like for that to be reliable enough to not be a laughing stock. An LLM can use tools to set that up, but you need to build on existing technologies and face down the Gödel, Turing and scaling problems that come with it.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#372

Post by nailer » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #271

amelius wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even just the most basic LLM integration, without even giving that LLM any personal data would be a massive improvement. I don't think Apple will ever use LLMs, given the offensive output they can generate sometimes. There is just no way to make them safe for all audiences.

Apple Intelligence already uses LLMs today in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.

You're correct. I imagine the parent poster may be using an pre-Iphone 15 Pro so not be aware.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#373

Post by wtallis » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #340

wtallis wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter) Adding filler is how you make a passively-cooled device run cooler . Air that's not moving doesn't transport enough heat to be useful, and convection doesn't do anything in the narrow spaces between and above components on a circuit board. Thermal paste, graphite sheets, and vapor chambers are what phones these days do with…

It depends on the filler and whether you want other things around to get warmer or not. Radios for example are normally kept away from too much heat, then any temperature difference is monitored/compensated in configuration. Anyway, what I mean is - that heat is going somewhere - any extra filler will change where / how quickly.

In the context of how phones today are built, air gaps are pretty much never the right answer to a thermal concern. At best, an air gap is what you allow when the budget cannot accommodate a better solution. If you have a component you need to keep cool, it's probably because it puts out a fair bit of heat on its own, so you want to thermally couple it to its surroundings. If you have a component you don't mind getting warm, you use it as part of the path for heat to be conducted from the big heat generators out to the surface of the phone.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#374

Post by MPSFounder » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

ddp26 wrote: post #180

John Giannandrea (JG) was running the Google Assistant when I was there. That didn't go so well. (Pre-LLM assistants as a category have done badly - Alexa/Siri did _ok_ but presumably everyone working on them had higher hopes.) I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category. Seems like there…

Very interesting! I literally heard people defend him in my circles as being the mind behind Google Assistant. I should have done my homework to see if timelines aligned with its recent success. I believe Siri needs to be completely redesigned from the grounds up. It is absolutely awful, and Steve would be rolling in grave if he saw what it amounts to. They're polishing a turd.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#375

Post by MPSFounder » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:15 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #364

xxpor wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.

Having sat beside both of them together in Caffe Macs some years ago, your assertion seemed exactly correct.

I never met Steve. I met Cook and on a separate occasion Forstall. Cook always struck me as a shy business bean counter. Forstall is an engineer through and through. Such a shame we never got to experience an alternate timeline where Apple was under his leadership.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#376

Post by MPSFounder » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

lsllc wrote: post #324

ksec wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…

This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously. You can imagine how it usually works…

Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#377

Post by klabb3 » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #328

klabb3 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue Compared to? All taxes mean fewer transactions – and purchases that never happen don’t generate revenue. This is not easily measurable. Most SaaS or similar services probably go through other devices or email to handle transactions. Apples payments and subscriptions are excellent products but how much goes through there of say revenue for streaming services like Spotify an…

> I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason. The users aren't the issue, the developers are. Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willi…

> The users aren't the issue, the developers are.

Just to clarify, you are referring to companies, not necessarily their developers.

> Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS

No they don’t? I just check their app listing and you can use Apples own IAP. In either case, NYT can have reputable reporting while still being complete slimes when it comes to subscriptions. And even so, it strengthens the argument that Apple and other subscription aggregators deliver value (relatively - our CC centric payment world is abysmally bad), meaning users are willing to pay, meaning merchants are willing to use it to get sales they couldn’t otherwise.

> can you imagine what shady game developers would do?

If what, they could do whatever they wanted? Apple (or any other curator) could still police against fraud and misleading consumers. What does that have to do with the 30% tax?

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#378

Post by alexpotato » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #253

alexpotato wrote: post #164

I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…

I heard a Steve story from a relation that was a high level exec during his tenure. They were running a meeting about failure rates of (Macbooks, phones, I can't remember which exactly). They knew their stats well, parts, how to source, costs, etc. They spent months on research. They presented it to him from an operations nature, e.g. the costs and such. His response was along the lines of: TV's are amazing technolog…

> But the point of telling me the story anyways, which I think matches here, is he had a way of pattern matching the average persons expectations based in reality, and applying it to their technology, and then aligning people towards ambitious goals that were on some level based in reality (i.e. people use TVs, they are similar technology, people don't expect them to break).

Very well put!

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#379

Post by Simon_O_Rourke » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #107

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #49

Would whoever in Apple who originally setup that AI division take the appropriate "blame" for being wrong and resign themselves? Hardly.

It's not uncommon for technology companies to over promise and under deliver. We just aren't used to it from Apple because of their secretive nature. They released a new MacBook recently and we don't know whether that was on time or months late simply because Apple never mentioned it before the product was released. Whether the fault lies with individuals or the structure of the organisation is a more interesting que…

It's the usual cop out so, a shrug of the shoulders and fire some VPs and start the merry-go-round again.

It seems like most tech corporate structures are to figure out the appropriate place in the org chart to wield the axe, so long as it's lower down.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#380

Post by mlsu » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #20

LoganDark wrote: post #5

Why is Apple struggling so hard with LLMs? I get that they're a hardware company, but surely that can't be the full story. They must be suffering from some case of extreme perfectionism or something like that. I would assume it'd be very difficult to get an LLM to perform consistently and reliably without making it useless.

No commercialized LLM product released so far would meet Steve Jobs' standard for a high-profile Apple product, and while that standard is clearly much more lax now, there still is one and still higher than what people accept from OpenAI et al. I wouldn't call that perfectionism, just a struggling brand standard that can't afford to lose even more face. I think many inside and outside Apple hoped that the ways that t…

Really?

If Apple released OpenAI's voice mode, without calling it "AI," referring to a "GPT" or a "model" -- if it was just integrated into the iPhone with a wake word, that absolutely would satisfy Jobs.

The problem with these companies is that they can't visualize how a product works for non-technical customers any more. Because everyone they know lives and breathes Silicon Valley. They see billboards for vector databases on their commute, so they think it's perfectly normal to name a product "GPT."

A product containing a language model should never, ever be called "AI" or "GPT" or even "Intelligence." 10 years ago, the only people who knew what the term "AI" even was were the nerdy readers of pulp scifi novels. I'm half joking but the whole town of silicon valley needs their glasses smashed and to be shoved into a locker.