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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

#41

Post by jeffbee »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #17
jeffbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?

I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.

I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos.

ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.

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

#42

Post by est31 »

mondobe wrote: 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.

Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

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

#43

Post by xvector »

xp84 wrote: post #26
mouse_ wrote: post #9

I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.

This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the se…

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/

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

#46

Post by jihadjihad »

tra3 wrote: post #14
brianshaler wrote: post #5

I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs

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 need a new battery in my 2020 SE as well, I wasn't aware that the last mini was a 13. Bring 'em back!

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

#47

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

xvector wrote: post #21
mondobe wrote: 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.

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.

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

#48

Post by JadeNB »

xp84 wrote: post #26
mouse_ wrote: post #9

I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.

This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the se…

The problem is that remote solutions to the privacy problem inevitably involve my trusting someone else's privacy assurances. On-device processing reduces the trust required, although of course it doesn't eliminate it.

The common response to this is to point out that I'm trusting Apple or Google anyway just by using their phones, which is true, but (1) since phones are directly accessible to security researchers, there's more potential to find out about malfeasance if data is exfiltrated from the phone in a way that it shouldn't be, and (2) even if I have complete trust in Apple or Google, I also have to trust that they'll be able to protect my data from malicious actors, and, the less data I give them, the less I have to worry when they fail.

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

#49

Post by behnamoh »

xvector wrote: post #39
behnamoh wrote: post #19

I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence: It's not bad, it's really really bad. The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intel…

Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since. As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.

> Apple has always sucked in AI

Yes, but Apple fans always respond by saying "...but Apple has been using ML in much of the OS for years, you just don't see it..."

I really want Apple to be better at this, but Generative AI is too uncontrollable for a control-freak company.

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

#50

Post by 1000100_1000101 »

zomg wrote: post #20

what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"

On iPhone, if I take a picture of a plant or animal, it identifies it for me. It's not 100% by any means, but it's useful enough. I've figured out what were baby plants I wanted vs. weeds. I've figure out species of birds I'd taken photos of with my SLR (ie: phone takes picture of Lightroom editing the image, and is able to identify it from that... I'd prefer there was a way to not require me to take a photo of my monitor, either doing it "live", and/or adding the functionality into the Mac.) For people and pets it can find other images that contain the same subject.

When my daughter was studying Chinese, I could use the live-video translation app and see the lesson text translated to English, and see her hand-written answers also translated to English. I could see this being more broadly useful when travelling, along with live translation of spoken words.

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