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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#61

Post by eurekin »

swyx wrote: post #10

brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google 2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT) 2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under on…

This is quite a spectacular CV.

Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#62

Post by satvikpendem »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #37
swyx wrote: post #10

brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google 2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT) 2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under on…

This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".

Where did they fail besides Siri? The rest look like fine achievements to me.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#63

Post by parliament32 »

sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#64

Post by next_xibalba »

joezydeco wrote: post #33
swyx wrote: post #10

brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google 2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT) 2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under on…

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

I miss 411GOOG. It was fun and felt like a cool fusion of new and old tech.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#65

Post by DrewADesign »

yunwal wrote: post #43
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

I have never been able to play music with Siri. Even something as simple as “play this specific album” gets completely bungled.

Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service?

I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request problem. Maybe its a genre thing?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#66

Post by scrollaway »

ecshafer wrote: post #47
elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst drivi…

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”.

It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.

Timers and alarm clocks it is.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#67

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

aetherspawn wrote: post #56

This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like. I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple. I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices). At this point, their investment…

I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#68

Post by npunt »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31
danielheath wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds. Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).

> or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library My personal favourite is Siri responding to a request to open the garage door, a request it had successfully fielded hundreds of times before, by placing a call to the Tanzanian embassy. (I've never been to Tanzania. If I have a connection to it, it's unknow…

I'm amazed more AI tools don't have reality checks as part of the command flow. If you take a UX-first perspective on AI - which Apple very much should - there's going to be x% failures to interpret correctly, causing some unintended and undesirable action. A reasonable way to handle these failure cases is to have a post-interpretation reality check.

This could be personalized, 'does this user do this kind of thing?' which checks history of user actions for anything similar. Or it could be generic, 'is this the type of thing a typical user does?'

In both cases, if it's unfamiliar you have a few options: try to interpret it again (maybe with a better model), raise a prompt with the user ('do you want to do x?'), or if it's highly unfamiliar, auto cancel the command and say sorry.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#70

Post by drob518 »

fidotron wrote: post #48
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

Yes, I think the question here is not so much why the old is leaving, but if anyone seriously expects the new guy to succeed any more? ex-Microsoft too, not exactly a great start. What does seem slightly odd is Apple have probably saved billions by failing to be dragged into the current model war.

I agree that not falling for the hype and rushing in may have just saved them. Apple is typically not a first mover. They often hang back, rethink the problem, and deliver something really nice. But not in this case. They had Siri first and then squandered their lead, but may have avoided a huge write-down as a result.
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