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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#611

Post by sodafountan »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #174
sodafountan wrote: post #158

Can someone explain to me how this was allowed to happen? Wasn't Siri supposed to be the leading AI agent not ten years ago? How was there such a large disconnect at Apple between what Siri could do and what "real" AI was soon to be capable of? Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn…

Source: while I don’t have any experience with the inner workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa). Siri was never an “AI agent”, with intent based systems, you give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an intent, all of the “slots” have to be fulfilled. For instance “I want to go from $sour…

I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer my question.

I want to know why the executive leadership at Apple failed to see LLMs as the future of AI. ChatGPT and Gemini are what Siri should be at this point. Siri was one of the leading voice-automated assistants of the past decade, and now Apple's only options are to strap on an existing solution to the name of their product or let it go defunct. So now Siri is just an added layer to access Gemini? Perhaps with a few hard-coded solutions to automate specific tasks on the iPhone, and that's their killer app into the world of AI? That's pathetic.

Is Apple already such a bloated corporation that it can no longer innovate fast enough to keep up with modern trends? It seems like only a few years ago they were super lean and able to innovate better than any major tech company around. LLMs were being researched in 2017. I guess three years was too short of a window to change the direction of Siri. They should have seen the writing on the wall here.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#612

Post by Razengan »

JohnMakin wrote: post #136
quitit wrote: post #63

This is a bit of a layer cake: 1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly. 2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press,…

Siri is objectively bad though. It isn't some vendetta. I am disabled and there are at least 50 different things that I'd love siri to do that should be dead simple , yet it cannot. My favorite one was when I suffered a small but not serious fall, decided to test whether siri could be alerted to call 9-11 while being less than 6 feet away from me, absolutely could not understand let alone execute my request. It's a l…

In the 15 years since I've been an Apple user, Siri has never worked for me when I really needed it.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#613

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sodafountan wrote: post #611
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: while I don’t have any experience with the inner workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa). Siri was never an “AI agent”, with intent based systems, you give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an intent, all of the “slots” have to be fulfilled. For instance “I want to go from $sour…

I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer my question. I want to know why the executive leadership at Apple failed to see LLMs as the future of AI. ChatGPT and Gemini are what Siri should be at this point. Siri was one of the leading voice-automated assistants of the past decade, and now Apple's only options are to strap on an existing solution to the name of their product or let it go defunct. So now…

According to everything that has been reported, both the Google Assistant and Alexa are less reliable now that they are LLM based.

I don’t know why, in my much smaller scale experience, converting to an LLM “tools” based approached from the Intent based approach is much more reliable.

Siri was behind pre LLM because Apple didn’t throw enough monkeys at the problem.

Everything that an assistant can do is “hardcoded” even when it is LLM based.

Old way: voice -> text -> pattern matching -> APIs to back end functionality.

New Way: voice -> text -> LLM -> APIs to back end functionality.

How often have you come across a case where Siri understood something and said “I can’t do that”? That’s not an AI problem. That’s Apple not putting people on the intent -> API mapping. An LLM won’t solve the issue of exposing the APIs to Siri.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#614

Post by Cockbrand »

apparent wrote: post #267
Cockbrand wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my HomePods all the time, and it's working great.

How do you do this on a HomePod? I could definitely see Apple limiting this to newer hardware, as a way to bump sales.

Let me get back to you on this, but it'll take me a few days

EDIT: Here you go, it's very barebones, but it's better than nothing (I hope): https://github.com/cockbrand/siri-gemini-shortcut

As you'd expect, the code is vibed by Gemini :)

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#615

Post by elzbardico »

aurareturn wrote: post #597
elzbardico wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be r…

Normal software has way less moat than SOTA labs. SOTA AI models can have different architectures, vastly different compute in training, different ways of inferencing, different input data, different RL, and different systems around the model. Not to mention the significant personal user data that OpenAI is collecting. Saying SOTA AI models are like sugar is insane.

What matter are the results. I'd say that Chinese companies are probably getting a better ROI from their projects using models a few months behind western models, because any deficiency in the models is surpassed by better engineering and better market fit of what they are building over those agents.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#616

Post by ghaff »

no_wizard wrote: post #242
ghaff wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.

I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary. Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up wi…

Pre-iPhone and pre-Intel Mac, Apple was experimenting with a lot of things. The iPod wasn't a clear initial win--and the iPhone wasn't either. A lot of the success happened in retrospect.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#617

Post by observationist »

They've let a snake in their walled garden.

I didn't realize that Apple could possibly be more stupid in their strategy with AI, but now they've given the game to their biggest competitor in every arena in which they compete.

It's truly amazing how badly they've flubbed it.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#618

Post by bmitc »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #584
bmitc wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology Since when? > versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.

> Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them? I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"

Is the iPod your only example? That was a quarter century ago.

What's hot about less ports, no headphone jack, no SD card, a tax when buying apps for your phone, planned obsolescence, antagonistic behavior towards app and software developers, an unchanged aluminum rectangle, thinner devices that look cool at the cost of performance and efficiency, heaviest laptops and phones on the market, phones made out of glass front and back, the touchbar, the notch, etc.?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#619

Post by bmitc »

stickmunch wrote: post #566
bmitc wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool When was this part last true?

Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard. Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.

> Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard

Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#620

Post by JohnMakin »

quitit wrote: post #273
JohnMakin wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for whatever cynicism leads you to believe this. I don't believe there is an "astroturfer" problem with siri, and that is mostly what I was responding to. Sorry you missed that.

Oh that riled you up? Too bad. Better get out your alt accounts to address this great injustice.

Huh? Why are you so upset about such a benign reply responding to astroturfing siri of all things? Have a good one.
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