Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 674 posts

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#661

Post by slwvx »

specialist wrote: post #575
slwvx wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that solar (and maybe wind?) energy have benefited from learning-by-doing [1][2] that has resulted in lower costs and/or improved performance each year. It seems reasonable to me that a similar process will apply to AI (at least in the long run). The rate of learning could be seen as a "pace" of improvement. I'm curious, do you have a reference for the deceleration of pace that you refer to? [1] http…

u/ipaddr is probably referring to 1) the dearth of new (novel) training data. Hence the mad scramble to hoover up, buy, steal, any potentially plausible new sources. 2) diminishing returns of embiggening compute clusters for training LLMs and size of their foundation models. (As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve. So there's a tension. Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling…

I was not aware of (or had forgotten) the term "Wright's law" [1], but that indeed is what I was thinking of. It looks like some may use the term "learning curve" to refer to the same idea (efficiency gains that follow investment); the Wikipedia page on "Learning curve" [2] includes references to Wright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#662

Post by stickmunch »

hollerith wrote: post #660
stickmunch wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You rarely ever saw them in the wild. Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.

UPS uses what are called DIADS made by Honeywell. I've seen Fedex and Amazon use regular android phones as far as I'm aware.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#663

Post by hollerith »

stickmunch wrote: post #662
hollerith wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You rarely ever saw them in the wild. Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.

UPS uses what are called DIADS made by Honeywell. I've seen Fedex and Amazon use regular android phones as far as I'm aware.

OK, but the topic is tablets before the introduction of the iPad

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#664

Post by dwaite »

cush wrote: post #159
Workaccount2 wrote: post #58

If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly diversified revenue stream. Going with An…

> Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.

> It was nearly two years ago

Just under 16 months since the release of iOS 18. The phones they would have sold this with shipped alongside 18.

Also, the personalized Siri was indicated it would not be available until later and was expected in the spring release (March 2025).

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#665

Post by dwaite »

rchaud wrote: post #645
trelane wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, "iPad" is almost a generic term for "tablet," especially for kids.

Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.

That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.

Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.

That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#666

Post by dwaite »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #544
_fw wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the person you’re replying to meant MacBooks. They were USB-C exclusively way before Windows machines.

It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything. I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.

There is not a single port on the Apple Silicon MBP that I wouldn't trade for another thunderbolt (USB-C) port.

Closest would be the SD card slot... if it was SD Express.

If they had released the M1 MBP in the old chassis I would have a real challenge upgrading to the current models.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#667

Post by dwaite »

adastra22 wrote: post #556
virgildotcodes wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything. I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.

Same… I love MagSafe and would prefer to use it. I’m always worried about yanking the computer with the USB-C charger in and breaking the cable or the port. But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.

The battery life is sufficient that I never feel the need to leave it umbilical-ed to an outlet across the room. I'll leave it docked at my desk, or use it wirelessly, or charge it at a conference room table, or recharge it after the day is done in my hotel room as I sleep.

Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#668

Post by dwaite »

Ntrails wrote: post #594
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is always behind on industry trends Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.

> prioritizing BT over wired earphones Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p > I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken. Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.

Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.

USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.

The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#669

Post by dwaite »

hnlmorg wrote: post #624
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though That's evidence they forced themselves. Not that there was a forcing function. That's the whole point of the top comment. (Mine.) They rushed where they didn't have to. And I still don't think they need to rush.

That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there: A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business. The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing visio…

> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.

Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.

This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:

1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.

2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier

3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities

4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code

I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.

But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.

That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#670

Post by dwaite »

cush wrote: post #372
baxtr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the top 3 features you’re missing right now?

I'll bite 1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in mor…

For 1, I think we are getting farther away from this.

Siri's current architecture now provides context into the prompt, such as the app/window that has focus and the content loaded into it. In that sense, Siri is more like the MacOS menu bar than an app. A consolidated view of Siri history may look disjointed, in that there is a lot of context hidden if all it shows is a query like "when was this building built?".

Even more so, it might not provide the functionality desired if you go look at historic chats and ask "who was the architect?", unless all that context was actually captured. However, that context was never formatted in a way that was intended to be clearly displayed to the user. That in itself creates a lot of challenges around things like user consent since Siri can farm off queries to other (online) tools and world-knowledge AI services.

There is at least a UX paradigm for this - clipboard history. Coincidentally, Tahoe built clipboard history into Spotlight. But clipboard history lends itself to perhaps being more a complete and self contained snapshot. I'm not sure Siri is being built to work this way because of implicit context.

For 2, at a certain point this gets farmed off to other tools or other AI services. The Gemini agreement is for the foundational model, not large "world knowledge" models or backing databases. Today, Siri answers this question by providing bibliographical information inline from Wikipedia, using internal tools. The model itself just isn't able to answer the actual question (e.g. it will just say his birthday).

For 3, the model already has substantial personal context (as much as apps are willing to give it) and does have state in between requests. This is actually one of the issues with Siri today - that context changes the behavior of the command and control engine in interesting ways, phone to phone and sometimes moment to moment.

Unfortunately, I think stopping and asking for clarification is not something generative AI currently excels at.

Post reply on HN