__Truly helpful__ it's funny to think about reasons people put these words there
Siri AI
671–680 of 746 posts
Re: Siri AI
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Siri, lights out everywhere" - "okay, which room". "Siri, start a stopwatch" - runs the App "Stopwatch" without starting it Such errors happen maybe 50% of the time. You can never just ask something without double-checking afterwards.
Siri, wake me up at “time”… Months later you have dozens of saved alarms, all at different times. Set a timer for 50 minutes…always get a timer for 15.
I learned long ago to set my timers for 49 minutes.
Re: Siri AI
#673I didn't really see anything that knocked my socks off. Mostly, it's the promise that Siri now works in the way in which they said it would work a few years ago, when it didn't. I do like the addition of Siri in the context menu, though. I can see that being useful.
Requiring at least an iPhone 15 Pro also seems like a mistake, unless it’s for actual hardware reasons. The 15 is only 3 years old, this requirement cuts off a lot of potential users I think
Who cares about users?
This decision is the best for costs(less to spent on ai) and on demand for newer models
Re: Siri AI
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not in fact how humans work at all. Ask a human to plan a trip: They do research, Pick destinations led by their own experience/likes/dislikes Compare to other guides Plan itineraries so they can get there Check and share Ask an LLM to plan a trip: It takes the prompt and continues it based on weights in the training data. If there is no data it picks the most likely thing (maybe made up). If there is it’ll mos…
I think even if what you say is true, it doesn't address parents' point that both humans and machines regurgitate what they've consumed. But I'd also want to point out that the way you're characterizing an LLM planning a trip doesn't have any structure to it, which indicates that in your scenario you're not using any kind of harness. I've been amazed at how capable even 30 billion parameter models are when I put them…
Agents and harnesses don’t change the fundamental nature of LLMs, as is demonstrated by their terrible performance at real world tasks.
Re: Siri AI
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of people never even asked for a personal assistant, because that isn’t something normal people have or do need in the first place. They aren’t so occupied/privileged/posh to need someone to do the trivial tasks of daily life for them. This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
Giving normal people something that has only been available to rich people is a staple of technological innovation. The problem in this case with Siri isn’t that people don’t want an assistant. It’s that it doesn’t actually work yet.
But normal people have entirely different problems than rich people do! The amount of administrative overhead that would warrant a personal assistant is just vastly lower - most normal people:
- don't travel frequently,
- don't have so many complex inquiries that require someone to research,
- don't have super complicated taxes to file,
- don't go eating out in fancy restaurants that require special skills to get reservations in,
- don't have so many meetings to attend,
- don't receive hundreds of emails per day,
- don't work on multiple projects at the same time,
- don't organise festivities and social gatherings all the time.
The one thing that would be useful - a kind of "chief of staff" that monitors your entire digital life and prioritises your every next step - is the antithesis to Siri and the like, which are merely reactive to your requests, not proactive in figuring out what needs your attention next. Let alone that that would be a total privacy nightmare, and a prime candidate for mass manipulation at scale.
Re: Siri AI
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of people never even asked for a personal assistant, because that isn’t something normal people have or do need in the first place. They aren’t so occupied/privileged/posh to need someone to do the trivial tasks of daily life for them. This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
Personally, I'd more interested in Reminders actually being able to sync lists properly and not delayed or reshuffling items while I'm typing before they would work on a personal assistant. Reminders (like Siri) has become the favorite joke of the family by now. They don't even seem to get the basics right, why would I want another layer on top?
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Re: Siri AI
#677I strongly believe Apple can win the consumer AI space. They have incredible distribution and hardware. They just haven’t executed at the application layer yet.
what's worrisome is that they continue to fail at it. it's one thing to say "we're still hashing things out". it's another to parade around Image Generation features that are obviously widely not-cared-for and oftentimes actively disliked Apple cares greatly about their brand yet this has hurt their brand like nothing else in the past decade
> it's another to parade around Image Generation features that are obviously widely not-cared-for and oftentimes actively disliked
I mean, that was one of many things, and I'd argue the least interesting by far. If the Safari extension creation thing is decent at all, that's a seriously cool addition. There's some real value shown in this most recent WWDC. Whether they actually release it this time is another question...
Re: Siri AI
#678It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…
Its feels as if apple are trying to create deterministic use cases for AI - a non deterministic solution!
Re: Siri AI
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Image generation seems like table stakes though, i.e. if you're going to offer a whole ass AI integrated with your operating system, it'd seem like a weird omission not to have image generation included.
i dont agree at all. image generation feels very odd for Apple. and usually they don't care about glaring omissions like this, either: iPadOS was lacking a calculator for yeeeeaaaars. they repeatedly said they'd ship a calculator if they can do something special for its introduction, and only then. so why did they lose their hesitancy to ship mediocre stuff here?
That's true, good point. Maybe they just wanted it for the memoji/iMessage possibilities?
Re: Siri AI
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s really one of the most flabbergasting things about discussing LLMs with the naysayers. There are a lot of extremely legitimate concerns, like the environmental impact and so on. But I just laugh when they point out that LLMs are merely clever regurgitators of their previous inputs… as if this isn’t how we as humans operate nearly all of the time. People realllllllllly want to think they’re special snowflakes.
It is not in fact how humans work at all. Ask a human to plan a trip: They do research, Pick destinations led by their own experience/likes/dislikes Compare to other guides Plan itineraries so they can get there Check and share Ask an LLM to plan a trip: It takes the prompt and continues it based on weights in the training data. If there is no data it picks the most likely thing (maybe made up). If there is it’ll mos…
There are plenty of humans who plan trips by concatenating destinations that appear the most frequently in their instagram feed. Not that different from how an LLM does things.
Where humans and (current) LLMs differ the most is their failure mode. A human friend could be bad at planning trips, but that's kinda predictable, we're used to it, we know how to catch that Exception. LLMs on the other hand still have failure modes that come across as really wacky, like, what are they smoking in Mountain View?
Which might actually serve as better evidence of different internal workings at a deeper level, than just parroting well-known superficial features of stochastic whatevertheysay.