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

Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#81

Post by pradn »

some_random wrote: post #37
pradn wrote: post #33

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to…

I agree completely, it's really unfortunate how AI on apple devices has been going. The message summarization is borderline useless and widely mocked, meanwhile their giant billboard ads for it are largely stupid and uncompelling. Let me choose to give it access to my data if I want to do really useful stuff with on device processing. They've been leaning into the privacy thing, do the stuff that would be creepy if i…

They're stuck on the privacy angle, because what it means is you can't call remote services. You'll always have access to more resources at a data-center than a phone. So, while the frontier of what's possible with purely-local models will keep advancing, it'll never exceed what's possible with remote models.

People care about extra privacy when the delta in capability is minimal. But people won't allow a massive discrepancy, like the difference between a 8B model and a 700B model.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#82

Post by pradn »

mgh2 wrote: post #56
pradn wrote: post #33

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to…

Apple is generally anti market hype. It is a smart PR move to avoid mentioning AI after the Apple Intelligence fiasco, their researchers leaving, and the bubble sentiment at the moment.

It's not a smart move to avoid integrating the most important capability advance in computing in the past decade - LLMs. They do support small cases, like summarizing text. But there's scope to do more.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#83

Post by pradn »

astrange wrote: post #40
pradn wrote: post #33

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to…

> In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate. Apps already have such an accessibility tree; it's used for VoiceOver and you can use it to write UI unit tests. (If you haven't tested your own app with VoiceOver, you should.)

I have used it actually! It's been years so the fact that it's an accessibility tree just like in a browser didn't come to mind immediately. Both Mac and Windows have such representations for native apps. The actual functionality apps and the accessibility clients support is something like a two-way negotiation. A lot of stuff that should be supported in apps, in theory, is not, just because no client supports it, etc.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#84

Post by pradn »

kodefreeze wrote: post #62
pradn wrote: post #33

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to…

They've being doing some research on this: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/ferretui-mobile

I didn't see this, thank you! They have a follow-up as well:

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/ferret-ui-2

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#85

Post by pradn »

rcxdude wrote: post #64
pradn wrote: post #33

Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed. Apple has everything it needs: * Apps are already logged in, so no extra friction to grant access. * Apps mostly use Apple-developed UI frameworks, so Apple could turn them into AI-readable representations, instead of raw pixels. In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to…

This is all possible, but an absolutely terrible idea from a security point of view, while prompt injection attacks are still a thing, and there's little evidence they will stop being a thing soon.

We can work toward closing security gaps with new technology, yes. It is necessary for large-scale adoption of LLM tech.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#86

Post by chasd00 »

adastra22 wrote: post #59
chasd00 wrote: post #28

I feel like they don’t want to get burned the way they did with the AVR/metaverse thing. Those headsets are worthless. Probably a lot of ptsd going on with people thinking how Jobs would have had their ass over it. I suspect they’re being very cautious with “AI”.

How did they get burned with AVP?

Late to a reply but the tech went nowhere. I’m not a financial expert but I don’t think they could have come close to breaking even on that product. I know no one that has it and there hasn’t been an article here talking about it in years (guessing here but I don’t recall seeing one).

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#87

Post by mort96 »

derefr wrote: post #79
mort96 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's generally perfectly safe to ignore products whose main purpose is to ride some hype wave.

Who said anything about the product's purpose? Excessive use of the term "AI" is a decision of marketing departments, and happens entirely downstream of product design. The same product could be produced five years ago or today, and the one produced five years ago would not be described as having "AI features", while the one produced today would. (You can check for yourself: look at the online product listing for any…

> (You can check for yourself: look at the online product listing for any mature "smart" device that got a new rev in the last three years. The Clapper would be described as an "AI" device today.)

And I make an effort to avoid those with "AI" features where practical. I do not need an AI toothbrush.

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#88

Post by fsckboy »

kergonath wrote: post #11
mdotk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more because they're way behind on AI and they literally have nothing to actually tell us.

They’re not way behind on AI, they’re way behind on LLMs. Several features they presented depend heavily on AI.

whatever Siri is, they're way behind on it. Siri has gotten siriously worse, Siri has fallen behind Siri.

(of course can't speak to this new release, obviously)

Re: Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event

#89

Post by kergonath »

fsckboy wrote: post #88
kergonath wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not way behind on AI, they’re way behind on LLMs. Several features they presented depend heavily on AI.

whatever Siri is, they're way behind on it. Siri has gotten siriously worse, Siri has fallen behind Siri. (of course can't speak to this new release, obviously)

No objection for me. I haven't used it since 2016 or so. I did not try it on the beta.
Post reply on HN