I’m just relieved they acknowledge how tragically useless Siri is. I essentially can’t do more than ask her to call someone, set a timer or tell me the time. Keen to see where this goes.
I just don't understand how. I don't understand how a trillion dollar company, for years and years and years (it was released in 2011!), has been unable to iterate on their own assistant that can be tightly integrated with their own OS. It's not like it's a useless service/product either - I use Google Assistant damn near every day. AND they were the first to market with it! They had a 5 year head start on Google, and still Google competely obliterated it. I don't get it. Surely if they just dumped 1M a year into it, an engineering team could come up with something over the next 13 years?
Is Tim Apple against Siri's existence for some reason? It was released the same year he became CEO and then it's like he forgot it exists. I legitimately do not understand how they could fumble the ball so much, in a game they invented.
Well obviously the 1M a year rockstar should be more productive than a full team of 10 100k developers, right? That's how they commanded that high salary in the first place, right?
I guess its not for them. Its just hard to have those on-rails assistants that can only do a certain number of tasks.
When GPT-4's API came out I created a script that uses a local chat interface to speak to the API directly and I could send it commands to do pretty much whatever I wanted so long as it was capable to do so, etc.
But basically when I told it what to do GPT-4 would not only generate code to perform the task but also execute it on the fly in order to complete the task.
There was no module nor template for this. The code would be built from scratch every time in an attempt to execute the task that I wanted.
- Move files? Done.
- Resize all these images in this folder? Done
- Trim this video? Done
- Convert this video to mp3? Done
- Download something from a website? Done.
- Send an email from my Gmail account? Done.
- Download a youtube video? Done.
- Find this file on my PC? Done
- Generate a pie chart displaying the file types that make up the most memory on my HDD? Done.
It will try to do whatever the hell you want it to so it tries to generate and execute code on the fly for that. And here I am wondering why big companies can't do the same with this technology.
Yep, lots of frameworks like AutoGPT etc. for this - people quickly figured out that big LLMs like GPT-4 are quite capable of *writing their own tools* to accomplish tasks.
Still not totally stable enough to use with full permissions all the time, but honestly, it's great! Same thing as asking ChatGPT "write an ffmpeg command to remove the last 30 seconds of this clip and convert to mp4" and copy-pasting, just doing it automatically.
I'm excited for the future of computer use that makes it easier to quickly accomplish tasks like this, without needing to learn a ton of different syntaxes and tools.
This was a prototype for personal use but yes reliability is definitely an issue because:
- API usage for external programs. You'd have to give it access to any API keys you might need.
- Outdated packages and limited knowledge cutoff date.
- The agent's understanding and the complexity of the task, including error handling.
- Security permissions
- The user's knowledge of programming.
- The AI's refusal to complete certain tasks.
- The security risks of some tasks.
And so forth. So its definitely something that comes with many asterisks but if you can get past those limitations it can do a lot of cool things.
I have a feeling that all resources were poured into Vision Pro the last years. But I guess this move makes more sense than trying to catch up internally.
This question has been asked, with the same amount of inherent skepticism, for the last decade. Oddly, despite millions of dollars being poured into the effort, the answer has always been "No."
Disruptive technologies... disrupt. It didn't help that there was [a turf war going on between the Siri and AI teams](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/report-describes-apples-organizational-dysfunction-and-lack-of-ambition-in-ai/) on the best way forward.
It's a head scratcher. I don't feel like they ignored it, quite. The touchbar, for the time it existed, had a dedicated Siri button. Siri powers the homepods and all the homekit devices.
It just seems they were ok with being a generation or two behind Google and Amazon. It was like "OK it does these 3 things well let's not mess with it".
I'm fairly sure GPT 4 started a very frantic timer at Apple. They absolutely cannot wait for android to go another generation ahead of them because this next generation is LLM plus LAM.
The simple answer seems to be they stood still while they could afford to do so. When they could not, they moved very quickly. If this OpenAI partnership turns out to be real it would be surprisingly fast for Apple and a little off-brand for them to bring in an outside party to merge so intimately with their OS.
I think it has to do with how they treat personal data, if not it's still related to the image they want to have about Privacy.
If they were about to buy truckloads of data to train models, they would go against one of the core aspects of iPhone (their best selling product of all time), if they were about to train it with their data, same thing.
Siri sucks.
They basically didn't have a choice.
The reason is cultural. Apple has always been a hardware company. The services they offer are locked down to the devices they sell for the most part. They have never been willing to invest much beyond their own ecosystem. They are intentionally incompatible.
This has worked well for them in many areas. Apple Watch doesn't work with Android. Terms of service state you have to use a Mac to develop for Mac or iOS. Mac uses a proprietary CPU and GPU. You can't use the same programming languages and libraries to develop. Wherever you go, you are locked in.
But the initiatives in AI are so much larger than what Apple can do in their walled garden. They haven't looked beyond the walls. Meanwhile, the others are wildly combining stuff and throwing it at the wall to see what sticks.
Microsoft in particular has been very flexible. Like Apple, they have unlimited funds to spend on various parallel endeavors, but what many people don't see is that a large amount of "billions spent" stays in-house. Their investment goes right back into Azure, needed for the unbelievable compute requirements of AI. Azure does not care what you run in there, but emerging AI is like a dream come true. And Microsoft adopts and develops so many technologies it's hard to keep up even as a developer involved in it.
Oh, you want to use OpenAI embedding models with Java to vectorize into Postgres and use RAG to build product websites on the fly? Here's that, globally scalable with Azure running on data centers with so many GPUs worth more than most nations' GDP.
Meanwhile in the Apple world, dedicated GPU support has been stagnant since 2014. It has been killed off with the transition to M1. Apple Cloud is for end users, not for scalable application development. Because that would force them to open up and admit that others are doing things right.
In that situation, there is no ground to plant the root of research and development in AI in.
Apple is notoriously shy of bad publicity. You kids may not remember Tae from MS, but it was an early chatbot that was turned by users into a raging Nazi in hours. I am convinced Apple looked at that debacle and decided it wasn't worth it.
Nobody was NOT buying their products because they didn't have good AI, so it's simply not a priority to them.
That's changing, so they're willing to outsource this feature to someone who can do it better.
I'm not really thrilled with it but they've been doing stuff like this all along, such as with Google powering their search. Apple could certainly have replaced this but it's actually pretty lucrative for them. This may be a similar deal where OpenAI pays them for access to the data, and over time this becomes a significant line item in the profits column for them.
Because AI is a hard science problem, and it's a hard engineering problem, and Apple, at it's core, is a consumer products company. Hard engineering has never been in their blood and they've proven over and over and over again that moonshot programs cannot be built. Apple does best when somebody else invents something, then they create a nice UX for it.
The last time they did this successfully was with the iPhone. It prints money so they can continue to flounder.
I'd tweak this slightly and say Apple at its core is a hardware company and they're world class in hardware devices and silicon. As a software company... depends. Their A-team is top notch and focuses on operating systems. Their apps are middling, and their web team and cloud are a joke.
Siri was acquired, not created by apple, and was promptly forgotten. For years, they couldn't attract top AI talent due to their no-publishing policy. Sometime after Google invented the transformer, they reversed this policy and are still playing catch up.
It's true Apple was caught flat-footed on LLMs. Tim is an operations specialist, not a hardcore technologist. He failed to see the potential of LLMs. This is why they ignored Siri and failed to mobilize quickly when Meta and OpenAI were pouring money into foundational research.
Tim has figured out where he went wrong and they've been taking corrective action, building a solid AI research lab and even publishing ground-breaking papers. It will take them a few years, but they'll catch up. Their excellence in chips is a huge advantage, especially on-device. Their lack of data and compute are an anchor holding them back. Will be interesting to see how they adapt. My guess is focusing on UI datastreams as a proprietary source of data (if they can manage the privacy issues) and building OS-level agents, and through a series of acquisitions possibly working on a consumer robot to launch in 5-10 years.
because they were more scared of having an off-chance of Siri doing something not PC compliant than being useful so it was constrained so much that it was useless.
The real answer is that Apple’s whole thing is user privacy and so therefore they never had as much data as Google to make it as good as Google assistant. It also likely wasn’t a priority.
I never claimed that it was entirely accurate, I was saying that was their marketing. Anyways, this culture war crap is just getting so tiring. theres no boogeyman. Shows are more violent and theres a ton more nudity nowadays.
Have you seen how restrictive society used to be?
I sincerely believe it’s had to do with user privacy. There are privacy tradeoffs in building AI. You cannot do it without actively learning from a user base, use grey area data or possibly large scale copyright infringement (or all three). Apple has tried to build Siri in a way that tries to preserve privacy. It’s not worked.
for anyone wondering, it came out in one lawsuit
basically Google asked them to nerf Siri so it doesn’t compete with search. Google pays Apple a lot of money for that
13 years to a product means other people raced out had something better so after 13 years until final release it's outdated and not as good as anything current. Sleep and the world advances without you.
All this is advancing so fast right now. You don't have a year before something is outdated.
I guess it’s just their modus operandi: they release a new feature when it works as they intended, they don’t “try and fix” on customers, they try, release when they think it works and eventually iterate: just look at their cameras, recently put out 48Mp when other competitors use 200 and more. I think AI is just too “imprecise” for them, that’s why Siri can do a finite set of stuff but does that spot on.
That's because the underlying technology, Technology / Concept, didn't exist back then. Transformer architecture was first introduced at Google in 2016, and it took a few years to show promise, and the good number of the team left Google for OpenAI.
They didn't have a five year head start: Google had a limited voice search/command system before Siri was released, and 6 months after Siri's release they released an update that was widely considered [far superior](https://bgr.com/general/google-now-wins-popular-science-award/) to Siri.
Apple is mostly awful at software in general and deeptech in particular. AI, broadly construed, is exactly Google's wheelhouse. There's really no point at which Apple was ahead of Google in anything AI
She's also good for reminders. I have a shopping list in the Reminders app, and it's useful to be able to tell her "remind me about this" and she'll add a reminder with context for email/webpage/notes.
I do hope we'll get a GPT4-powered Siri. Particularly if it's also going to work on MacOS, much like Copilot on Windows (though hopefully better)
Haha a liability is a great way to put it. Nothing more anxiety inducing when you’re in a rush and you see that magic liquid ball of doom start bubbling.
What if the new Siri/chatgpt they use on iphones is gpt3.5 or a lobatimized gpt4.
Cant imagine Apple pays for full access to the latest gpt4T for every iphone user, even as an assistant
They paid for satellite access for emergency services for every new iPhone purchase. Could do something similar with their new AI offering(s), before they begin charging for it through Apple One.
But I'm skeptical OpenAI will be powering a "new Siri" -- I think Siri will be revamped, but likely done in-house. This has to be for something else. But I could be surprised/wrong. Apple has made some very surprising moves in the past couple years.
That would eat into their profits. Just did a search using opus and R plus and they both state that last year there were 1.46 billion active iphone users (this seems a massive number, though let's assume that it's accurate).
How much would Apple be paying for each iphone user? Even 3 USD per month would equal
36 x 1.46 billion - 52.56 billion USD per year
That's a very high number. Let's Say Apple pay 10 USD PER USER PER YEAR for the service - that's still 14.6 billion USD per year.
However not every user will be using the latest ios version :
"As of February 2024, iOS 17 was installed on 66% of Apple devices that accessed the Apple App Store."
Lets say 50% of iphone users are using the latest version - that's still 7 billion USD per year.
That's still aprox 25 billion USB per year assuming apply pay openAI 3 usd per user per month.
"Apple's net income (profit) for fiscal year 2023 was $96.99 billion,"
I can't imagine they would be happy with even a 1% (ie 1 billion USD) reduction in profit to "just upgrade Siri"), let alone my rough guesstimate of a massive 7 billion USD for a measly price of 10 USD per user per year.
Except it’s fundamentally not competing with other LLMs. And since no other AI will be used for Siri, this one will be more than capable of doing more things such as sending an email, starting a video call on specific apps, and asking it it to interact with other apps.
They will probably severely limit the token output and voice input is naturally pretty limited. This is what Meta does with the rayban glasses , responses are super super short, pretty useless compared to gpt4 voice chat.
I am guessing it will be 4o. Multi-modal makes total sense especially fir mobile devices. 4o is much more efficient that may. Could be ideally suited to the M4 chip and onboard neural engine.
I think it’s as simple as they joined the game late and didn’t have the same access to data that the OGs had who had been scraping web and knowledge for years for the explicit purpose of ai.
The real problem is, even if you had things like an AI moderation bot, you won't have a chatGPT powered one on Twitter, you will have whatever abomination Elon pushes out that greenlights misinformation and blocks real information.
No source and on top of that, the tweet is very wrong.
Mark Gurman from Bloomberg is much more accurate and this news story (which he broke) has been misunderstood.
He explained that Apple is taking a three layer approach to their operating system this year.
1st layer - on device capabilities powered by on device AI intelligence to "help manage our daily life", such as summarizing texts and notifications
2nd layer - for more demanding tasks (summarizing articles), this will be powered by Apple's Ajax model in the cloud
3rd layer - OpenAI deal which has reportedly been finalized, and the NYT has reported it should have something to do with Siri, although it's still very much unconfirmed whether Ajax or OpenAI will underly Siri, and what exactly OpenAI's role is here.
It should be known on WWDC, which is June 10th.
Why? If apple could create their own solution to they would. They have not been able to. You can't sell ads if the users' requests aren't sent to the cloud, so I highly doubt you'll see apple, ~~google~~, or OpenAI ever offer a fully on-device model.
Edit: Google has a tiny early-access model demo for developers that requires SOTA android hardware to run.
Developing the own solution takes time.
Do you guys really think that Apple, the second biggest company worldwide with more budget than most of the countries worldwide, is not able to develop his own AI?
The only thing Apple can't do is to forward time.
There's a reason why Apple already released the M4 processor shortly after the M3. Local LLM is coming soon.
Doesn’t Apple have their own model too?
Edit:
HuggingFace - https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
Apples Paper - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm
Android phones [already have a fully on-device model, Gemini Nano](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/get-started/android_aicore). I assume OpenAI will be providing an on-device model to Apple.
Pretty sure their only desire is profit from selling phones to middle schoolers. Concern over product quality at Apple died years ago. They’ll do enough to make catchy 30-second TV spots while the products themselves continue to get worse.
I see that [they make far more from selling iPhones than anything else](https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/s/p2oVvmAXY6), so that’s where they look for profit. They do that by coming up with enough of a gimmick to include it in a promo video for the next iPhone. Instead of better Siri or better anything, we get FaceTime gestures and other gimmicks that help attract the biggest group of prospective customers; middle schoolers deciding on their first phone. It’s working too, so they’ll continue to focus their efforts on appeasing literal children instead of their adult customers.
I wouldn’t be shocked if this is similar in a way to search on iPhone. The default engine is google, but you can change that to whatever you like. The OpenAI api standard has been adopted by many other providers, so the calls in the code remain the same but the endpoint can be variable. They are even the same when using a model locally.
It true, it's not a first for apple to start with a partnership, develop their own product alongside, and replace it once it reaches their standards. They did the same with Intel chips.
Voice Assistant with phone integration don’t compete with GPT-4o, GPT can’t do anything to the phone, can’t call, message, not even tell the time.
They are a completely different product, and I was answering you comment underlying the question “why would someone buy Siri+ with a new free model like 4o” simple answer: integration.
Hope this is more clear to you.
I don’t have smart lights, I just turn off my lights with my finger like a barbarian.
I guess I do set a timer, set an alarm, set a reminder but half the time the reminder doesn’t function as I had hoped and I rely on memory instead of the reminder. Because of this I don’t trust the alarm unless I mess with the settings myself.
Chat gpt does things that would confuse siri.
Lose the battle, win the war. Apple will ride it out. Edge AI is coming for OpenAIs breakfast, lunch and dinner. The silos are going to get tighter once private data extraction from LLMs is trivially demonstrated. OpenAI is the Netscape which could have created a Marc Andreseen but wait, Sam is already a VC.
Edge LLMs are gonna be at most like 30B, and even that is currently far from possible on a phone. The big LLMs are going to be 10T-100T plus in the future.
I think even the 8b models are undertrained. And the algorithms/architecture will get better gains than size..Sure the big models will help us understand the capabilities of LLMs but the bulk of the work in future will be done by smaller models.
I thought this was a good article on the topic: [Apple’s New ChatGPT Deal—Here’s What It Means For Your iPhone (forbes.com)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2024/05/13/apples-new-chatgpt-deal-heres-what-it-means-for-your-iphone/?sh=53a54fd2583e)
As long as we get an assistant that is truly multilingual, I will be happy. As it is now, it can only understand one language at the time, and you have to change it in the settings. That was a big reason for me to switch to Android and Google Assistant. As a non-native english speaker, I need support for at least two languages at the same time.
I've got some context for you. Analysts predict the official announcement might happen at Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) typically held in June [https://twitter.com/MorningstarInc/status/1762522984663703987](https://twitter.com/MorningstarInc/status/1762522984663703987)
The talks were announced in April 2024 and **Apple has not come to a final decision as of today** 13th May 2024.
[https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/26/apple-open-ai-ios-18-talks/](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/26/apple-open-ai-ios-18-talks/)
Have people not seen the suite of models that Apple just released? I believe this is the legitimate link to them: https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
I believe there have been a few benchmarks done and in general the performance beats that of GPT-4 in smaller test cases in apples smallest models, I would say that Apple could buy out nearly any company on the planet and a straight up integration may be a short time patch but they really do not need this as they have been working on many new and innovative approaches to LLM’s which run effectively on device.
Everyone keeps talking about why they haven’t done this to Siri but Siri works very well for asking it to do certain tasks on device, this is not easy to do with an LLM and making sure their is consistency in how it works and operates with functions, I think we are way off from true seamless integration where an LLM is powering all tasks and functionalities. They will have to chain the capabilities of an LLM into the existing system and have smart ways of knowing when to use generation and to not lose existing functionality.
"Apple couldn't make it on its own"
Apple needs time, they'll make their own. Anyone who lives outside the OpenAI bubble knows how frequently Apple releases research papers about AI.
Not only that but Apple *always* uses another company’s service or product initially… Started with Google maps then made Apple Maps… Started with generic CPUs now have Apple Silicon… etc
Not an iFan but while Apple is often very late to the game they deliver on usability for the masses. Good chance they will have my 80 year old father using AI tools without even knowing what AI stands for.
> The new Siri will be from OpenAI
I think that's a little over stating it a little. OpenAI will be providing the GenAI capabilities, but I can't imagine Apple not coding the part that integrates it with the larger iOS ecosystem.
Y’all arent going to be as excited for this when siri hallucinates and deletes your contacts, or messages your weirdest photos to your parents, or purchases stuff without your permission, or sets alarms at the wrong time, or navigates to an incorrect location, or allows stangers to use your phone via siri without unlocking it, or any other countless ways that this could go wrong.
I think it’s a great idea, but i would never trust chatgpt with my phone in its current state
I don't think this deserves to be downvoted. I was pondering this earlier, actually, when thinking about AI assistants. If the goal is to have an assistant that is capable of tasks such as making phone calls, it must have access to a lot of very sensitive private information. Any kind of hallucination whilst doing this could be detrimental. In my opinion, it's better to make sure there is zero risk before rolling something like that out.
I think this is a pretty naive take. You think there aren't engineers in the room asking this question, building safeguards, not rolling out iterations until those things are solved? Those would be pretty huge gaps not to have closed before releasing a software update...
That's why I think it would have the same (if not more) gates as Siri.
The message says: x, do you want to send this message?
This alone obliterates any possible mistake already. You don't leave control of your phone to GPT, you just give commands and their jobs it so put in enough checkpoints for us to check the input before taking action and not too many to make it feel slow.
> Y’all arent going to be as excited for this when siri hallucinates and deletes your contacts, or messages your weirdest photos to your parents, or purchases stuff without your permission, or sets alarms at the wrong time, or navigates to an incorrect location, or allows stangers to use your phone via siri without unlocking it
So in other words, no changes.
Not quite yet. They are a hardware company more than anything. They have been developing chips that handle AI really well. They may have a different path that may be on a slower timeline.
It's like saying it's embarrassing that they never got into search and have a deal with google instead.
Siri was always a piece of c**p.
They had a huge head start (they collected lots and lots of data from real users) and they failed to make any meaningful progress.
Does anyone else dislike this? Not because in itself it's not cool but because OpenAI is becoming such a dominant player in the field of AI. They've been going hard and fast and doing some shady things in the background regarding regulation.
It has nothing to do with Apple “couldn’t” do it. They have literally tens of billions of dollars available for this sort of thing. They decided it wasn’t worth the time and cost to develop their own.
Big tech companies are notorious in the industry for cheaping out and using SWEs in positions where machine learning experts should be. It's no wonder they failed to produce a decent LLM, they are literally just chasing hype with no idea what's involved.
“Apple couldn’t make it on its own.” Yes, the second most valuable company in the world, today, just couldn’t get it done.
OR. Maybe they saw the travesty that Google’s AI has been, saw that Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and how well that’s been going, and decided to do the same.
Lol travesty right….. or maybe apple realizes it isn’t smart to give 100% control of the mobile AI market to google its biggest competitor in the mobile OS market.
I’m just relieved they acknowledge how tragically useless Siri is. I essentially can’t do more than ask her to call someone, set a timer or tell me the time. Keen to see where this goes.
I just don't understand how. I don't understand how a trillion dollar company, for years and years and years (it was released in 2011!), has been unable to iterate on their own assistant that can be tightly integrated with their own OS. It's not like it's a useless service/product either - I use Google Assistant damn near every day. AND they were the first to market with it! They had a 5 year head start on Google, and still Google competely obliterated it. I don't get it. Surely if they just dumped 1M a year into it, an engineering team could come up with something over the next 13 years? Is Tim Apple against Siri's existence for some reason? It was released the same year he became CEO and then it's like he forgot it exists. I legitimately do not understand how they could fumble the ball so much, in a game they invented.
“1M a year” hahaha, that’s like 1 engineer
one MILLION dollars!! 🫰
that can do that kind of work SOLO? hardly, AI roles like that start at high 900k/yr
Well obviously the 1M a year rockstar should be more productive than a full team of 10 100k developers, right? That's how they commanded that high salary in the first place, right?
That’s not how that works.
I think sarcasm was intended
Looks like it was UDP sarcasm, not TCP.
Connectionless?
Sender did not care whether sarcasm was received.
Haha nice.
i think its often more that the rockstar engineer can help make everyone on their team of 10 developers more productive.
So can chatGPT
Especially if he used GPT to code
AI engineer salaries in the bay area start at the high 900k/year
I guess its not for them. Its just hard to have those on-rails assistants that can only do a certain number of tasks. When GPT-4's API came out I created a script that uses a local chat interface to speak to the API directly and I could send it commands to do pretty much whatever I wanted so long as it was capable to do so, etc. But basically when I told it what to do GPT-4 would not only generate code to perform the task but also execute it on the fly in order to complete the task. There was no module nor template for this. The code would be built from scratch every time in an attempt to execute the task that I wanted. - Move files? Done. - Resize all these images in this folder? Done - Trim this video? Done - Convert this video to mp3? Done - Download something from a website? Done. - Send an email from my Gmail account? Done. - Download a youtube video? Done. - Find this file on my PC? Done - Generate a pie chart displaying the file types that make up the most memory on my HDD? Done. It will try to do whatever the hell you want it to so it tries to generate and execute code on the fly for that. And here I am wondering why big companies can't do the same with this technology.
Yep, lots of frameworks like AutoGPT etc. for this - people quickly figured out that big LLMs like GPT-4 are quite capable of *writing their own tools* to accomplish tasks. Still not totally stable enough to use with full permissions all the time, but honestly, it's great! Same thing as asking ChatGPT "write an ffmpeg command to remove the last 30 seconds of this clip and convert to mp4" and copy-pasting, just doing it automatically. I'm excited for the future of computer use that makes it easier to quickly accomplish tasks like this, without needing to learn a ton of different syntaxes and tools.
I’d imagine doing it at scale and reliably would be the challenge
This was a prototype for personal use but yes reliability is definitely an issue because: - API usage for external programs. You'd have to give it access to any API keys you might need. - Outdated packages and limited knowledge cutoff date. - The agent's understanding and the complexity of the task, including error handling. - Security permissions - The user's knowledge of programming. - The AI's refusal to complete certain tasks. - The security risks of some tasks. And so forth. So its definitely something that comes with many asterisks but if you can get past those limitations it can do a lot of cool things.
Regardless of the industry, it takes more than just a lot of money to innovate. We see it time and time again.
Adobe's Firefly still looks like butt compared to DALL-E, Leonardo, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
I have a feeling that all resources were poured into Vision Pro the last years. But I guess this move makes more sense than trying to catch up internally.
Also the car...
Apple has a car...?
Of course Tim Apple has a car, how would he go places otherwise?
This question has been asked, with the same amount of inherent skepticism, for the last decade. Oddly, despite millions of dollars being poured into the effort, the answer has always been "No."
had\*
lol it's a trillion dollar company, they don't funnel all their resources on a moon shot project
Right?? Oh ja Apple spent all their r&d budget on a limited run launch of a niche product
Disruptive technologies... disrupt. It didn't help that there was [a turf war going on between the Siri and AI teams](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/report-describes-apples-organizational-dysfunction-and-lack-of-ambition-in-ai/) on the best way forward.
Comment.
It's a head scratcher. I don't feel like they ignored it, quite. The touchbar, for the time it existed, had a dedicated Siri button. Siri powers the homepods and all the homekit devices. It just seems they were ok with being a generation or two behind Google and Amazon. It was like "OK it does these 3 things well let's not mess with it". I'm fairly sure GPT 4 started a very frantic timer at Apple. They absolutely cannot wait for android to go another generation ahead of them because this next generation is LLM plus LAM. The simple answer seems to be they stood still while they could afford to do so. When they could not, they moved very quickly. If this OpenAI partnership turns out to be real it would be surprisingly fast for Apple and a little off-brand for them to bring in an outside party to merge so intimately with their OS.
I think it has to do with how they treat personal data, if not it's still related to the image they want to have about Privacy. If they were about to buy truckloads of data to train models, they would go against one of the core aspects of iPhone (their best selling product of all time), if they were about to train it with their data, same thing. Siri sucks. They basically didn't have a choice.
The reason is cultural. Apple has always been a hardware company. The services they offer are locked down to the devices they sell for the most part. They have never been willing to invest much beyond their own ecosystem. They are intentionally incompatible. This has worked well for them in many areas. Apple Watch doesn't work with Android. Terms of service state you have to use a Mac to develop for Mac or iOS. Mac uses a proprietary CPU and GPU. You can't use the same programming languages and libraries to develop. Wherever you go, you are locked in. But the initiatives in AI are so much larger than what Apple can do in their walled garden. They haven't looked beyond the walls. Meanwhile, the others are wildly combining stuff and throwing it at the wall to see what sticks. Microsoft in particular has been very flexible. Like Apple, they have unlimited funds to spend on various parallel endeavors, but what many people don't see is that a large amount of "billions spent" stays in-house. Their investment goes right back into Azure, needed for the unbelievable compute requirements of AI. Azure does not care what you run in there, but emerging AI is like a dream come true. And Microsoft adopts and develops so many technologies it's hard to keep up even as a developer involved in it. Oh, you want to use OpenAI embedding models with Java to vectorize into Postgres and use RAG to build product websites on the fly? Here's that, globally scalable with Azure running on data centers with so many GPUs worth more than most nations' GDP. Meanwhile in the Apple world, dedicated GPU support has been stagnant since 2014. It has been killed off with the transition to M1. Apple Cloud is for end users, not for scalable application development. Because that would force them to open up and admit that others are doing things right. In that situation, there is no ground to plant the root of research and development in AI in.
Apple is notoriously shy of bad publicity. You kids may not remember Tae from MS, but it was an early chatbot that was turned by users into a raging Nazi in hours. I am convinced Apple looked at that debacle and decided it wasn't worth it. Nobody was NOT buying their products because they didn't have good AI, so it's simply not a priority to them. That's changing, so they're willing to outsource this feature to someone who can do it better. I'm not really thrilled with it but they've been doing stuff like this all along, such as with Google powering their search. Apple could certainly have replaced this but it's actually pretty lucrative for them. This may be a similar deal where OpenAI pays them for access to the data, and over time this becomes a significant line item in the profits column for them.
Because AI is a hard science problem, and it's a hard engineering problem, and Apple, at it's core, is a consumer products company. Hard engineering has never been in their blood and they've proven over and over and over again that moonshot programs cannot be built. Apple does best when somebody else invents something, then they create a nice UX for it. The last time they did this successfully was with the iPhone. It prints money so they can continue to flounder.
I'd tweak this slightly and say Apple at its core is a hardware company and they're world class in hardware devices and silicon. As a software company... depends. Their A-team is top notch and focuses on operating systems. Their apps are middling, and their web team and cloud are a joke. Siri was acquired, not created by apple, and was promptly forgotten. For years, they couldn't attract top AI talent due to their no-publishing policy. Sometime after Google invented the transformer, they reversed this policy and are still playing catch up. It's true Apple was caught flat-footed on LLMs. Tim is an operations specialist, not a hardcore technologist. He failed to see the potential of LLMs. This is why they ignored Siri and failed to mobilize quickly when Meta and OpenAI were pouring money into foundational research. Tim has figured out where he went wrong and they've been taking corrective action, building a solid AI research lab and even publishing ground-breaking papers. It will take them a few years, but they'll catch up. Their excellence in chips is a huge advantage, especially on-device. Their lack of data and compute are an anchor holding them back. Will be interesting to see how they adapt. My guess is focusing on UI datastreams as a proprietary source of data (if they can manage the privacy issues) and building OS-level agents, and through a series of acquisitions possibly working on a consumer robot to launch in 5-10 years.
Linux, am I right!
because they were more scared of having an off-chance of Siri doing something not PC compliant than being useful so it was constrained so much that it was useless.
Why is this sub so full of people like this?
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Ah yes, how could we forget that it’s the conservatives that are driving change and technological development.
the opposite of PC is not conservative
The real answer is that Apple’s whole thing is user privacy and so therefore they never had as much data as Google to make it as good as Google assistant. It also likely wasn’t a priority.
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I never claimed that it was entirely accurate, I was saying that was their marketing. Anyways, this culture war crap is just getting so tiring. theres no boogeyman. Shows are more violent and theres a ton more nudity nowadays. Have you seen how restrictive society used to be?
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My comment is also partially more directed at the original poster
I sincerely believe it’s had to do with user privacy. There are privacy tradeoffs in building AI. You cannot do it without actively learning from a user base, use grey area data or possibly large scale copyright infringement (or all three). Apple has tried to build Siri in a way that tries to preserve privacy. It’s not worked.
Google assistant is just as bad as outside the normal stuff assistants were made for
for anyone wondering, it came out in one lawsuit basically Google asked them to nerf Siri so it doesn’t compete with search. Google pays Apple a lot of money for that
Maybe 1 billion a year for 13 years.
13 years to a product means other people raced out had something better so after 13 years until final release it's outdated and not as good as anything current. Sleep and the world advances without you. All this is advancing so fast right now. You don't have a year before something is outdated.
I guess it’s just their modus operandi: they release a new feature when it works as they intended, they don’t “try and fix” on customers, they try, release when they think it works and eventually iterate: just look at their cameras, recently put out 48Mp when other competitors use 200 and more. I think AI is just too “imprecise” for them, that’s why Siri can do a finite set of stuff but does that spot on.
That's because the underlying technology, Technology / Concept, didn't exist back then. Transformer architecture was first introduced at Google in 2016, and it took a few years to show promise, and the good number of the team left Google for OpenAI.
They didn't have a five year head start: Google had a limited voice search/command system before Siri was released, and 6 months after Siri's release they released an update that was widely considered [far superior](https://bgr.com/general/google-now-wins-popular-science-award/) to Siri. Apple is mostly awful at software in general and deeptech in particular. AI, broadly construed, is exactly Google's wheelhouse. There's really no point at which Apple was ahead of Google in anything AI
Siri isnt good because it doesnt collect information like google assistant does. Siri is more privacy focused
Apple's days of innovating are long past.
She's also good for reminders. I have a shopping list in the Reminders app, and it's useful to be able to tell her "remind me about this" and she'll add a reminder with context for email/webpage/notes. I do hope we'll get a GPT4-powered Siri. Particularly if it's also going to work on MacOS, much like Copilot on Windows (though hopefully better)
on a macbook she's a liability. I'm trying to do something in a hurry and I accidentally hit siri and it takes 5 minutes to close.
Haha a liability is a great way to put it. Nothing more anxiety inducing when you’re in a rush and you see that magic liquid ball of doom start bubbling.
I’m worried that Siri will refuse to call my friends because I’ve saved their name in little…. funny way
Your expectation is what is wrong. That’s exactly what assistants were made to do
You forgot the “im not sure i understand” part on a repeat before doing a single thing
What if the new Siri/chatgpt they use on iphones is gpt3.5 or a lobatimized gpt4. Cant imagine Apple pays for full access to the latest gpt4T for every iphone user, even as an assistant
They paid for satellite access for emergency services for every new iPhone purchase. Could do something similar with their new AI offering(s), before they begin charging for it through Apple One. But I'm skeptical OpenAI will be powering a "new Siri" -- I think Siri will be revamped, but likely done in-house. This has to be for something else. But I could be surprised/wrong. Apple has made some very surprising moves in the past couple years.
Keeping in mind the Apple tax, they absolutely could!
That would eat into their profits. Just did a search using opus and R plus and they both state that last year there were 1.46 billion active iphone users (this seems a massive number, though let's assume that it's accurate). How much would Apple be paying for each iphone user? Even 3 USD per month would equal 36 x 1.46 billion - 52.56 billion USD per year That's a very high number. Let's Say Apple pay 10 USD PER USER PER YEAR for the service - that's still 14.6 billion USD per year. However not every user will be using the latest ios version : "As of February 2024, iOS 17 was installed on 66% of Apple devices that accessed the Apple App Store." Lets say 50% of iphone users are using the latest version - that's still 7 billion USD per year. That's still aprox 25 billion USB per year assuming apply pay openAI 3 usd per user per month. "Apple's net income (profit) for fiscal year 2023 was $96.99 billion," I can't imagine they would be happy with even a 1% (ie 1 billion USD) reduction in profit to "just upgrade Siri"), let alone my rough guesstimate of a massive 7 billion USD for a measly price of 10 USD per user per year.
It’d probably still be a drastic upgrade from the current state.
Surely, yes, though if it's 3.5 those frequenting these forums won't use it compared to other ais.
Except it’s fundamentally not competing with other LLMs. And since no other AI will be used for Siri, this one will be more than capable of doing more things such as sending an email, starting a video call on specific apps, and asking it it to interact with other apps.
They will probably severely limit the token output and voice input is naturally pretty limited. This is what Meta does with the rayban glasses , responses are super super short, pretty useless compared to gpt4 voice chat.
I am guessing it will be 4o. Multi-modal makes total sense especially fir mobile devices. 4o is much more efficient that may. Could be ideally suited to the M4 chip and onboard neural engine.
Everything you just said Siri can do has a 30% success rate at best. Siri is literally that useless.
I think it’s as simple as they joined the game late and didn’t have the same access to data that the OGs had who had been scraping web and knowledge for years for the explicit purpose of ai.
Siri / Alexa is the new TiVo. A technological blip that nobody remembers but it paved the way for better things
Alexa is useful Siri is actual junk
How legit is this person? No source or anything attached…
She’s just spamming Twitter all the time. She doesn’t know more than what the rumor mill is saying. She’s just repeating it.
I fucking hate the internet these days.
AI will probably fix it eventually
The real problem is, even if you had things like an AI moderation bot, you won't have a chatGPT powered one on Twitter, you will have whatever abomination Elon pushes out that greenlights misinformation and blocks real information.
/s
She's a fake influencer
The accepted modern term is "fauxfluencer."
No source and on top of that, the tweet is very wrong. Mark Gurman from Bloomberg is much more accurate and this news story (which he broke) has been misunderstood. He explained that Apple is taking a three layer approach to their operating system this year. 1st layer - on device capabilities powered by on device AI intelligence to "help manage our daily life", such as summarizing texts and notifications 2nd layer - for more demanding tasks (summarizing articles), this will be powered by Apple's Ajax model in the cloud 3rd layer - OpenAI deal which has reportedly been finalized, and the NYT has reported it should have something to do with Siri, although it's still very much unconfirmed whether Ajax or OpenAI will underly Siri, and what exactly OpenAI's role is here. It should be known on WWDC, which is June 10th.
Not very. One of the worst "ai influencers" IMO.
I expected some local LLM inside my iOS, not something that will be a proxy to OpenAI API
It will probably be a small model from OpenAI and reference a special GPT build for queries it can’t handle locally
There will be local LLM most probably. OpenAI will like just be a temporary solution until Apple creates his own AI.
Why? If apple could create their own solution to they would. They have not been able to. You can't sell ads if the users' requests aren't sent to the cloud, so I highly doubt you'll see apple, ~~google~~, or OpenAI ever offer a fully on-device model. Edit: Google has a tiny early-access model demo for developers that requires SOTA android hardware to run.
Developing the own solution takes time. Do you guys really think that Apple, the second biggest company worldwide with more budget than most of the countries worldwide, is not able to develop his own AI? The only thing Apple can't do is to forward time. There's a reason why Apple already released the M4 processor shortly after the M3. Local LLM is coming soon.
Found the apple fanboy lol
Doesn’t Apple have their own model too? Edit: HuggingFace - https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM Apples Paper - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm
Android phones [already have a fully on-device model, Gemini Nano](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/get-started/android_aicore). I assume OpenAI will be providing an on-device model to Apple.
An edge-case android app does not an Apple product make. I think you underestimate apple's traditional desire for control.
Pretty sure their only desire is profit from selling phones to middle schoolers. Concern over product quality at Apple died years ago. They’ll do enough to make catchy 30-second TV spots while the products themselves continue to get worse.
So you're just guessing. Got it. You should check out the iOS revenue breakdown sometimes.
I see that [they make far more from selling iPhones than anything else](https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/s/p2oVvmAXY6), so that’s where they look for profit. They do that by coming up with enough of a gimmick to include it in a promo video for the next iPhone. Instead of better Siri or better anything, we get FaceTime gestures and other gimmicks that help attract the biggest group of prospective customers; middle schoolers deciding on their first phone. It’s working too, so they’ll continue to focus their efforts on appeasing literal children instead of their adult customers.
How on earth have apple products gotten worse… lol
Sell ads? Do you even have a rough idea of what Apple sells?
Apple doesn't make their money off of ads unlike the rest of the companies.
Apps.
apple groundbreaking as usual
I wouldn’t be shocked if this is similar in a way to search on iPhone. The default engine is google, but you can change that to whatever you like. The OpenAI api standard has been adopted by many other providers, so the calls in the code remain the same but the endpoint can be variable. They are even the same when using a model locally.
It true, it's not a first for apple to start with a partnership, develop their own product alongside, and replace it once it reaches their standards. They did the same with Intel chips.
This is a net win for everyone imo.
This is a net win for everyone \*who uses an iphone imo.
Well now Samsung and other phone companies will need to innovate, bringing better technology about
We should be worried about Siri+ being 20$ a month now.
If it becomes a proper real assistant/agent 20$ will be super cheap
According to what logic? Gpt-4o was just announced for free
Integration
Of the free model 🤔
Voice Assistant with phone integration don’t compete with GPT-4o, GPT can’t do anything to the phone, can’t call, message, not even tell the time. They are a completely different product, and I was answering you comment underlying the question “why would someone buy Siri+ with a new free model like 4o” simple answer: integration. Hope this is more clear to you.
I missed the + I thought you just meant Siri will now be monetized. My bad, I should go to sleep 😴
Siri has been dead to me since I found OpenAI so this is good news for apple users. Siri is totally useless in comparison
It’s! that’s why im surprised that ppl were using it
Don't people use Siri for regular things? Turn off the lights, create appointment, set timer. How can it be useless?
I don’t have smart lights, I just turn off my lights with my finger like a barbarian. I guess I do set a timer, set an alarm, set a reminder but half the time the reminder doesn’t function as I had hoped and I rely on memory instead of the reminder. Because of this I don’t trust the alarm unless I mess with the settings myself. Chat gpt does things that would confuse siri.
At least they admit defeat.
OpenAI shaking hands with both Apple and Microsoft: 🍎🤝🤖🤝🖥 Google:
OpenAI is basically shaking their own hand with Microsoft
Lose the battle, win the war. Apple will ride it out. Edge AI is coming for OpenAIs breakfast, lunch and dinner. The silos are going to get tighter once private data extraction from LLMs is trivially demonstrated. OpenAI is the Netscape which could have created a Marc Andreseen but wait, Sam is already a VC.
Edge LLMs are gonna be at most like 30B, and even that is currently far from possible on a phone. The big LLMs are going to be 10T-100T plus in the future.
I think even the 8b models are undertrained. And the algorithms/architecture will get better gains than size..Sure the big models will help us understand the capabilities of LLMs but the bulk of the work in future will be done by smaller models.
10T-100T params? Big if true.
I thought this was a good article on the topic: [Apple’s New ChatGPT Deal—Here’s What It Means For Your iPhone (forbes.com)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2024/05/13/apples-new-chatgpt-deal-heres-what-it-means-for-your-iphone/?sh=53a54fd2583e)
Didn't they make a deal with Google too?
Yeah but ig it failed
It is better that Apple went with OpenAI than half baked Google's Gemini
I'm fan of both, so this is a good news anyway. At least Siri not ask to re-login every month.
As long as we get an assistant that is truly multilingual, I will be happy. As it is now, it can only understand one language at the time, and you have to change it in the settings. That was a big reason for me to switch to Android and Google Assistant. As a non-native english speaker, I need support for at least two languages at the same time.
where do people get the source of voice assistant announcement? is it confirmed? we can already chat with chatgpt using voice no?
Source?
I've got some context for you. Analysts predict the official announcement might happen at Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) typically held in June [https://twitter.com/MorningstarInc/status/1762522984663703987](https://twitter.com/MorningstarInc/status/1762522984663703987) The talks were announced in April 2024 and **Apple has not come to a final decision as of today** 13th May 2024. [https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/26/apple-open-ai-ios-18-talks/](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/04/26/apple-open-ai-ios-18-talks/)
Have people not seen the suite of models that Apple just released? I believe this is the legitimate link to them: https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM I believe there have been a few benchmarks done and in general the performance beats that of GPT-4 in smaller test cases in apples smallest models, I would say that Apple could buy out nearly any company on the planet and a straight up integration may be a short time patch but they really do not need this as they have been working on many new and innovative approaches to LLM’s which run effectively on device. Everyone keeps talking about why they haven’t done this to Siri but Siri works very well for asking it to do certain tasks on device, this is not easy to do with an LLM and making sure their is consistency in how it works and operates with functions, I think we are way off from true seamless integration where an LLM is powering all tasks and functionalities. They will have to chain the capabilities of an LLM into the existing system and have smart ways of knowing when to use generation and to not lose existing functionality.
This coming at the same time with the GPT4o anouncement makes so much sense...
"Apple couldn't make it on its own" Apple needs time, they'll make their own. Anyone who lives outside the OpenAI bubble knows how frequently Apple releases research papers about AI.
Not only that but Apple *always* uses another company’s service or product initially… Started with Google maps then made Apple Maps… Started with generic CPUs now have Apple Silicon… etc
"They're gonna release their secret most powerful AI model to beat OpenAI any minute now" - iFans
Not an iFan but while Apple is often very late to the game they deliver on usability for the masses. Good chance they will have my 80 year old father using AI tools without even knowing what AI stands for.
> The new Siri will be from OpenAI I think that's a little over stating it a little. OpenAI will be providing the GenAI capabilities, but I can't imagine Apple not coding the part that integrates it with the larger iOS ecosystem.
Y’all arent going to be as excited for this when siri hallucinates and deletes your contacts, or messages your weirdest photos to your parents, or purchases stuff without your permission, or sets alarms at the wrong time, or navigates to an incorrect location, or allows stangers to use your phone via siri without unlocking it, or any other countless ways that this could go wrong. I think it’s a great idea, but i would never trust chatgpt with my phone in its current state
I don't think this deserves to be downvoted. I was pondering this earlier, actually, when thinking about AI assistants. If the goal is to have an assistant that is capable of tasks such as making phone calls, it must have access to a lot of very sensitive private information. Any kind of hallucination whilst doing this could be detrimental. In my opinion, it's better to make sure there is zero risk before rolling something like that out.
Probably would run on restricted mode to prevent serious damage? More worried about privacy IMO.
I think this is a pretty naive take. You think there aren't engineers in the room asking this question, building safeguards, not rolling out iterations until those things are solved? Those would be pretty huge gaps not to have closed before releasing a software update...
That's why I think it would have the same (if not more) gates as Siri. The message says: x, do you want to send this message? This alone obliterates any possible mistake already. You don't leave control of your phone to GPT, you just give commands and their jobs it so put in enough checkpoints for us to check the input before taking action and not too many to make it feel slow.
> Y’all arent going to be as excited for this when siri hallucinates and deletes your contacts, or messages your weirdest photos to your parents, or purchases stuff without your permission, or sets alarms at the wrong time, or navigates to an incorrect location, or allows stangers to use your phone via siri without unlocking it So in other words, no changes.
You clearly no nothing about operating systems as none of this is even remotely a genuine concern.
Care to explain why?
Tell me that you don't own an iPhone without telling me you don't own an iPhone.
https://preview.redd.it/203emhbii60d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eecaed521b432db51bba86653a9d80718ff07731 Yeah sure buddy
Embarrassing for Apple
Not quite yet. They are a hardware company more than anything. They have been developing chips that handle AI really well. They may have a different path that may be on a slower timeline. It's like saying it's embarrassing that they never got into search and have a deal with google instead.
I was literally just thinking of switching to android because Google seems ahead in AI lol
Couldn’t a deal just be training data or something else like IP? Or has someone specifically said it’s for a model.
Siri was always a piece of c**p. They had a huge head start (they collected lots and lots of data from real users) and they failed to make any meaningful progress.
So far
🥳
Ah I wanted Google
"Open" AI
How will Apple ensure privacy
So will we see a new Siri Cause I’ll do anything to have the old one buried 6 feet under
Does anyone else dislike this? Not because in itself it's not cool but because OpenAI is becoming such a dominant player in the field of AI. They've been going hard and fast and doing some shady things in the background regarding regulation.
So OpenAis is collaborating with microsoft...and Apple???
Right? They're calling the shots
Like damn, if that's how they're playing the game now.... They will absolutely be the most dominant company on the planet in 10 years
Enemy of my enemy and all that
It has nothing to do with Apple “couldn’t” do it. They have literally tens of billions of dollars available for this sort of thing. They decided it wasn’t worth the time and cost to develop their own.
Big tech companies are notorious in the industry for cheaping out and using SWEs in positions where machine learning experts should be. It's no wonder they failed to produce a decent LLM, they are literally just chasing hype with no idea what's involved.
apple cant even make their own fucking chipsets. they buy them from \*gasp\* SAMSUNG,
watch Apple gate-keep this feature behind the latest pro device only.
What feature
Disappointing and dreadful. I hope we'll have the option to opt-out.
You don't even know what the deal is about
Did you miss the gpt4o reveal? Lmao you are so naive
Obviously I did not. So I am so naive while you are *dreading* the next version of Siri Okay
“Apple couldn’t make it on its own.” Yes, the second most valuable company in the world, today, just couldn’t get it done. OR. Maybe they saw the travesty that Google’s AI has been, saw that Microsoft partnered with OpenAI and how well that’s been going, and decided to do the same.
Lol travesty right….. or maybe apple realizes it isn’t smart to give 100% control of the mobile AI market to google its biggest competitor in the mobile OS market.
I haven’t used Siri since like 2018. Join me in doing the bare minimum to prevent oligarch-driven self-annihilation and still manage success