Hacker News Reader

Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

> As we have seen, when the vector of differentiation shifts, market leaders tend to fall by the wayside. In the brave new world of AI, Google and Amazon have the clear edge over Apple.

Many people seem to believe this meme of AI changing everything. I have trouble being excited. It seems like Google Translate has improved a bit over the past few years, but it can't be relied on more than before. Personal assistant fail to understand very simple queries (they're way beyond Wolfram Alpha, which is itself cool but far from awe-inspiring).

It seems that with neural networks and what not, you can get really impressive results from the get-go. But once the low-hanging fruits have been reaped, it's hard to make quantum leaps.

There is also a lot of conflation. Sure Google Maps and Waze really do change things. But that's not AI in the sense that is meant today.

View on HN

To me, the thing that gives the game away is that every time a company talks about "AI" both current and near future in general terms it's blue-sky, the-future-is-robots glorious (not really) automated future. Then when they talk specifics it's "language translation" which is still pretty awful and "image processing" which has been the purview of AI for many many years with no indication it'll be breaking out of that box anytime soon.

Yes I know there's massive advancements in using ML to make things seem more advanced than they are. But at the end of the day consumer AI today is: Language recognition and translation and photo recognition and manipulation. Everything else is snake oil.

So pardon me if I don't start portending Apple's doom because they may have to spend a little more of their untold billions to buy an AI startup to make photo enhancements slightly more cool for the next version of IOS. I don't think there's a game-changing AI breakthrough waiting to happen that the big companies are all going to have to fight for market space with because I can't find any evidence of it anywhere.

I think personal assistant AI's are still very much in their alpha state. It will get better as time passes. Google and Amazon have been aggressively investing in Research into AI (Google probably more so through Google Research, but Amazon has ramped up recently).

Apple has recently been hiring aggressively as well; and I'm more optimistic about Apple than the article, simply because Apple has amazing amount of hardware experience. I hope that they leverage that to make better AI-enabled devices... the future is going to be VERY interesting.

The biggest difference with the iPhone X, that it can recognise your face and expressions does seem to be AI that changes at least some stuff. As an iPhone 5 owner I've picked up the 6 and 7 and thought meh, same stuff, bulkier handset but the face thing on the X has an element of wow.

There's still a lot of unpicked hanging fruit though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com