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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

As an Apple customer, I’m looking over the fence and seeing how fast AI is advancing all over the place. Meanwhile, Apple can’t even get basic AI capability right, like autocorrect on the iPhone. How are inventors not worried? Their AI capability is decades behind Meta, Google, Microsoft and the likes of ChatGPT.

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Apple’s contribution is in things like the ‘neural engine’ architecture in their chips which potentially offers ways to run ML models locally as part of the functionality of software running on your device. That’s probably a much more exciting contribution to widespread adoption of these technologies than a fight between cloud services.

And it’s what is more likely to lead to smarter autocomplete too.

Look at https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra... for example.

All phones have that, and non-Apple phones put it to better use, like completely on-device speech to text, smart replies, and waiting on hold for you.

Apple is not really a AI company, and I doubt they'd ever get it right. They are just waiting with huge pockets for the first one that is decent to buy.

More likely to ~steal~ copy.

> They are just waiting with huge pockets for the first one that is decent to buy.

If Apple was any clever, they would buy a ecosystem of AI tools like HugginFace.

I would love to implement a decent autocorrect for the iPhone. However, I know that Apple will ban it from their platform when they want, or as soon as they feel the heat of the competition.

You can right now with 3rd party keyboards. Gramerly and Google both have keyboards with better autocorrect.

Apple is in different markets though, it's not in search for example, so this doesn't matter, apple sells the devices that you access the AI from, rather than the services that will require the AI to run, i.e you still use Google on your apple device, so if google changes or loses out, it doesn't matter, you still use your Apple device to access that service.

Apple has already invested in optimising there machines for Stable diffusion for example.

They do something good on hardware side because products like https://www.rewind.ai/ are supposedly possible only on new Mac chips.

Investors aren't worried because Apple has shown time and again that they can catch up when needed, often making something more polished than the competition.

Someone also told me this recently, and it makes sense... Apple dominates a market in both software and hardware, and the hardware is the anchor in that vertical integration. It's a huge anti-competitive edge (except that the hardware itself is very competitive) that nobody else has, which Google is trying to obtain with their own phones and laptops.

Given that the majority of Apple's revenue comes from things like hardware sales and services like the App Store, I doubt there'd be much of an upside if Apple were to develop their AI capabilities since there's not much use it can serve in those areas

This is especially given the amount of investment these other companies have been putting in to get the results that they have, so it seems like it's just a case of it not being worth it to them

Maybe newer versions of iOS have improved, but for a while I at least thought that I could identify when users post comments from iOS simply based on common iOS auto-incorrections which appeared in the comment. Truly embarrassing.

I think it also depends on what you call AI and where you look. They have invested in computational photography, lots of audio work stuff, etc. But mostly in areas that are core to their hardware sales.

They can buy the technology, like they did with Siri. I guess it's the easier way to solve the problem.

Siri is just terrible.

Funny you mention autocomplete. The iPhone keyboard is a beautiful ML implementation. It runs on device and it is hardware accelerated. When things work users don't notice. Look at how people type of the iPhone. Sometimes they press a few keys away and it figures it out.

Putting a LM like GPT in the autocomplete has a lot of problems. You don't want your keyboard suggest too much. It is a Pandora's box. People will complain how the keyboard is putting words in their mouth.

I feel like it was far easier to type on the older iPhones, and there was a whole thread on HN of people with similar experiences. It's not just nostalgia; I still use an iPhone 5 sometimes, and its keyboard is superior. Idk how they regressed like that.

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