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Comment by highwaylights | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, but Apple doesn’t have a search to rival Google (or even an assistant, given the state of Siri).

Focusing on privacy and on-device learning is great, but when the strength of these models is in consuming all the data they can hoover up your motive is at odds with your philosophy.

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Apple gets $18B a year from Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices. Why would Apple build a search engine that would probably be inferior and not be able to monetize it?

They already have a search engine?

Just swipe down on any iPhone.

Yes and at one point someone wrote a web front end for it. It’s laughably bad.

I had to disable several features of iOS search due to ridiculously long delay and lag.

They do have a search engine though with Siri Suggestions. Which has a user base of ~1.5b+ people.

We only see the tip of the iceberg so who knows what else it is capable of.

“Hey siri, what is today’s date?”

“Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network”

“hey siri, what’s the weather today?”

“Now playing Eminem Love the way you lie featuring Rihanna”

Hey siri, turn the TV off.

Which TV? Bedroom or Living Room or Everywhere?

(Only 1 of the 2 TVs is ever on)

I won’t spam this thread anymore, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it improved.

And AppleTV itself is hot garbage for this kind of stuff even though it's a veritable supercomputer that should be the hub for Siri and home automation.

- Hey Siri, <do something that involves AppleTV in any capacity>.

- I'm sorry, one of your devices is off

And that has nothing to do with an LLM. That has to do with speech to text algorithms. It also doesn’t take advanced AI to do a simple intents based answers.

Yes we are aware that Siri doesn't use LLM yet. That is what this thread is about.

Me: Hey Siri, call <my city> Toyota.

Siri: I'm sorry, that contact is not in your list

Me: Siri, what is the number for <my city> Toyota.

Siri: <my city> Toyota's phone number is 123-456-7890 [said too fast to remember or write down in one go]

Me: Siri, call <my city> Toyota

Siri: I'm sorry, you do not have that contact number.

Me: &$@@&/&&/&!!!

I work around this by asking it to find Toyota in <my city>. Then if it finds the dealership, it asks if I want to navigate there, or call them.

I find the worst errors to be when I ask it for information, or to send a text, and it instead places a phone call to someone. It will even call people that I have never called on my phone (a fact it should know), without asking first.

Just tried this exact interaction. Siri gave me a list of nearest Toyotas and made the call. Seems to be working just fine.

Starting to think all these Siri complaints are either made up or really outdated.

I only use Siri with the original Homepods. It has always been terrible. You cannot even tell it to start playing movies on the TV that you have already purchased from Apple itself in the TV app. It will start to play some random song or something.

I should be able to say hey siri, start playing <name of media> on <name of Apple TV>, and it should be able to start the TV and start playing it.

A friend has one that constantly plays U2 out of nowhere. He doesn't even listen to U2, and maintains that he's never requested it.

This isn't in response to a prompt either. He'll unpause the connected TV and it'll just start blasting U2.

Yes, the U2 Songs of Innocence album.

In case someone doesn’t know they gave that album to all iTunes users as part of a promotional thing when it came out.

On my iPhone if I connect the Bluetooth headset and accidentally push the call/cancel button out comes U2…

If you have the magic phrase to make it work, I'd like to know. I tried for about five minutes while driving yesterday, to no avail.

For me, Siri is like an 80s text adventure game, except I was better at those.

Edit: just now I was able to call by interacting a second time with Siri, and using the physical button. Using the button never would have occurred to me while driving.

You must be the one user that Siri works perfectly for.

I spent a decade lowering my expectations, and they're still not low enough.

The perfectly obvious use cases Siri overlooks are maddeningly numerous. My go to example was "text this photo to <contact name>" For years I checked each new iOS release to see if that was enabled, and for close to ten years, no. I'm not sure whether it was the most recent, or the one before (I gave up somewhere along the way) but now you can (finally) do it.

"HeySiri, send this photo to name in messages." "Ready to send" "Send it" "It's sent"

done

Perhaps the verb "text" is unclear to Siri?

Like I said: it does it now. It didn't from inception until something like 2021.

Siri never tells me it has trouble connecting to the network, it says "something went wrong"

If you're asking for an LLM this will get worse because the first L means "large", as in too large to fit in a phone without a network connection.

two minutes later

"Hey Siri, what is today's date?"

"That's sweet, but I think of you as a friend"

"What? The date, Siri, what is the date?"

"You're so sweet"

"Sigh"

They have every query their users enter into Spotlight. They have all the results it returns (who cares if they originated from Google, ok maybe they do, maybe not using it for anything is part of their deal with Google). They have your contacts, calendars, messages, email, music, workout history, tasks, real time location, which Siri already uses to e.g. recommend a destination when you get in your car to a degree of accuracy that straight spooks me sometimes.

Apple has access to SUBSTANTIALLY more fine-grained personalized data than Google does. Full stop. That's a weird thing to assert in the tech crowd, but think about it deeply and you'll realize its true.

Google has islands of services that they've done an extremely good job of building bridges between. They have some islands that Apple has nothing like (YouTube is the biggest one) (Search is a huge island, but only indefensible if the interfaces customers use to access it don't leak the queries and results; no one opens a browser and types "www.google.com" on mobile and even if they did, Apple controls the browser renderer, they could lift everything if they wanted to, they won't, I'm simply illustrating how much Apple should fuckin scare Google). But the waters between those islands are patrolled by Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, and there's sharks in there as well (uh, the metaphor is falling apart, the sharks are "Google's tumultuous history with privacy and user blowback if they overstep").

Apple is a continent. Many of their cities are ports that connect to some of Google's islands, but Google's product still has to be checked by customs.

You're right that even given that power, hoovering it up is at-odds with Apple's philosophy. Or, is it? I think "hoovering it unencrypted to the cloud" definitely is; but that's the point OP was making: if we're extremely close, as a species, to solving "make AI work", one of the challenges for the next five years is inevitably going to be "make it more personal". Its awesome that I can ask ChatGPT to write a date comparison function. It'll also be awesome if I could ask Siri "when did sarah and I talk about getting a cat" or something.

That requires personalized data to set the context. If Apple can swing at the fences and say "everything is on-device, nothing leaves, we can't see it, and now you can ask Siri that, and by the way there's new functionality built-in to iOS that apps can leverage to integrate with Siri's new LLM capabilities just like ChatGPT plugins"; that's an extremely compelling product. Extremely. And I know they would ingest that data, that they would do that, because they already do! Go ask Siri to call Sarah, or if you have any meetings tomorrow (assuming you're using Apple Calendar), and it will respond. I don't know where you're getting this take that they don't "hoover data"; they ingest everything from all their first party apps into Siri's `DATA MATRIX`. Its just, you know, 2010s era querying and data crunching.

Don't get me wrong, Google's gonna do a lot of this too. But Google is playing from the position of "we have a model, we have the data, we just need to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year maintaining all these servers". Apple is playing from the position "our customers are paying us for the silicon to run this, we have the data, we just have to figure out the model". If its not obvious at this point: the models/algorithms/etc are not a moat. They're going to be commoditized with time. Publicly accessible data isn't a moat. Personal data is a moat, because people care about privacy. And cost effective training and inference silicon is a moat, because its Physical, and like literally One Company on the planet makes it, and they're in a big time situationship with Tim Cook.

GPT-4 seems pretty "moatish".

Apple does not have the queries that their users enter into spotlight, They dont have all the results it returns.

You dont spawn a network request on every local search on an apple device.

Typing into Spotlight sends a request to Apple?

Yes you do. It trivially does. Search for "Burger King" and see how many results that generates which couldn't possibly be served locally (undownloaded Apps from the App Store, Maps, search recommendations, etc).

They may not be storing these queries or using them for further analytics, training, etc. But they could.

> And cost effective training and inference silicon is a moat, because its Physical, and like literally One Company on the planet makes it,

I got Nvidia on my paper. Did I do the math wrong?

Google has TPUs, Amazon has tranium and inferentia

TSMC manufactures the silicon for nearly all of the current generation high end silicon. The only exceptions I've been able to find are, naturally, Intel's CPU lineup (which has nothing to do with AI) (and, to be clear, Intel Arc is also manufactured by TSMC), and the Snapdragon 8cxg3, which is manufactured by Samsung; and the "advanced-ness" of the 8cxg3 is pretty miserable compared to A16, M2, RTX 4000, RDNA3, or Tensor Processing Units.

Apple has purchased the entirety of TSMC's 3nm production for the next 1 to 2 years. They can do that, and can continue to do that, because they have a ton of money. They have a ton of money for buying chips because there isn't some crazy business middle-logic justifying the cost of these chips' performance; they buy chips, they sell chips to consumers. In comparison, literally zero other customers of TSMC derive the majority of their hardware revenue from selling to consumers. Companies like Nvidia make some money this way, but most of their money goes to data center sales, which has their own business justification for buying them which fluctuates (ChatGPT subscriptions? training models? is the past model good enough? etc).

I think this is wrong because you can always build a search engine - it’s not hard - and you can supplement the learned models with cryptographically secured private data to build a private personalized model. In fact this seems in all ways superior to any alternative, and strikes at the heart of the Google spy ware ad spam business model.

And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri? I’d love to meet someone that uses it so I can verify this statement. But with the advent of Chatgpt Alexa, Siri, and Google whatever all look like freshman projects. The next generation of assistants have just begun, and I assure you, the state of the past has nothing to do with what comes next. OpenAI hit a giant reset button across an awful lot of stuff.

> And seriously, did you really try to assert the Google whatever it is has outperformed Siri?

Anything outperforms Siri. Google Assistant is head and shoulders above Alexa and Siri.

I have both and find that 90% of the time my commands are “remind me ___”, “wake me up at ___”, “what’s the weather today”, and “play ___ on Spotify”. For these, I can’t tell the difference between google and Siri in terms of quality (but Alexa was worse).

I was just setting reminders today and had Siri repeatedly fail to do what I want. The only use case I have for it is setting timers, which is does very well. I'd use it for much more if it was as good as ChatGPT.

This is entirely my point. They’re all crap at a fundamental level, none of them outperform any other. But the next generation, which will assuredly be backed by a LLM, will be shockingly powerful.

The MKBHD personality is onto Monte Carlo testing in his device reviews. He has an intuition for good UIX. Google and Apple should pay people like MKBHD and his production crew a billion dollars every year to film achievable, desirable text, voice, camera A.I. assisted use-cases.

They don’t work like that though. Instead they spend $3b / year on hiring fungible cog SDE 2 job code 67483’s and look at gantt chart roadmaps produced by fungible cog PM 3 job code 74842’s for fungible cog SDM 7 job code 84747’s with the nominal assistance of centralized (I.e., marginalized) fungible cog UX 5 job code 35563’s then wonder why it’s perennially late and complete garbage. Except no one wonders that because fungible cogs don’t have wonder in their job responsibly matrix.

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