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> how garbage Siri quality is today

a few notes on this

- siri is incredibly underinvested. They have another team that's building some sort of search and natural language processing engine, that has slowly sapped away some key headcount from the siri team.

- apple doesn't get the full advantage of tons of user data from the wild. this is both a bug and a feature

- the siri api model is clearly generations old, and i suspect that apple has been marshaling its resources into a big leap forward - alongside their hand tracking, ar, and hardware

- apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off (and optionally flick). this includes software - the individual components are built and ready - the only thing missing is gluing it together

There's something happening, and I think that the rumored glasses are the hardware totem.

“Yes Siri is garbage but it doesn’t matter because Apple are probably working on a top secret new thing that will blow everyone else out of the water”

You might be right but there’s no real evidence for it yet.

Lots of things with Apple come out of nowhere. In this case there's actually quite a bit more evidence than usual because of all the fielded, underutilized hardware that's ready to go— when it launches, it'll likely be available on millions of devices, rather than as something you have to get the latest hardware to have, as is the case when the camera or screen undergoes a drastic improvement, or there's a new feature like wireless charging or NFC payments.

Hasn't Siri remained relatively unchanged for over a decade? I think the most recent innovation was just bringing it to Intel Macs.

It has had features removed.

Yes, it's been stagnant for so very long that I, and I suspect most users, have learned the very few things that it can do reliably, and no longer even try to do something more sophisticated. If it became more capable, it might take a long while for most users to even notice, because we have stopped hoping it will pleasantly surprise us.

Most people didn’t notice, but dictation now runs in a hybrid mode — both on device and via server. So you get some (maybe poor) results at first (only results if offline but better than nothing) that get rewritten after a couple seconds from server.

For Siri itself, I think it runs locally now.

>because Apple are probably working on a top secret new thing that will blow everyone else out of the water”

that's a mischaracterization of what i said. what i said was that they have been clearly hiring key positions and cannibalizing the siri team for something new. that something new will likely be a major release. i also believe that the ar headset is the unifying product under which they're rallying.

You may well be right, but if so that's a huge problem for Apple as by all accounts the AR device is still many years from being ready for release and meanwhile they are in a very precarious situation with Siri...

The first proper integration of a Whisper & a GPT-class LM will be a big step change, a Siri-like AI that you can actually talk to somewhat sensibly and expect it to "understand" more than pre-set phrases... Google could be in a position to release something for Android, and their are Android SoCs with neural accelerators as well (sure nothing as impressive as Apple's chips but Samsung have demonstrated a cut-down SD model on their SoC).

I don't think the new siri is intrinsicly tied to the device. I think that as part of remaking siri, they're using the new platform as a rallying cry and story as to why it's important. (it's hard to justify features such as making siri spatially aware otherwise)

> apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off (and optionally flick). this includes software - the individual components are built and ready - the only thing missing is gluing it together

Could you expand on this bit? I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, but I’m not sure what you’re referencing here

Not OP, but I suspect this is a simple combination of AR and precise device location awareness. The former comes in the form of ARKit. I’m not aware of a framework for locating devices, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were one.

U1 chip triangulation solves the second part. Would require at least 3 U1-enabled devices in your home.

Alternatively whole-home mapping via AR also solves this. No triangulation needed.

Homepods have U1 chips. They can position airtags within your house. You can put an airtag under, or adjacent to, a lamp and link it to a smart switch. Your apple watch has gesture detection (still in beta, tbf), as well as U1 and real time positioning capabilities.

Everything required for apple to know not only where you are, but which way your hand is pointing, as well as where "smart devices" are in your house is already being sold and rolled out en masse to the majority of people in the ecosystem.

$25 for an Airtag, plus say $20 for a smart switch. Plus $200 for a HomePod.

To turn a single lamp on/off by pointing at it, something that nobody ever wants to do (alright, once for the cool factor). If someone wanted to overpay for useless features, they can already go for a Philips Hue.

I can turn off my lamps from anywhere in the world using a $10 Tuta ZigBee bridge and a $8 LIDL light.

You sir, are not Apple’s target market.

Seems like Apple's target market is very narrow given homepod's weak sales

I think that this is one of those things that sounds like you'd never do it, but...

I've put zigbee switches into every wall switch in my house and now when I stay in hotels, I forget to turn off the lights before getting into bed.

>something that nobody ever wants to do

I think that this gesture, if it works well, is something that will be a killer app for smarthomes. The other point of friction, which is interop, has been more or less solved by thread/matter. Homepods are $100, btw. Not to mention what happens if apple integrates u1 into a smart switch/bulb, which is something that the thread protocol allows for.

Meanwhile you could use an iphone as a webcam for years by just buying an app,you could use an ipad as a cintiq by just buying an app, using your phone with your computer with kdeconnect also has been around for years. Pretty much nobody cared. Then apple came out with their branded version and suddenly you have people praising it as the best thing since sliced bread and great "innovation".

So my prediction would be that apple releases a ZigBee bridge and light for $50 in about 3 years and calls it a fancy name. People will tell you how absolutely essential and innovative it is and how you could never get that without an iDevice.

It's probably not glasses. Nobody likes wearing glasses. Every attempt at making tech glasses has failed. It'll probably be the Apple Watch.

Everybody would love wearing Apple Glasses. Would probably look really cool.

I remember seeing AirPods in somebody's ears for the first time. "What a dork" I thought back then. Now they're cool and everywhere.

> Now they're cool and everywhere.

One of these things is true.

There is a difference between the subjective and objective "cool." They've sold something like 150 million pairs of Airpods? I think that qualifies as objectively "cool."

Another heuristic is: are the majority of attractive and young people using/buying/doing it?

AirPods are cool by that measure as well.

If lots of people are doing or buying something, that’s a signal that it isn’t cool.

I would not love wearing them. I waste a significant amount of money on contact lenses each year for the privilege of not having to wear anything on my face.

I'm not a VR/AR fan but if Apple can come out with super high quality AR headset that can augment/replace monitors I would buy one instantly. I might be earlier than mainstream adopter but if the tech ever gets there this will be a natural shift.

I won't buy Meta products but I keep waiting for someone to do VR workspace right - where I can truly work and travel from anywhere with a decent chair and a desk for keyboard (no need to lug around monitors, no need for huge table).

I think that's it. I had half an hour to kill in a cafe yesterday, didn't bring my kindle, and I thought "if there were compact AR or even VR glasses that I could whip out to emulate a full-size working environment, that would be super handy right now".

Having said that, for me to spend money on it it would (a) also be able to realistically replace my set up at home, which currently consists of 2 HiDPI screens and (b) not be that much more expensive than what that cost me.

As an mere user this is what I had assumed. Siri has been stagnant and buggy for years; it makes sense they are working on a big replacement instead of putting resource into incremntal improvements on what seems to be a weak foundation.

> apple doesn't get the full advantage of tons of user data from the wild.

Do you think OpenAI did? Perhaps Apple doesn't have the vast amount of data that Google has, but if OpenAI managed to have like 200 wikipedia-sized corpuses of different textual data for their English GPT models, that's certainly not out of reach of Apple.

> apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off

Point at it? You mean with a finger? What do you mean they've shipped everything required?

> > Apple has a ridiculous, almost unfathomably deep moat for training and running [LLMs]...

> Do they? I can completely fathom, given my own anecdotal experiences, how garbage Siri quality is today.

Siri is a dead end. When Jobs bought Siri (what, 10 years ago?) he explicitly junked almost all the AI back end, mainly buying the speech recognition engine. I didn't understand why and still don't (but strangely he didn't ask me :-).

John Giannandrea has run Apple's AI effort for the past five or six years. He is the reason Google has a big AI effort (he consolidated a bunch of AI projects and bought Deep Mind, etc) before he decamped for Apple. For all I know the Siri team isn't even part of his remit.

You can never look into Apple (even if you work there) so one can only speculate based on what visible signs appear. But Siri isn't one of them.

Jobs has been dead for over ten years

And it feels like nobody has worked on it since then

The cinema industry know how to squeeze a billion dollar a year out of Apple. Do the Apple or Sony ”social engineers“ have total view? When Amazon was sky rocketing and Blue Origin had not reached orbit a niche producer from the cinema industry had Jeff B paying a lot although he might have backed out of that deal like giving up on the Android phone with a lot of cameras.

>When Amazon was sky rocketing and Blue Origin had not reached orbit...

Blue Origin still has not reached orbit.

> He is the reason Google has a big AI effort (he consolidated a bunch of AI projects and bought Deep Mind, etc) before he decamped for Apple

I'm sure he's great but this made me laugh

I aim to please!

(And yes he’s a great guy)

The part that Siri is bad at will be commoditized — someone will open-source a GPT-4-level language model. And Apple's moat will be being able to run that on-device with all the attendant benefits (privacy, zero marginal cost to the company, availability in more scenarios, etc)

yeah, makes sense. At least these integrations at a lower level are happening now. I just can't help but feel disappointed that we didn't see earlier cohesion at least a few years ago, maybe around the early or pre-M1 era when there were all those A7, A8 whatever SoCs. But in retrospect, that is basically 10 minutes ago in the history of the universe so yeah, I'm just overly excitable!

You realize that these language models are like 100's of GBs in size and consumes 10's of GB's of memory. Last time I checked, apple still ships their products with less than the market average in both of these specs. If you want a local running LLM on an iphone, get ready to sell a kidney.

(assuming we're not talking about the near future)

I think this can be a scenario of converging incentives: on one side large models will incentivized hardware manufacturers to increase the memory available on the devices, while on the other sides model developers will be incentivized to trim the fat on the models and devise compression mechanisms that don't compromise quality too much.

It's not unthinkable to imagine a hand held device able to run full inference locally a few device generations in the future.

You can today run an LLM vastly better than Siri on a few GB of RAM using Llama 7B at 4-bit quantization and alpaca.cpp. This is moving so fast, every day there is something new coming. There won't be any moat in LLMs soon or even in dedicated HW as it turns out you don't need that much for "basic intelligence".

Note I'm not suggesting you can pack the full knowledgebase of humanity into those 2GB of RAM, but the key feature of an edge AI is simply to understand instructions, something Siri and Ok Google struggle with at best..

Same experience.

Alexa is DIMENSIONS better than Siri. Siri can create a timer ... okay even an alarm. That’s it. It is comically bad. Their text to speech is excellent, but the rest is unbelievable bad.

If Apple has some kind of silver bullet, it’s time to put it out or be left behind.

I don’t have all the details because NDAs but I ask questions and get nods and grins from colleagues and friends at chip companies; Apple (and nVidia and Intels) silver bullet to cloud hosted, software based AI is AI chips.

We’re circling back around to local compute being the default as hardware performance of next gen phones and tablets reaches a “good enough” point for most users.

There will be scientific problems that will require modern server clusters but most consumer facing AI needs will be done on hardware within a decade.

I’m not saying AGI in a decade, I’m saying cutting edge logic embedded in software now will be the basis for logic in chips in the years to come.

Can we take a minute to comment on how bad the text correction is on the iPhone?

Amazon has publicly walked back from Alexa because turns out people don't use it for much beyond creating a timer and it doesn't make money.

I think it's quite likely that Apple realized the same quite a bit earlier and eased up on Siri versus focusing on other things.

Honestly I observe zero progress in the last 10 years. My first iPhone was 4S. My current iPhone is 8. My use-case is absolutely the same. Calls, SMS, Whatsapp, navigation, books, browser. The same with macs. I boot, open IDE, Terminal and that's about it. Yes, hardware's getting faster (which is compensated by software getting slower). But nothing changed dramatically.

I think that the only thing that changed is adoption of fingerprint reader. Both in iPhone 8 and in mac.

AI might be that thing that could tremendously change my usage pattern. But it should be as smart as human assistant. GPT4-level intelligence might have the necessary power for that.

I don’t think Apple necessarily needs to lead the pack on LLM research. They just need to take the SOTA FOSS model and bake it into silicon, using their chip design expertise.

If you do that, you can do inference on mobile devices, which is a huge privacy win; it plus into their general privacy positioning in a big way. If you open up that SDK to developers it would be the iOS app gold rush all over again.

Note, Google is also moving in the direction of on-device inference with Coral, but they obviously will want to transmit the personalized model weights back to the mothership.

Honestly, it speaks mountains to Apple as an organisation that they did not invest all of their resources into Siri, especially when you consider how Amazon invested in Alexa etc. Everyone has long understood that the "personal assistant" represents really the pinnacle of not just what AI but the personal computer should be able to offer -- the mistake this past decade was thinking that had to do with then current ML paradigms or with these completely useless voice agents. That Apple could realise it was a dead-end and not sink much more investment/engineering resources into the tool any further than what anyone actually uses these tools for (changing song, lowering volume, etc) is outstanding.

Ultimately, I'm very reassured that it's Apple and Microsoft leading the way for personal and business AI assistants respectively. As Stratechery has emphasised, the latter not only already has all the data from most firms outside Silicon Valley, but more importantly has always adhered to and designed their software according to a computer-as-a-tool philosophy versus Google's "ML/AI will do everything for you behind the scenes"; the former has not only made a show of data security but invested massively in the hardware architectures necessary to making on-device AI a possibility. Without at all being a "fanboy", Apple is quite literally the only company I would trust my personal data to for use in a GPT-based assistant.

Amazon's investment in Alexa is a perfect example of why Apple didn't (and shouldn't have) invested all of their resources into Siri. The Alexa team is getting seriously gutted in these rounds of downsizing [1], or as CNBC puts it "the team behind the technology was a prime target of the largest layoffs in the company’s history."

What they have been invested heavily in is the Apple Neural Engine ("ANE"), special silicon right on the SoC to handle ML / AI code. Optimize on a server, then run the model on your iPhone or probably soon, your Apple Watch.

WWDC this year is going to be very, very important.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/06/amazon-fully-committed-to-al...

Siri is garbage because it's trying to be a real AI, as it was understood to be at the time. Alexa works because it's not an AI but it seems as if it's an AI.

If you’re the exec in charge of this at Apple, what are you doing right now. It’s not watching OpenAI become what Siri could be unless you have something to do about it. Your motivation levels are extremely high.