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Comment by DonaldPShimoda | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I was really impressed that even with regard to the Autocorrect update, they used technical terms like "transformer model" without using hype words. They very clearly labeled it as a predictive text engine rather than some magical pseudo-sentient enigma or something.

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Why were you impressed by that? WWDC is a developer's conference. I bet many developers would have been offended if they were told AI is some enigma.

cough. Google I/O. cough

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of too.

Although WWDC is a developers' conference, the keynote tends to be a popular event for regular Apple users as well, and over the last decade the keynote announcements have become significantly more user-facing while technical details are relegated to the Platforms State of the Union (or the specific sessions throughout the rest of the week).

So I was impressed — or maybe "pleased" would be a better word. I was pleased that they chose not to hype this feature using the common buzz words of the year, and instead just stuck to technical terminology. Some other companies would not have done the same, in my opinion.

> I bet many developers would have been offended if they were told AI is some enigma.

You think? The "AI" enthusiasm i've seen everywhere online borders on religious fanaticism...

Apple marketing uses weasel words all the time.

And they didn't in this instance when I think other companies would have, so I was impressed.

"logarithmic leaps" in their Welcome IBM Ad is my favorite industry example

> magical pseudo-sentient enigma or

Since when does artificial intelligence imply sentience? They're interdependent and neither are reliant on the other.

Yes, but that’s not how “normal” people take it. People believe these are thinking machines and programs, capable of some amount of reasoning. It’s coming from somewhere between decades of terrifying sci-fi and a few months of impressive model results.

Well they are programs capable of some amount of reasoning…

Basic/moderate reasoning tasks are absolutely in the capability of GPT-4.

Note that reasoning is _another_ thing that doesn't require sentience. Plus, GPT-4 is capable of doing simple reasoning tasks.

The other response has my thoughts right. Although the two things are separate, laypeople (and a surprising number of others too) seem too easily duped by false claims of modern language models exhibiting "emergent properties" of potential sentience. It's absurd, to be sure, but that also means it would've been easy to tap into that to generate hype among such people.

I've noticed the hype and the doomsayers implying both.

Much better than their previous marketing 15 years ago measuring hard drive capacities in "songs".

How dare they speak in a language their users might understand!

And yet somehow it's better to say transformer models and not AI?

Sir, this is a developer conference.

The rest of the conference, sure. But the keynote has always been designed for a mainstream audience.

That wouldn't make sense. "Let's have a conference strictly for developers, but let's speak to a completely different audience in the keynote."

That is actually how it goes, though. The WWDC opening keynote is the typical Apple computer user's best look at what's coming up. It's not not technical, but it's very much deliberately made to be approachable to non-developers.

Whether you agree with this choice or not, it's the way things have been for at least as long as I've been watching (which is over a decade).

Think of it by analogy as the keynote for the conference is like the back cover summary of a book.

Despite technically being part of a developer conference, the intro keynote has always functioned more like a consumer-focused annual hardware and software update for Apple device users.

Hence things like the ever-present use of things like impressive-sounding "marketing benchmarks" that wouldn't pass as up to snuff on slides in a room of developers.

And also the very high level of abstraction so that non-technical users can understand the major updates — that's not exactly a trait one would use to describe a developer conference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenote#%22One_more_thing......

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_Inc._media_event...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Developers_Conferenc...

"AI" is a technically meaningless term. In contrast, a transformer model is a very specific technical thing.

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