>happy to pay a bit extra for the compute, it could be "premium siri"
Siri is heavily embedded in the ecosystem, yet has bitterly under delivered for far too long. Many improvements should have been made absent access to an LLM.
Apple should provide this behavior out of the box, and figure out how to make the costs work without additional subscriptions.
I think the cost of running these models is still astronomical, and unlike ms and google apple just doesnt really have cloud compute at their scale. So I could imagine they might run this as a premium service first to build hype, and then figure out bringing it down in cost over time.
A bit like the vision pro, its a premium product now, but I could imagine 3-6 years down the line it will cost around an ipad pro. Apple is really good at scaling things once they see the market. But suddenly switching everyone to a gpt-3.5 for siri overnight would be a humongous cost (I think).
Apple is the only company I know of (discounting Nvidia), that has this established base of consumers just waiting for a killer app.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
In addition to the leaps and bounds in silicon, Apple has also quietly been making acquisitions in the space (like $200M+ for Xnor.ai - focusing on low-power ML intended for edge computing applications).
They are likely relentlessly optimizing, and in typical Apple fashion will not be first to release something, but will do a killer job in distributing it to hundreds of millions of devices/people at once, with a UX that's thoughtfully polished and accessible to all.
I’m not sure what your complaint is, Siri does quite well with timers and alarms.