I'm not sure about the facial recognition features, I don't use that stuff but I imagine Android phones mostly do that in the cloud. If Apple's ML chip helps there then that's good for them, but I can't say I'd buy an iPhone for a gimmick like that.
I wouldn't call it a "gimmick", it's a feature that a lot of mainstream users depend on to find pictures of loved ones. My parents use it all the time to rummage through photos and find pictures of my niece, or an old picture of my dead grandparents.
Humans use a lot more than just facial recongition, meanwhile this AI stuff seems overly focused on it. I reckon most people could recognize Donald Trump or Angela Merkel even from behind, using clues from the surrounding, their dress, stature, and hair. I'd wager you can recognize your loved ones from any angle very reliably. Can your AI?
Honestly in my personal experience the best way to accomplish such a thing is still to order by date, because you, holding your camara/phone, move continously through time/space. Pictures of a certain person usually occur together and aren't randomly distributed. An exception is maybe your SO and others you may take a photo of on a whim.
What you're arguing is both true and irrelevant. We don't even need photographs, we could just sketch whatever is in front of us, but convenience matters.
For more complex tasks like locating and recognizing humans and their faces, humans can still perfectly do it but I still would rather be taking more pictures of my loved ones than rummaging through my photos every single time I’m looking for something.
As for the accuracy of those systems, it mostly depends on the model being deployed.
With virtually unlimited computational budget (cloud), it’s easy to deploy a very powerful model but you sacrifice privacy and performance in high latency environments.
With a limited computational budget (local neural processing unit) you deploy what you can cram into the chip. It’s less accurate but consistent and private.
Ok, do this exercise right now (if you have anywhere between 1-10k pictures on your phone): find all the pictures from 3 family members of your choice.
Clock it, let me know how long it will take you to perform this task.
Now think about my mom in her 70s, do you think it's completely doable for her to find pictures of my dead grandmother this way?
> Honestly in my personal experience the best way to accomplish such a thing is still to order by date, because you, holding your camara/phone, move continously through time/space. Pictures of a certain person usually occur together and aren't randomly distributed. An exception is maybe your SO and others you may take a photo of on a whim.
How would ordering by date give my mother access to all pictures she might have from my grandmother?
Of course that AI will not find every single instance of a face at any angle, but it will be "good enough" to find a bunch of them pretty quickly when my mother is missing her mother and wants to see a nice picture.
That's the use case, it's not someone trying to organise their pictures with utmost precision, accuracy, and completeness, it's a common person trying to find some nice pictures of a loved one. If they don't have to spend 2 hours scrolling through an endless set of pictures it's already a pretty damn good feature.