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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Apple had a huge lead on this with Siri, and then let it stagnate - actually devolve - instead of throwing money at it to develop it further.

My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system.

Text/image is close to being a solved problem, video is on its way but still not great. Both will be impossible to beat from a cold-ish start.

I'm not convinced Apple has the hire-power to attract the best people for any of this.

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If Apple’s grand plan is convincing large numbers of people to stick a $3000 clunky ass rectangular box to their face they are in serious trouble.

Obviously, it won’t be $3000 and it won’t be clunky. The current version is basically a dev kit.

It’s very literally a $3000 clunky rectangular box marketed as a premium product.

> My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system.

I'd speculate they can't do this without 5-10x the compute, which means a wildly bigger battery. I can't think of how you'd mash VR gaming and generative AI together into a headset form factor in a way that's practical for gaming. We can _only just_ run image models in almost real time, and that still requires some heavy lifting and compromises on quality. Doing generative AI on-device for a gaming experience is a hugely tall ask. (And if you're doing it in the cloud, why not do it for the simpler, more popular hardware instead, like iPads?)

The issue is actually that they are throwing a ton of money into Siri. That's partly why it appears to have gotten worse for most queries.

The problem with Siri (and with Alexa) is that Apple was not able to provide enough value for people to make it mainstream. Alexa at least worked for home appliances but using Siri for Macbook or iPhone? Why? Not to mention Apple was not able to monetize it.

I haven't heard someone talk to Siri in a loooong time.

When driving I use Siri to control Spotify and to call people. At home I use google home every day to know the weather, to set alarms and to play music. I'd use Siri for those functions but it responds way slower than google home.

Siri being terrible is thrown around thoughtlessly, you should try it. It's actually pretty good these days. It's shocking how many things it can respond with actual answers.

I think Siri being terrible is probably an indictment of ai now broadly, more so than people believe right now.

I use Siri all the time for really trivial things like settings alarms/timers. Any time I try to do something slightly more complicated, like maintaining a shopping list, it gets terrible pretty quickly.

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