Apple to unveil AI-enabled Safari alongside new operating systems

You can commonly block elements with ad blockers, e.g. ublock

If you don’t want to wait, the iOS and Mac AdGuard apps already allow this. It’s very effective and I use it semi regularly to hide support chat popups and signup forms.

There are probably other apps with that feature too if you don’t like AdGuard

Let's imagine these features are extremely effective and widely adopted, and the advertising market evaporates. What do people think is going to happen to the content ecosystem - suddenly all the low quality ad sponsored clickbait will disappear?

Personally, I think if the only way to earn a living is to convince people to pay for content, we will see much more polarization as consumers self select into their information silos, and producers are incentivized to produce content that flatters their readers sense of superiority and/or aggrievement.

Wait 6 months when the model will be on your watch. Lag gone, answers 99% improved.

I’d rather have an improved Safari with useful AI features (not just another “chat with …” app)… Siri they can fix whenever or rip it out entirely.

Siri isn't that slow for me generally, but the responses are relatively primitive compared to GPT. Very likely Siri is lagging GPT based agents due to the high processing cost of LLM queries.

Startups can launch with today's GPT agents because their utilization is relatively tiny. Siri operates at planet scale, plus Apple is committed to on-device privacy, so they need to develop highly optimized on-device models.

No doubt this is going to drive a major hardware upgrade cycle for Apple.

The one where Google pays them $20 billion a year?

This is total speculation on my part, but I read an article recently claiming that Apple had struck a deal with Google to leverage their Gemini models. Here’s an article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/technology/apple-google-a...

Why would Apple give up 18 billion dollars (per year) from Google?

Privacy? That's just a marketing slogan, they are tracking you across first party apps. And privacy is never worth 18 billion dollars.

Unlikely; this will likely be focused on on-device search of your personal or other local data and relevant context from the web. This has always been Apple's focus, and the opportunity to 10X this with LLMs is profound. Access to your private data has always been the key to making a breakthrough intelligent agent and Apple is better positioned to make headway here than anyone else (except maybe Google Pixel but the marketshare is tiny).

There is really no need for Apple to step into web search when (1) they don't inherently have a value-add beyond making your searches more private, which they already can do, and (2) from a revenue standpoint they already tax Google billions a year for preferred placement.

Boring is good. If there’s AI in the product, I want it to be 100% accurate. Not 99% accurate. Zero hallucinations. I use MacOS because it’s very predictable and I don’t have to tinker. If this means dialing back to only a subset of LLM capability then that’s perfect.

"Safari, I want to watch latest X videos."

"Sure thing! Loading xvideos!"

Not long at all. Much faster than we want. That pollution will fund the massive infra demands.

Spider-specific content is a great way to get doomed into the bottom ranks of SEO.

Meta is fine; they'll just funnel you to the app instead.