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Comment by erickhill | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s safe to say Siri and Alexa are officially dead. They look like dusty storefront mannequins next to Battlestar replicants at this point.

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Or Apple is rarely if ever the first mover on a new tech and just waits to refine the user experience for people?

Maybe Apple is not that close and Siri will be really far behind for a while. I just wouldn't count them out yet.

From the time Apple bought Siri, it hasn't even delivered on the promises of the company it bought as of yet. It's been such a lackluster product. I wouldn't count them out, but it doesn't even feel like they are in.

Apple really dropped the ball when it comes to Siri. For years I watched WWDC thinking "surely they'll update siri this year" and they still haven't given it a significant update.

If you'd have told me 10 years ago that Apple would wait this long to update siri I would have been like no way, that's crazy.

The tech wasn’t ready. Alexa is the same. No progress.

Businesses have to focus and it made sense to drop this as a priority.

Sounds like excuses.

This can't set alarms, timers, play music, etc. The only current overlapping use case I see is checking the weather (assuming GPT-4o can search online), and Siri is already fine for that.

Amazing tech, but still lacking in the integrations I'd want to use voice for.

Very easy to plug in that capability with tool use. Gpt3+ already support using tools/json schema output.

Apple actually threw in the towel. OpenAI is going to be powering the next version of Siri.

Why do people beat up on Siri so much ? It does all the basic stuff I need it to do fine. Could it be better, yes. But it’s made my easier and safer while driving especially.

I’m not even sure if people who rag on it use it ?

Siri runs locally on the device. It works with internet completely disabled (airplane mode). You can't run any LLM on a phone.

You can run a bunch of LLMs on a phone (such as llama), depending on which phone you have.

Apple would need to stick an m4 in the next iPhone to even hope to run something like this and I bet that GPT4o would run either slowly, poorly, or not at all on a top spec m4.

Of course GPT 4, or even 3, are impossible to run on any consumer product. As far as I know it's an ensemble of several models which are huge by themselves, with enormous hardware requirements.

But there's a lot of smaller LLMs, and my point is that these models can already run in mobile phones.

You can run a SLM (small language model) on an iPhone, and not much else. It would use up all of the resources. The iPhone only has 6 GB RAM.

Where do you draw the line? GPT2 was introduced as a LLM, and you can easily run it on more limited devices than a recent iPhone. Did it stop being an LLM when bigger models were released? Is llama 7B an LLM or an "SLM"?

Relatively speaking. It's like the definition of a supercomputer 30 years ago is a cheap Android phone in your pocket today.

You can certainly run a transformer model or any other neural network based model on an iPhone. Siri is probably some kind of neural network. But obviously a model running on device is nowhere near comparable to the current state of the art LLM's. Can't fit a $40k GPU in your pocket (yet).

A transformer running on an iPhone would be roughly 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the state of the art LLM (GPT4 with a trillion parameters)

> Did it stop being an LLM when bigger models were released?

Yes it does make sense that what is considered L for a LLM is a moving target.

Don't know about Alexa, but Siri and Google Assistant are only toys.

Can OpenAI change your thermostat?

I had 3.5 producing valid Home Assistant commands within weeks of release, now we have tool usage so yeah, it definitely can.

If apple made Siri impressive then less people would need apps. Less apps = less revenue.

I wonder how much Siri being brain dead is due to it being free. The OpenAI version likely costs 1000x more than Apple’s per query, but is rate limited. Would Apple release something similar for free?

Good thing there’s iCloud subscriptions huh.

Siri runs locally on the device. The cost would be prohibitive if they changed it to an LLM running in the cloud.

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