Hacker News Reader

Comment by disqard | Hacker News Reader

I'll take a shot (not at MS, so I have no inside info).

GenAI is hotter than anything else right now. As Satya publicly stated, "we made them dance" -- which shows how high-priority it is to maximize "AI innovation" at MS.

If you disagree, think about how badly "Tay" blew up in MS's face and yet they still went ahead and bundled OpenAI LLM tech into all of Office365, just so they could have bragging rights about beating Google to it.

At this point, it's a race (to where? who knows) and no Big Tech Corp wants to be seen as "not at the forefront".

That's my $0.02, anyway :)

View on HN

You are absolutely right. This AI race has been sort of funny to watch among the big tech incumbents.

Google kept on launching faked demos and hurriedly released an openly race biased image generator all in a bid to catch up with OpenAI.

Meanwhile Apple has been sort of lethargic. Recently annouced a deal with OpenAI to add GPT to their devices. They seem happy to continue playing catch up in this regard.

I think Meta is probably the only big tech giant that has kind of got their execution right straight from the jump. Can't point to any slip ups from their "AI announcements".

Note that Meta aren't trying to sell AI services to most people (with the exception of advertisers, for whom it kinda makes sense).

Much easier to avoid messing up, given this.

Llama 3 is available and in your face when you open WhatsApp these days. They're very much trying to get everyone to tell them / the AI their secrets.

You forgot Amazon eating paste in the corner.

> They seem happy to continue playing catch up in this regard.

Catch up with what? Does anyone else have an AI product actually worth having?

Is it somehow bad that Apple hasn't also released an AI that doesn't do what it's supposed do half of the time?

Apple plays “catch up” by quietly hunkering down for a few years and then suddenly leapfrogging everyone else.

Except they totally flopped with virtual reality.

Mixed Reality... the vision pro is not suitable for 80% of the VR use cases ie. Gaming/porn.

> Meanwhile Apple has been sort of lethargic.

If by lethargic you mean OCR of every single image on my computer so I can copy and paste text from anything, all running locally on the NPU on my M1 chip, then lethargic is A-OK.

That's what Apple does: they ship useful features. We'll see tomorrow if they fall in the trap and run in this race to nowhere.

I tried to use AI on (intentionally?) badly formatted bank statements for a family member. Tried Apple, Google, various startups. Nothing could do it. The easy stuff is easy (raw OCR) but the hard stuff (layout recognition and reformatting) is not yet doable.

>OCR of every single image on my computer so I can copy and paste text from anything, all running locally on the NPU on my M1 chip

This functionality is baked into Windows since 10. But for some reason you need a third party program to expose it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.media.ocr?...

https://github.com/TheJoeFin/Text-Grab

Check out Microsoft PowerToys' TextExtractor.

Apple, as it exists now, is not much an innovator. They don't need to be. They can release improved versions of the products everyone already has. Best not to mess with that by introducing half-assed tech that breaks the user experience. Wait till its matured a bit then release a smooth and polished apple version.

I think this is for the better. I’ve been using LLMs pretty regularly lately for some side projects, and they’re interesting but they’re not particularly nice products. I’m not aware of anyone who has a legitimately polished offering. There’s definitely a lot to the tech, but the signal to noise on essentially every model I’ve tried is far below normal standards for feature reliability and quality.

> hurriedly released an openly race biased image generator all in a bid to catch up with OpenAI.

If you think the bias was due to timing constraints and not intentional then you are extremely naive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com