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Comment by hehdhdjehehegwv | Hacker News Reader

There’s a lot I don’t like about Sam Altman. There’s a lot I don’t like about OpenAI.

But goddamn they absolutely leapfrogged Google and Apple and it’s completely amazing to see these trillion dollar companies play catch-up with a start-up.

I want to see more of this. Big Tech has been holding back innovation for too long.

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They "leapfrogged" Google on providing a natural language interface to the world knowledge we'd gotten used to retrieving throug web search. But Apple's never done more than toyed in that space.

Apple's focus has long been on a lifestyle product experience across their portfolio of hardware, and Apple Intelligence appears to be focused exactly on that in a way that has little overlap with OpenAI's offerings. The partnership agreement announced today is just outsourcing an accessory tool to a popular and suitably scaled vendor, the same as they did for web search and social network integration in the past. Nobody's leapfrogging anybody between these two because they're on totally different paths.

Siri is a toy, but I don't think that was Apple's intent. It's been a long-standing complaint that using Siri to search the web sucks compared to other companies offerings.

Apple's product focus is on getting Siri to bridge your first-party and third-party apps, your 500GB of on-device data, and your terabyte of iCloud data with a nice interface, all of which they're trying to deliver using their own technology.

Having Siri answer your trivia question about whale songs, or suggest a Pad Thai recipe modification when you ran out of soy sauce, is just not where they see the value. Poor web search has been an easy critique to weigh against Siri for the last many years, and the ChatGPT integration (and Apple's own local prompt prep) should fare far better than that, but it doesn't have any relevance to "leapfrogging" because the two companies just aren't trying to do the same thing.

That's the complaint! They play in the same space, they just don't seem to be trying. Siri happily returns links to Pad Thai recipes, it's not like they didn't expect this to be a use-case. They just haven't made a UX that competes with others.

And it's not just web search! Siri's context is abysmal. My dad routinely has to correct the spelling of his own name. It's a common name, there are multiple spellings, but it's his phone!

My favorite thing with names is I have some people in my contacts who have names that are phonetically similar to English words. When I type those words in a text or email, Siri will change those words to people’s names.

Ah yes, them saying “we’re bad at it on purpose, but are scrambling to throw random features in our next release” is definitely a great defense.

Apple bought Siri 14 years ago, derailed the progress and promise it had by neglect, and ended up needing a bail out from Sam once he kicked their ass in assistants.

Call it whatever you want.

Big Tech is the only reason OpenAI can run. Microsoft is propping them up with billions of dollars worth of compute and infrastructure

And the foundational tech (Transformers) came from Big Tech, aka Google

It came from Google employees who left to found startups.

Google had technical founders, now it’s run by MBAs and they are having a Kodak Moment.

Isn’t MS heavily invested in them and also letting them use Azure pretty extensively? Rather, I think this is more like an interesting model of a big tech company actually managing to figure out exactly how hands off they need to be, in order to not suffocate any ember of innovation. (In this mixed analogy people often put out fires with their bare hands I guess, don’t think too hard about it).

Change is inevitable in the AI space, and the changes come in fits and starts. In a decade OpenAI too may become a hapless fiefdom lorded over by the previous generation's AI talent.

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