Apple releases first preview of its long-awaited iPhone AI | Hacker News Reader

Apple releases first preview of its long-awaited iPhone AI

cnbc.com

17 pointsgeox29 comments

This can't come soon enough. Apple has made Siri dumber over the years. I used to be able to say "Hey Siri, play Overcast" and it would play my podcasts. Now it says "I don't see any music by Overcast in Apple Music". When I say "Hey Siri, tell the Overcast app to play" it replies "the Overcast app doesn't have any unplayed content" — even when I'm in the middle of an episode, and I have many unplayed episodes. It is dumb as rocks.

It’s become a liability.

Hey siri, turn on the AC!

Proceeds to call someone I’ve been texting whose name sounds nothing like anything in that phrase.

"Siri, set the lights to full."

[all the lights turn off]

I've had Siri call people randomly when I didn't even say hey Siri. It called someone I hadn't talked to in years.

If I tell it to intercom and “mistakenly” (stupid me) use a persons name at the beginning of the message, it will fail and tell me that it can’t yet intercom to contacts.

I live in the Americas, yet i am still with my european apple account. Will I be able to join the preview?

I imagine you would be able to, as long as your phone doesn't give other DMA behavior (prompting for alternative browsers, allowing alternative app marketplaces, allowing side-loading).

You will need to have both a Siri language and a Region of US English currently, as the models have not been further localized.

It's not been clear to me whether siri will integrate "AI" capabilities locally or whether it will simply be a fancy wrapper around chatGPT API - I suspect the latter.

Most of it is a mix of local functionality using their in-house hardware-optimized LLM models (which is why the compatible iPhone models are limited) and a whole server architecture they've built out to, in theory, provide secure off-device functionality (all the buzzwords about data being encrypted in flight, server storage being ephemeral per session, etc).

OpenAI functionality is also included for when the Apple LLM(s) decide that they can't handle a query (no info has been given on how that's determined), but it specifically requires consent from the user (every time) to happen.

I'd actually say it is more that "World Model" queries ("what was the cause of the American Civil War") are just something Apple doesn't see value in doing themselves.

This is even more an issue when you look at the reputational harm and potential liability of giving a poor answer when someone asks about "do-it-yourself home vasectomy options"

It's probably not clear for the same reason you're quoting AI. Nevertheless Apple has said, clearly, that its AI capabilities will be both local and online, and sometimes, will just wrap the chatgpt api.

The really sad thing is that Apple is doing really cool, really difficult, hacker-y shit just to make this all work while you and others are just ignoring it to virtue signaling ... being a Luddite?

> will just wrap the chatgpt api

Just to clarify, it's not even Siri wrapping Chat GPT really.

It's essentially just a "dumb" integration where if Siri thinks it can't handle a request, it'll prompt you to send it to Chat GPT instead. If it ever wants to send anything off to Chat GPT it'll ask you first, and from there it doesn't pretend to be Siri. There's a very obvious line drawn, it's just a convenience feature that makes it so you don't have to go into the Chat GPT app if Siri can't help you.

> Investors hope the tight integration of AI with Apple’s operating system can spur a big wave of upgrades in the coming years, especially since the system will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max and newer.

Ah, to have such an active imagination...

Let me guess; once the anti-AI sentiment starts brewing, they're going to promote Resident Evil 8 as a system-seller app.

We'll all just have to see how much demand there is for an AI from Apple. Outside our filter bubble people or seems there are people that do want it though.

If they actually wanted it, they would be using the OpenAI webapp today, free of charge, on any iPhone with internet access. The investor sentiment expects the weaker, local AI to drive sales which is absolutely mad. Either AI is successful and people buy OpenAI's product instead of Apple's, or AI flops and there's no point in putting a little "AI-enabled" sticker on the box.

there's that privacy thing that Apple's kinda known for?

I do not know a single person in my life that tries to defend their purchase of Apple devices as a "privacy" conscious decision. Maybe they justify it to themselves that way, but nobody buys an iPhone to thwart surveillance or zero-click exploits. If they do, they should ask for their money back.

In any case; does the market research really suggest that privacy is what's going to make people use Apple's ChatGPT over OpenAI's ChatGPT? I doubt those people constitute a market any larger than Resident Evil 8 owners on iOS.

Apple isn't going to come out with a ChatGPT, at least not anytime soon.

we'll just have to see. in the absence of data, my opinion is that it's larger than RE8 iOS users because that's an actual thing that some of my non-tech friends care about, having heard about Facebook's offenses in the news. but my filter bubble is just as filtered as yours.

But if Apple can do fully context-aware AI using all sensors and replace Siri? "Siri, where am I?" "Siri, every time I near this store, ask me and my spouse if we need anything from it." "Siri, whenever I take a picture of the cats, make a cute meme to send to the kids." "Siri, analyze these pictures and create a 3D model of the room and its furniture." "Siri, go through my photos and make an album of the kids and send it to the grandparents."

If indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

Apple had 10 years to replace Siri, and now they're subcontracting the intelligent bit to OpenAI instead of WolframAlpha. If you remain hopeful in the face of that much resignation, then I cannot shake your faith.

Talk about a profound misunderstanding of the powers that shape the tech landscape and open consumer wallets.

Bundling, convenience, tight integration, and bringing technologies to larger markets are like the most powerful business moves you can make in tech. Making something one tap away instead of four unlocks at least an order of magnitude more engagement and usage.

I think you are wrong and the lackluster sales of AI-enabled iPhones will prove it. The exact same thing happened with Siri, and was she a system-seller? No, people actually switched phones because Siri was the only assistant you could use. Mandating a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone hates does not automatically make your solution good again. This exact pattern is destined to happen with ChatGPT; the people that want it already use it, and the people that don't care won't be happy about being forced to use a solution that doesn't work for them.

Siri was a system seller - The iPhone 4S that Siri was introduced alongside sold 4mm units on the first weekend which was the fastest selling iPhone to date. This was an 'S' update where the body style had not been changed, so the draw of the device was purely related to internals updates and Siri, which was heavily promoted. I don't know how long that sales bump lasted for but I don't think you're correct that Siri wasn't a system seller.

Few people switched because of Siri - I'm not sure in practice whether any significant amount of people switched away from iPhone due to Siri, that sounds like something that might be true in niche circles but probably not something that made a dent on the general market of >1 billion people and devices. Even if a million people switch thats a rounding error, and frankly HN is famous for overestimating the techie-ness of the general market.

ChatGPT isn't a substitute - ChatGPT is just one way AI tech is articulated. Most people don't like chatbots (see late 2010s hype like Messenger bots that died fast). Most people don't have time to tinker with AI tools to know whether it will help them in their lives and all their little use cases. Integrating AI into existing workflows on iOS will expose it to an order of magnitude more people. If they like the particular use cases it enables, maybe that'll move units. It will require a lot of user education in the form of marketing to get people to see these capabilities, because again the general market isn't tinkering with AI and doesn't know what it can do. Regardless, your point that any who were interested would use ChatGPT makes little sense because ChatGPT isn't a substitute in practice for general market users, nor the specific use cases Apple showed off where they use AI, due to tight integration, different UX, greater convenience, etc.

Apple Intelligence, as they call it, encompasses far more than just a chatbot. I’d be surprised if it didn’t generate a noticeable increase in sales this year.

Siri encompasses more than a calculator you can use with your voice. For all of it's lovely functionality, it remains a hated and borderline-unusable interface even among die-hard Apple fans. An AI-version of it is not going to capture the attention of the smartphone market, especially when you can open ChatGPT in your browser with 2 taps already.

That would be if they specifically wanted a Chatbot.

What I would like from Apple is a smart assistant that is actually smart. That implies it has access to and can do reasoning about a ton of work-related as well as rather personal information which I don't want to share carte blanc with OpenAI or Google or Meta.

So I would like to be able to just ask if I had anything going on this coming weekend, and for it to bring up a relevant conversation from last week in WhatsApp. Meta probably doesn't want to share conversations carte blanc with Google and OpenAI either, nor can they with the E2E privacy posturing they've presented around WhatsApp.

Well, stay optimistic. We hoped for a Siri that "is actually smart" for 10 long years, and we got some pretty new animations and a new few new voices to pick. If Apple's plan is to rely on OpenAI for serious performance improvements then we might as well throw in the towel now and admit they have no idea what they're doing.

> That implies it has access to and can do reasoning about a ton of work-related as well as rather personal information which I don't want to share carte blanc with OpenAI or Google or Meta.

So let me get this straight. You want to use Apple's AI because it will use their OS entitlements to get information out of Google and Meta's apps that you wouldn't otherwise share with them?

I... don't think you can stop those companies from getting your data in apps they operate. Ironically, if you could replace Apple's OpenAI integration with either Google or Meta's LLMs then you would have a fully transparent system that you can prove doesn't send any information to Big Tech. You and I aren't allowed to validate Apple's AI servers, we're just allowed to look at the whitepaper.

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