Apple's Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes
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Personally, I don't really care if they ever ship a working AI feature as long as they don't neglect and shittify the rest of iOS/macOS in the process.
I wish they would forget the really advanced features and just focus on little ones. Like particularly with Alexa back when I used to use that, one of the major frustrations was figuring out the magical word order that would get it to do what I wanted, it would only do a thing if I said it in a certain way otherwise it would get condfused or do the wrong thing. An LLM would be great at making that not happen.
But instead of just that little bit, they're trying to do Star Trek levels of computer voice control, missing out on incremental improvements.
Alt-Tab doesn't show window previews because it switches between apps and not windows. Previews are in Mission Control which is for switching between windows.
Sadly, it seems as if Apple Intelligence has sucked the air out of the room as far as spending any effort on other matters is concerned. ScreenTime doesn’t work correctly since iOS 18 (showing random and incorrect durations). It’s become basically useless. All the catalyst apps on macOS are garbage as far as user experience is concerned (can’t use the keyboard effectively or as expected for navigation with those apps). AirDrop works sometimes, but won’t sometimes. Same with continuity and other features introduced a long, long time ago.
With all these issues, no improvements have been done over the years. The ossification of macOS, or rather the iOSsification of macOS is diminishing the uniqueness of each platform and its strengths.
Top level heads need to roll right this month if Apple wants to show that it’s serious about software. Apple Intelligence can be released in 2030 or never, for all I care.
The LLM does run on the neural engine though. LLMs are simple architecturally.
[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
Also - I don't think Amazon (or more specifically Alexa) is exactly worth emulating. I am willing to bet there are a substantial number of issues with their new Alexa features that don't happen with Siri specifically because of its reduced scope (can't browse the internet and shop for you, etc.)
Or, heck, just buy Perplexity. You have the cash.
Ship what?
Will what they ship be anything better than just using ChatGPT? Right now companies don't need to buy anything, because everyone has what is essentially the exact same product. Maybe OpenAI's is a bit better than everyone else's in everyday use, but a run of the mill AI offering with maybe? better usability is still a run of the mill AI offering.
That's the problem. There really is no differentiation out there. You know you're all using pretty much the same thing when fanboy-ism rears its ugly head. "My ChatGPT is better than your Claude!" Or vice-versa ad-nauseum.
The only way to win in that environment is to leverage your other businesses to force use of your models onto the market.
But I guess, kudos to Apple for at least trying to improve their product. They really don't need to do that. But how long will that attitude last? Sooner or later even Apple will start foisting their models onto the markets by leveraging their other business lines. Like Microsoft has figured out recently, "hey, we don't need to be good at AI to win. We just need to force everyone to use our models!" Expect the same from Amazon, FB, Google et al.
They know they have a run of the mill model. Maybe even not as good as Gemini or ChatGPT. (or even DeepSeek? Who knows?) So they leverage other business to force use of the models onto the market.
Everyone else will do the exact same thing. Why? Because I don't think their models will be better in any material way than the slop Amazon is slinging.
In Amazon's case, Alexa. The voice assistant market seems like a great place to leverage this tech but two of the three major services in this space (Apple, Google, and Amazon) have nothing to show and Google is only recently getting their act together.
Once Alexa (the home assistant) gets Claude capabilities natively, I can see it becoming infinitely more useful.
> Walker said the decision to delay the features was made because of quality issues and that the company has found the technology only works properly up to two-thirds to 80% of the time. He said the group “can make more progress to get those percentages up, so that users get something they can really count on.”
Sounds about right for generative AI running on smaller local models. For consumer tech having it fail in weird ways 1/3 to 1/5 of the time is unacceptable.
They need to leave Siri behind and make a whole new thing, roll it out to their most loyal and spendy customers, and then let it make its way down the customer chain as it gains more capability.
Keep Siri! Siri can become the dumb, reliable agent. When I want my garage door opened, I ask Siri. When I want something more thoughtful, I ask this other thing.
A few major iOS releases ago when you said “Hey Siri, wake me up in an hour”, it correctly set an alarm in now() + 60 minutes. Nowadays if you don’t say an absolute time, it sets a timer instead of an alarm. I used relative times when taking naps so this regression is a UX change for worse for me.
To this day, it’s less reliable. Also Siri can’t text my wife who has two phone numbers in my address book. Although there is just a single iMessage chat - Siri always asks (Which one? - without offering options!!!)
The old farts in Apple management need to go and pronto.
The ossification of the entire management layer is really reall frightening and a terrible sign for a company.
I bet we saw peak Apple in 2023/24.
Or when I ask for directions to a hardware store, and I get a result 300km away across a national border...
Sure, maybe it is embarrassing for Apple that they haven't made their own model, but the price of LLM AI is dropping like a rock, and eventually, Apple's large user base, distribution, UI design, and convenience will win the day.
1. This is not important enough that a senior person (VP or above) is assigned to take care of Generative AI (the biggest shift since Mobile/Cloud) or
2. Robby Walker is cannon fodder and is polishing his resume.
"During the all-hands gathering [...] people familiar with the matter have said." is journalist speak for "I heard this from inside sources".
Their fake AI promises are just embarrassing.
Rather than realize it was late at night and I was referring to my normal wakeup alarm, Siri added a second alarm.
You are perfectly right that they don’t seem to use their own products, or those employees that do have no path to enact change. They also don’t seem to do much user testing.
* WebGL is half-assed in safari because of "security" risks, but reeks that they don't want to risk mobile gaming bypassing the app store.
* They've let mobile gaming be ruined by abusive micro-transaction games.
* Apple ignores user bugs unless they get a lot of press ( my current frustration: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255473542 )
* iTunes Genius was SO GOOD at recommending new music, but now that they can just grab a monthly fee music discovery on Apple music is very meh.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that that their top-down product driven development cycle can't handle a sudden, new technology (that is arguably overhyped).
The tragedy is that the only mobile alternative is an operating system run by an adtech company and windows is...regressing again after some promise.
At least there's always linux? :-/
As much as I'd love to blame Apple here, I'm not sure what they could have done differently. Once the race to the bottom in terms of up-front pricing started ad-supported and microtransaction-supported games were inevitable. Meanwhile, games with cash shops were already popular in South Korea[1] and "free" games allowed the same model to gain a foothold here.
I would love if Apple labelled all gacha games as 18+ because they're gambling simulators, but it's really up to consumers to avoid non-gambling MTX if they don't like this business model.
Not commenting on anything in the latter clause of your sentence, but I can tell you the security risks are very, very real. Having worked on GPU architecture as well as a browser engine -- so, so many features/guardrails/guarantees that we take for granted on desktop PCs are basically in their infancy when you look over at the GPU world. Address-space isolation, virtualization of hardware resources, separation of virtual machines, privilege isolation -- when you go to the GPU, all of that is kinda-there if you're on newer hardware, but even then without anywhere near the level of coverage or battle-testing that modern CPUs & kernels have. For example, Pascal (i.e. that old 1060 your friend is still using in their kid's desktop) doesn't even have per-process memory isolation -- a buffer overflow in your browser engine could attack any GPU process on your machine! Even the vendors themselves won't claim to support "proper" secure multi-tenancy until the Hopper era, and again -- even that's much less well-tested than the CPU-level isolation that browsers normally rely on. Consider how much of a security impact PPO/site-isolation has had: so many attacks that used to be possible (e.g. your password being stolen off of your banking site by a malicious ad in the sidebar) are now essentially impossible. That only works because of the deep strength and reliability of address-space separation in modern hardware platforms.
So to take code written by random people on the internet, in a dynamic language, JIT compile it, and then give it access to your GPU -- well, I hope you can understand why that might put the security people on edge. Again, I don't mean to dismiss the rest of your comment, but I want to clarify that when it comes to punching holes in the browser sandbox, the security concerns are really very real.