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Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, they have also succumbed to the AI hype machine. Apple, calling it by its actual name "machine learning" was about the only thing I still liked about Apple.

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Wait, didn't they try to backronym their way into "Apple Intelligence" last cycle?

https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

Probably don't want to draw more attention to their ongoing lawsuits [1]. Apple, for all its faults, does enjoy consistency and the unruly nature of LLM's is something I'm shocked they thought they could tame in a short amount of time. The fallout of the hilariously bad news/message "summaries" were more than enough to spook Apple from allowing that to go much further.

>Built into your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro* to help you write, express yourself, and get things done effortlessly.** Designed with groundbreaking privacy at every step.

The asterisks are really icing on the cake here.

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[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-accused-of-ai-cop...

> actual name "machine learning"

Yesterday’s hype is today’s humility.

They are marketing to the public who mostly call this stuff AI and not machine learning.

Machine learning is a bit more specific than what we now call AI, no?

the other way around.

I don’t follow. Machine learning was coined to specifically describe the application of neural networks to unsupervised classification systems. Its meaning has grown beyond that, but at the outset, it was a niche part of artificial intelligence. Now you’re saying that AI is a subset of machine learning?

Lately AI = LLM (at least in popular culture).

> what we now call AI

(Emphasis added)

When a company (or most people) today (now) says “AI”, they are not referring to the area of study traditionally called artificial intelligence. They are talking exclusively about transformers or diffusion.

Which is a subset of what has always been called AI, and different enough from what “machine learning” was when the phrase became commonplace that it might actually be confusing to use that term. The multi-layer perceptron is a machine learning system, but attention networks are kind of their own thing even if they originally came out of machine learning research. So the transformer architecture isn’t exactly cut and dry machine learning.

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