They did do the smart thing of not throwing too much capital behind it. Once the hype crumbles, they will be able to do something amazing with this tech. That will be a few years off but probably worth the wait.
Firefox is also marketing how easy it is to disable AI.
Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff
The user does not give two shits if the new laptop "has AI". This is how Apple has been killing it lately, they market the macbooks being powerful, cheap, with long batteries, and a premium feel. Things the user cares about. Most of the stuff marketers are just blanket labeling "AI" will eventually be shuffled to the background and rebranded with a more specific term to highlight the feature being delivered rather than the fact it's AI".
I reckon most humans never learn the valuable lessons of the past.
As you put it - nobody cares about the technology in and of itself. They care about “ok cool what’s in it for me?”. That’s what determines their decision to purchase/use a thing.
Sure, but is this actually happening? Last time I tried, Atlassian's heavily-pushed AI couldn't even turn a Jira ticket number of Confluence into a clickable link. Similarly, Windows has been actively moving away from providing locally-installed applications in the Start menu search towards offering random internet garbage.
I'm all for using a LLM to make something like Siri able to understand both "Siri, turn off the lights" and "Siri, make it dark!" - but that's not what's being pushed onto consumers, because there is no way anyone is going to pay $100/month for any version of that.
Everyone seems well convinced AI can just replace 90% of software out there but I've yet to see any evidence of that. Sure it can stand up a blog, get a simple app together pretty quick but once you get into larger scale software it's not capable of doing it by itself and you still need teams of developers working together.
Apple Intelligence was a rebrand, and Apple has made some unique decisions rolling it out.
For instance, the new chatbot version of Siri's hallucinations were seen as unacceptable, so its release was delayed.
Is a chatbot that provides false information regularly really an advancement?
Apple chose not to do photorealistic generative images, so they can't be used for deepfakes.
Apple chose not to add a feature to write text for you, just one to clean up what you write, because they don't want to help kids in school cheat.
Hell, there are chatbots out there trying to convince kids that suicide is a great idea.
How is prioritizing pushing out slop as quickly as possible with no consideration of the consequences acceptable?
Apple seems to follow the values that Steve laid out. Tim isn’t a visionary but he seems to follow the principles associated with being disciplined with cash quite well. They haven’t done any stupid acquisitions either. Quite the contrast with OAI.