Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

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> If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do you need from AI that Apple's new offering won't provide?

I've been using Kagi Assistant for my AI needs, and have to say, Siri will probably replace it in the fall. The question will be, will I still want to keep Kagi for search, or will this new Siri get me where I need to be on all fronts? I need to start paying more attention to how often I actually use the search results vs just the AI summary.

There are things I didn't see Apple show and I wonder how Siri will handle it. One example would be basic coding. They mentioned LLMs in Xcode and Siri with the Shortcuts app and Safari Extensions, but I just had Kagi write up a webpage as a means to display a bunch of data it gave me. Gemini could also do this, so maybe it's not a problem for Siri, but it remains to be seen. There is also a question of what the experience will be like. ChatGPT, for example, handles writing up this code is a much nicer way than Kagi Assistant. Kagi feels more like the results I would have had from ChatGPT a couple years ago where it just dumps out the code in a block and any change is an entirely new code dump, meanwhile ChatGPT goes into a coding interface with a live editor. Going to Xcode feels like overkill, Siri will probably be not enough... so that's a gap in the market Apple may not serve. I assume there will be several things like this. The prosumer level of AI usage, if you will.

Very very few consumers will be looking to use an AI to write code for them.

They will, but they won’t realize it’s writing code. It will look like Claude Cowork, which writes code for itself under the hood but is results-oriented for the user.

Co-work is damn near magic. I've been working on a mapping project the past few days, am probably a couple hundred prompts deep in to it (I'm doing some very weird stuff with the data to produce a hybrid map). The processing pipeline is something like 12k lines of python and counting.

those few are the ones shelling out ridiculous money. mom&pop ChatGPT users aren’t their key demographic/users, it is Uber’s with $1.5k/SWE/month budgets

I don’t think what I did would be too uncommon. I asked the LLM to design an exercise program and went back and forth with it a bit. Everything was kind of scattered in the chat and hard to read/find. I asked for a web page to consolidate everything so I could just check it each day and see what to use. It made a single file I can just double-click and open in the browser. It’s infinitely better than what the chat itself would have provided, and much better than telling it to give me a bunch of markdown tables.

I could see the same thing being useful for the ultimate output of a lot of chats. For example, they showed Siri comparing specs for few different products. I used an LLM to do this once as well, but it was comparing 12 things with about 50 attributes. The table was fine, but what was better was asking for a webpage that let me click on the attribute rows I cared about so it could total up each column, which allowed me to easily rank them and better make a decision.

Once it can make html files, it’s a small step to have Siri throw it into iCloud, and make it web accessible. This would be more of a feature than something it would just do, but I could see this being used in the same way Google talked about making dynamic widgets to help explain concepts within Google Search. That’s dynamic coding with an LLM as well, even if people don’t know it. Apple wouldn’t even need to show the code, they could just save it directly to a file and open Safari. That’s essentially what their extension builder will do… write some JavaScript and load it into Safari.

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