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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

The second slide on the site is… it’s gotta be a troll from some pissed off designer, right?

Screenshotted in case they change it https://imgur.com/a/n1I3z8g

I don't get it, this looks like what I'd expect it to show me if I asked it to find a certain message. I assume tapping on that message would bring me straight to that point in the conversation.

Using AI to summarize a message by saying what the message says in the same amount of words as the message So helpful!

Is your complaint that the example text message in the image wasn't three paragraphs long? It's just showing search results.

My complaint is this image is supposed to tell the story of how this stuff is useful or new. Finding a message from earlier in the same day and then paraphrasing the message instead of just showing it isn’t useful or new. A simple keyword search uses infinitely fewer GPUs and finds me the info as fast without the risk of hallucinations or datacenter driven environmental collapse.

But for whatever reason - because this stuff is mostly useless, because they’ve all got ai psychosis, or because of general dysfunction in the corporate structure - they can’t come up with a better example.

When there're no real use-cases or solved problems, they have to come up with some fillers, probably Claude suggested this slide.

> But for whatever reason - because this stuff is mostly useless, because they’ve all got ai psychosis, or because of general dysfunction in the corporate structure - they can’t come up with a better example.

More likely, they just wanted an image that shows it can search your text messages for context. Most people still aren't familiar with AI, so having a very simple example image[¹] for people who may not have used an AI search tool before is useful.

[¹] I'm sure you and I can both think of more complex questions to pose to the Skinner box, but we're both familiar with AI and know what to expect.

> Most people still aren't familiar with AI

I don’t think that’s true. Who are these blissfully unaware masses, and how do I join them?

I guess it depends on your definition of “familiar”, but it’s in the news every single day, and you can’t even google something without being slapped in the face with it. I feel like the only people left unfamiliar are people who have no access to the internet - and by definition they aren’t buying iPhones

I believe that is showing the results of a search, as in something like "What Plant was Aga telling me about the other day?". The website doesn't make that clear but they asked questions like that in the keynote (not that specific one).

Lol. That makes it almost make sense. It’s still showing me a summary of a text that uses exactly the same amount of space to convey exactly the same amount of information. Like, that’s just search - i’ve been able to get this info by typing “plant” into the search bar since they added spotlight in iPhoneOS 3.0 back in 2009

It’s also a text from 9:14am the same day.

If this is the second slide in your marketing slideshow, you clearly have nothing better to show.

The reason it's showing you what's in the text is to show you a search result. The text is essentially the proof. When the user asks what plant she was telling you about, they don't have the text in front of them. It could be 200 texts back.

> It could be 200 texts back.

Ok? But if I search for something just show me the thing I searched for (the proof). There is literally no need to repeat it in a slightly different tense. Who is that helping?

If I asked you over voice what Mike said he wanted for his birthday, it's usually less confusing if you just answer the question ("he wants snow boots") rather than started reading out words from another person ("I love it here at the snow, ...")

If that’s the story you’re trying to tell, where is the query in the image? The image alone doesn’t tell that story.

But also:

a) do you trust the llm to get it right 100% of the time? Because i’m gonna always read the original message to make sure.

And b) just excerpt the message “mike says i love it here at the snow … but i need snowboots” if you’re so desperate to shoehorn LLMs into everything, that’s just as easy a task for them as summarizing is.

The query isn't in these screenshots you're seeing online because it was in the video. This particular one I think was missing the query but the others like it had a presenter talking through what they were doing. Complaining about an image pulled off the internet out of context… Come on.

It’s not “pulled off the internet with no context”. It’s the second slide in their marketing presentation about what’s new in siri. The context they chose for it is all around it.

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