The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking about someone’s flight is so useful (can’t tell you how many times my brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup!).
I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.
Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can genuinely see all this being useful for “the rest of us,” to quote Craig. As someone who’s taken a pessimistic view of Apple software innovation the last several years, I’m amazed.
One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.
It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft.
I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't.
Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text.
I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.
That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by marketing.
I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.
Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end?
There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.
The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does it work every time or is there some chance that it horribly misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who trusted it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...
Two features I really want:
“Position the cursor at the beginning of the word ‘usability’”
“Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever”
"Can you meet tonight at 7?" Me "oh yes" Siri "No you can't, your daughter's recital is at 7"
It's these integrations which will make life easier for those who deal with multiple personas all through their day.
But why partner with an outside company ? Even though it's optional on the device etc, people are miffed about the partnership than being excited by all that Apple has to offer.
Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now.
I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about 10 years behind the curve
Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.
No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman), the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.
I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places, restaurants, train stations, people), people that are bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English not being their first language, etc.
I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also send emails? If so then won't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks?
Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually send the emails; maybe Apple is doing the same thing?
- Proofread button in mail.
- ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools in macOS
I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go without it.
I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that Gmail has supported for a decade.
Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI the better.
Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.
If you spend an hour drawing a picture for someone for their birthday and send it to them, a great deal of the value to them is not in the quality of the picture but in the fact that you went to the effort, and that it's something unique only you could produce for them by giving your time. The work is more satisfying to the creator as well - if you've ever used something you built yourself that you're proud of vs. something you bought you must have felt this. The AI image that Tania generated in a few seconds might be fun the first time, but quickly becomes just spam filling most of a page of conversation, adding nothing.
If you make up a bedtime story for your child, starring them, with the things they're interested in, a great deal of the value to them is not in the quality of the story but... same thing as above. I don't think Apple's idea of reading an AI story off your phone instead is going to have the same impact.
In a world where you can have anything the value of everything is nothing.
We've been building this up for some time, this tiny universe is the most common thing for me to respond to "will you tell me a story?" (something that is requested sometimes several times a day) since it is so deeply ingrained in both our heads.
Yesterday, while driving to pick up burritos, I dictated a broad set of detailed points, including the complete introductory sequence to the story to gpt-4o and asked it to tell a new adventure based on all of the context.
It did an amazing job at it. I was able to see my kid's reaction in the reflection of the mirrors and it did not take away from what we already had. It actually gave me some new ideas on where I can take it when I'm doing it myself.
If people lean on gen ai with none of their own personal, creative contributions they're not going to get interesting results.
But I know you can go to the effort to create and create and create and then on top of that layer on gen AI--it can knock it out of the park.
In this way, I see gen AI capabilities as simply another tool that can be used best with practice, like a synthesizer after previously only having a piano or organ.
Context will be more important when the gift itself is easy.
ai spam, especially the custom emoji/stickers will be interesting in terms of whether they will have any reusability or will be littered like single-use plastic.
Same thing for your kid, the kid likes both stories, gives 0 shit that you used GenAI or sat up for 8 hours trying to figure out the rhyme, those things are making YOU feel better not the person receiving it.
I really enjoyed the explanation for how they planned on tackling server-enabled AI tasks while making the best possible effort to keep your requests private. Auditable server software that runs on Apple hardware is probably as good as you can get for tasks like that. Even better would be making it OSS.
There was one demo where you could talk to Siri about your mom and it would understand the context because of stuff that she (your mom) had written in one of her emails to you... that's the kind of stuff that I think we all imagined an AI world would look like. I'm really impressed with the vision they described and I think they honestly jumped to the lead of the pack in an important way that hasn't been well considered up until this point.
It's not just the raw AI capabilities from the models themselves, which I think many of us already get the feeling are going to be commoditized at some point in the future, but rather the hardware and system-wide integrations that make use of those models that matters starting today. Obviously how the experience will be when it's available to the public is a different story, but the vision alone was impressive to me. Basically, Apple again understands the UX.
I wish Apple the best of luck and I'm excited to see how their competitors plan on responding. The announcement today I think was actually subtle compared to what the implications are going to be. It's exciting to think that it may make computing easier for older people.
Remember this ad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw1iwC7Zh24 12 years ago, they promised a bunch of things that I still wouldn't trust Siri to pull off.
I can't but feel all of this super creepy.
Also no competitor is going to be as good at integrating everything, as none of those have as integrated systems.
i might have missed it but there has not been much talk about guardrails or ethical use with their tools, and what they are doing about it in terms of potential abuse.
imo, apple will gain expertise to serve a monster level of scale for more casual users that want to generate creative or funny pictures, emojis, do some text work, and enhance quality of life. I don't think Apple will be at the forefront of new AI technology to integrate those into user facing features, but if they are to catch up, they will have to get into the forefront of the same technologies to support their unique scale.
Was a notable WWDC, was curious to see what they would do with the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, and nothing about the M3 Ultra or M4 Ultra, or the M3/M4 Extreme.
I also predicted that they would use their own M2 Ultras and whatnot to support their own compute capacity in the cloud, and interestingly enough it was mentioned. I wonder if we'll get more details on this front.
I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.
Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong". I don't expect an amazing AI assistant out of them, I expect something that sometimes does what the user meant.
To be fair, this was just the keynote -- details will be revealed in the sessions.
They repeated this so many times they've made it true.
I mean they have great PR, but in terms of privacy, they extract more information from you than google does.
1. On-device AI
2. AI using Apple's servers
3. AI using ChatGPT/OpenAI's services (and others in the future)
Number 1 will pass to number 2 if it thinks it requires the extra processing power, but number 3 will only be invoked with explicit user permission.
[Edit: As pointed out below, other providers will be coming eventually.]
I am worried about the reliability, if you are relying on it giving important information without checking the source (like a flight) than that could lead to some bad situations.
That being said, the polish and actual usefulness of these features is really interesting. It may not have some of the flashiest things being thrown around but the things shown are actually useful things.
Glad that ChatGPT is optional each time Siri thinks it would be useful.
My only big question is, can I disable any online component and what does that mean if something can't be processed locally?
I also have to wonder, given their talk about the servers running the same chips. Is it just that the models can't run locally or is it possibly context related? I am not seeing anything if it is entire features or just some requests.
I wonder if that implies that over time different hardware will run different levels of requests locally vs the cloud.
Notice what's missing? A photorealistic style.
It seems like a good move on their part. I'm not that wild about the cartoon-ification of everything with more memes and more emojis, but at least it's obviously made-up; this is oriented toward "fun" stuff. A lot of kids will like it. Adults, too.
There's still going to be controversy because people will still generate things in really poor taste, but it lowers the stakes.
I think it shows the context for the information it presents. Like the messages, events and other stuff. So you can quickly check if the answer is correct. So it's more about semantic search, but with a more flexible text describing the result.
I bet that’s going to be the case. I think they added the servers as a stop-gap out of necessity, but what they see as the ideal situation is the time when they can turn those off because all devices they sell have been able to run everything locally for X amount of time.
I am worried at the infinite ability of teenagers to hack around the guardrails and generate some probably not safe for school images for the next 2 years while apple figures out how to get them under control.
This can be never. LLMs fail fast as you move away from high resourced languages.
They said the models can scale to "private cloud compute" based on Apple Silicon which will be ensured by your device to run "publicly verifiable software" in order to guarantee no misuse of your data.
I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source? That'd be positively surprising. Curious to see how this evolves.
Anyway, overall looks really really cool. If it works as marketed, then it will be an easy "shut up and take my money". Siri seems to finally be becoming what it was meant to be (I wonder if they're piggy-backing on top of the Shortcuts Actions catalogue to have a wide array of possible actions right away), and the image and emoji generation features that integrate with Apple Photos and other parts of the system look _really_ cool.
It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15 Pro.
The way it works is that when the on-device model decides "this could better be answered by chatgpt" then it will ask you if it should use that. They described it in a way which seems to indicate that it will be pluggable for other models too over time. Notably, ChatGPT 4o will be available for free without creating an OpenAI account.
Being best in class for on-device AI is a huge market opportunity. Trying to do it all would be dumb like launching Safari without a google search homepage partnership.
Apple can focus on what they are good at which is on device stuff and blending AI into their whole UX across the platform, without compromising privacy. And then taking advantage of a market leader for anything requiring large external server farms and data being sent across the wire for internet access, like AI search queries.
If the system doesn't say "I'm gonna phone a friend to get an answer for this", it's going to stay either 100% local or at worst 100% within Apple Intelligence, which is audited to be completely private.
So if you're asking for a recipe for banana bread, going to ChatGPT is fine. Sending more personal information might not be.
More specifically "is openai seeing my personal data or questions?" A: "No, unless you say it's okay to talk to OpenAI everything happens either on your iPhone or in Private Compute"
They said the models can scale to "private cloud compute" based on Apple Silicon which will be ensured by your device to run "publicly verifiable software" in order to guarantee no misuse of your data.
I wonder if their server-side code will be open-source? That'd be positively surprising. Curious to see how this evolves.
Anyway, overall looks really really cool. If it works as marketed, then it will be an easy "shut up and take my money". Siri seems to finally be becoming what it was meant to be (I wonder if they're piggy-backing on top of the Shortcuts Actions catalogue to have a wide array of possible actions right away), and the image and emoji generation features that integrate with Apple Photos and other parts of the system look _really_ cool.
It seems like it will require M1+ on Macs/iPads, or an iPhone 15 Pro.
No, but they said it'll be available for audit by independent experts.
They specifically stated it required iPhone 15 Pro or higher and anything with a m1 or higher.
iphone 15 Pro 8 GB RAM (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15_pro-12557.php)
iphone 15 6 GB Ram (https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15-12559.php)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17
Per the comparison table on that page, the "Neural Engine" has double the performance in the A17 compared to the A16, which could be the critical differentiator.
And my concern isn’t from a privacy perspective, just a “I want less things cluttering my screen” perspective.
So far though it looks like it’s decent at being opt-in in nature. So that’s all good.
Siri can now be that assistant, that summarises or does things, that would instead make you go through various screens or apps. Feels like it rescues clutter, not increases it to me imo
And good news! You can clear your homescreen too fully from all icons now =)
It seems like this is what Rabbit's LAM was supposed to be. It is interesting to see it work, and I wonder how it will work in practice. I'm not sold on using voice for interacting with things still.
Image Generation is gross, I really didn't want this. I am not excited to start seeing how many horrible AI images I'm going to get sent.
I like Semantic Search in my photos.
This does seem like the typical Apple polish.I think this might be the first main stream application of Gen AI that I can see catching on.
This does look like a real-world implementation of the concept promoted by Rabbit. Apple already had the App Intents API mechanism in place to give them the hooks into the apps. They have also publish articles about their Ferret UI LLM that can look at an app's UI and figure out how to interact with it, if there are no available intents. This is pretty exciting.
At https://openadapt.ai we rely on users to demonstrate tasks, then have the model analyze these demonstrations in order to automate them. The goal is similar to Rabbit's "teach mode", except it's desktop only and open source.
1. Yes, App Intents feel like the best version of a LAM we'll ever get. With each developer motivated to log their own actions for Siri to hook into, it seems like a solid experience.
2. Image Gen - yeah, they're pretty nasty, BUT their focus on a "emoji generator" is great. Whatever model they made is surprisingly good at that. It's really niche but really fun. The lifelessness of the generations doesn't matter so much here.
3. Polish - there's so much polish, I'm amazed. Across the board, they've given the "Intelligence" features a unique and impressive look.
Apple may have actually nailed this one.
Edit: except for image generation. That one sucks
Say more? it's just the media thing about intellectual property rights?
Followed by maybe search engines once it gets to a certain level of quality (which we seem to be a bit far from).
Then either desktop or home(alexa).
I'll be curious to see if Apple gets caught with some surprise or scandal from unexpected behavior in their generative models. I expect that the rollout will be smoother than Bing or Google's first attempts, but I don't think even Apple will prove capable of identifying and mitigating all possible edge cases.
I noticed during the livestream that the re-write feature generated some pretty bad text, with all the hallmarks of gen AI content. That's not a good sign for this feature, especially considering they thought it was good enough to include in the presentation.
This is the curse of small-language models. They are better suited for constrained output like categorization. Using them for email generation takes... well, that takes courage.
Thankfully, there is an option to use GPT-4o for many of the text generation tasks.
The output is almost worse, dripping in a passive aggressive tone.
But a lot of the other features actually seem useful without feeling shoehorned in. At least so far.
I am hoping that I can turn off the ability to use a server while keeping local processing, but curious what that would actually look like. Would it just say "sorry can't do that" or something? Is it that there is too much context and it can't happen locally or entire features that only work in the cloud?
Edit:
OK how they handle the ChatGPT integration I am happy with. Asks me each time if I want to do it.
However... using recipe generation as an example... is a choice.
I don't even look at this stuff any more and see the upside to any of it. AI went from, "This is kinda cool and quaint." to "You NEED this in every single aspect of your life, whether you want it or not." AI has become so pervasive and intrusive, I stopped seeing the benefits of any of this.
All of these "make your life easier" features really show that no tech is making our lives simpler. Task creation is maybe easier but task completion doesn't seem to be in the cards. "Hey siri, summarize my daughters play and let me know when it is and how to get there" shows there's something fundamentally missing in the way we're living.
- So far, the quality has been very hit or miss, versus places where I intentionally invoke generative AI.
- I'm not ready to relinquish my critical thinking to AI, both from a general perspective, and also because it's developed by big companies who may have different values and interests than me.
- It feels like they're trying to get me to "just take a taste", like a bunch of pushers.
- I just want more/better of the right type of features, not a bunch of inscrutable magic.
It's not unlike the first spreadsheets. Sure, they will some day benefit the entire finance department, but at the beginning only people who loved technology for the sake of technology learned enough about them to make them useful in daily life.
Apple has always been great at broadening the audience of who could use personal computing. We will see if it works with AI.
I think it remains to be seen how broadly useful the current gen of AI tech can be, and who it can be useful for. We are in early days, and what emerges in 5-10 years as the answer is obvious to almost no one right now.
This barely scratches the surface on how much AI integration there's going to be in the typical life of someone in the 2030s.
After a random update my bank's app has received AI assistant out of blue to supposedly help their clients.
At first I was interested how these algorithms could enhance apps and services but now, this does indeed feels like shoving AI everywhere it's possible even if it doesn't makes any sense; as if companies are trying to shake a rattle over your baby's cradle to entertain it.
Aside above, I was hoping that after this WWDC Siri would get more languages so I could finally give it instructions in my native language and make it actually more useful. But instead there are generated emoticons coming (I wonder if people even remember that word). I guess chasing the hottest trends seems more important for Apple.
I'll go back to a dumbphone before I feed the AI
My e-mail, my documents, my photos, my browsing, my movement. The first step for me was setting up Syncthing and it was much smoother than I initially thought. Many steps to go.
I can’t help but think it’ll get worse with AI
Mostly I see no point in things like email self hosting if half my contacts are on Gmail and the other half on Microsoft.
My suggestion (as someone that tried to escape for some time) is to build a private system for yourself (using private OS and networks) and use a common system to interface with everyone else.
> ChatGPT will come to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, powered by GPT-4o.
What's a promise from Sam Altman worth, again?
Their brand is equally about creativity as it is about privacy. They wouldn't chop off one arm to keep the other, but that's what you're suggesting they should have done.
And yes, I know generative AI could be seen specifically as anti-creativity, but I personally don't think it is. It can help one be creative.
In 2024 they don't have to wiretap anything. It's all being sent directly to the cloud. Their job has been done for them.
However, to me, the off-device bit they showed today (user consent on every request) represents a strategic hedge as a $3T company.
They are likely buying time and trying to prevent people from switching to other ecosystems while their teams catch up with the tech and find a way to do this all in the “Apple Way”.
That does not necessarily mean better, just different. I reserve judgment until I see how it shakes out.
but if I don't like this feature, and can't turn it off, I guess it's sadly back to Linux on my personal laptops.
If you don't specifically activate it, it won't do shit.
Of course we've only seen examples from an overly produced hype/propaganda video, but it looks to me of yet another example of Apple taking products and making them usable to the masses
Who cares how your flight information shows up at the right time in the right place? the only thing that should matter is that it does.
Private Cloud - Isn't this what Amazon did with their tablet - Fire? What is the difference with Apple Private Cloud?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
> Sherlocked as a term
> The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or obviates third-party software is so well known that being Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and iOS developer community.[2][3][4]
There's a term for that, it's called being Sherlocked: https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co...
I don't use Grammarly, really, but I think at least that one is more automatic?
Auto transcripts for calls (with permission) is another feature I really liked.
I was a little surprised to see/hear no mention of inaccuracies, but for ChatGPT they did show the "Check for important facts" notice.
- siri text chat now on the lock screen
- incoming a billion developer app functions/APIs
- better notifications
- can make network requests
Why even open any other app?
This was my first thought when I saw Rabbit r1 - will all of us become backend developers just glueing various API between legacy services and LLMs? Today seems like another step in that direction.
When I ask Siri Pro what I'm doing on the weekend, she plans a dinner with a mix of friends and compatible strangers. Any restaurant is fine: the food is going to be personalized anyway.
>> - incoming a billion developer app functions/APIs
So any _real agent_ which has full access to all Apps can still blow Siri out of the water.
Your phone won't do anything else. For 99% of people, they pick up their phone, AI will just decide what they want to see. And most will accept it.
Someday everyone in the room will all pick up their phones when they all ring at once. It will be some emotional trigger like a live feed from a school shooting. Everyone in the room will start screaming at the totally different experiences they're being presented. Evil liberals, clueless law enforcement, product placement being shown over the shooter's gun. You'll sit horrified because you returned to a dumbphone to escape.
That will be the reality if this AI assistant stuff isn't checked hard now. AI is getting better at addiction an order of magnitude faster than it's getting better at actual tasks.
(Sharing because I had trouble finding it).
I'm curious to try some of the Siri integrations - though I hope Siri retains a 'dumb mode' for simple tasks.
But I think Apple is going to limit iPhones from doing something like that to boost sales of the 15 Pro and the future gens.
Better yet, no more dealing with overpriced subscriptions or programs that do not respect user privacy.
Kudos to the Apple software team making useful stuff powered by machine learning and AI!
By the end of the year maybe 1% of the content you interact with will be human made.
Even now in HN maybe 20-30% of the comments are generated by various transformers, but it seems every input box on every OS now has a context aware 'generate' button, so I suspect it will be way more in few months.
The Eternal September is coming. (and by ironic coincidence it might actually be in September haha)
I don't want generative AI in my phone. I want someone, or something to book a meeting with my family doctor, the head of my son's future primary school, etc. I don't need AI to do that. I need the other industries (medical/government/education) to wake up and let us automate them.
Do you know that my family doctor ONLY take calls? Like in the 1970s I guess? Do you know it takes hours to reach a government office, and they work maybe 6 hours a day? The whole world is f**ing sleeping, IT people, hey guys, slow down on killing yourselves.
AI is supposed to get rid of the chores, now it leaves us with the chores and take the creative part away. I don't need such AI.
Basically all your information is sucked into a semantic system, and your apps are accessible to a LLM. All with closed models and trusted auditors.
Also funny how they pretend it's a great breakthrough when Siri was stupid-Siri for so many years and only now is lately coming to the AI party.
I really hope those gen-images won't be used to ridicule and bully other people. I think it's kind of daring to use images of known people without their consent, relying on the idea that you know them.
And it's dawning on me that we are already neck-deep in AI. It's flowing through every app and private information. They obliterate any privacy in this system, for the model.
Apple could use it to sell more devices - every new generation can have more RAM = more privacy. People will have real reason to buy a new phone more often.
Technically, the sentence could be read that experts inspect the code, and the client uses TLS and CA's to ensure it's only talking to those Apple servers. But that's pretty much the status quo and uninteresting.
It sounds like they're trying to say that somehow iPhone ensures that it's only talking to a server that's running audited code? That would be absolutely incredible (for more things than just running LLMs), but I can't really imagine how it would be implemented.
Combining the existing aspects of Siri with an LLM will, I expect, make it the best voice assistant available.
Hey siri play classical work X a randomly selected version starts playing
Hey siri play a different version same version keeps playing
Hey siri play song X some random song that might have one similar keyword in the lyrics starts playing
No play song X I don’t understand
Hey siri play the rangers game do you mean hockey or baseball?
Only one is playing today and I’ve favorited the baseball team and you always ask me this and I always answer baseball I can’t play that audio anyway
>car crashes off of bridge
(All sequences shortened by ~5 fewer tries at different wordings to get Siri to do what I want)
Other than that, using an LLM to handle cross-app functionality is music to my ears. That said, it's similar to what was originally promised with Siri etc. initially. I do believe this technology can do it good enough to be actually useful though.
(TSMC for hardware, but it seems very un-Apple to be so dependent upon someone else for software capabilities like OpenAI)
I think this further confirms that they think these AI services are a commodity that they don't feel a need to compete with for the time being.
For example:
Imagine a simple Amazon price tracker I have in my menu bar. I pick 5 products that I want to have their price tracked. I want that info to be exposed to Siri too. And then I can simply ask Siri a tricky question: "Hey Siri, check Amazon tracker app, and tell me if it's a good moment to buy that coffee machine." I'd even expect Siri to get me that data from my app and be able to send it over my email. It doesn't sound like rocket science.
In the end of the day, the average user doesn't like writing with a chatbot. The average user doesn't really like reading (as it could be overwhelming). But the average user could potentially like an assistant that offloads some basic tasks that are not mission critical.
By mission critical I mean asking the next best AI assistant to buy you a plane ticket.
Local LLMs + Apple Private Cloud LLMs + OpenAI LLMs. It’s like they can’t decide on one solution. Feels very not Apple.
The OpenAI integration also seems setup to data mine ChatGPT. They will have data that says Customer X requested question Q and got answer A from Siri, which he didn't like and went to ChatGPT instead, and got answer B, which he liked. Ok, there's a training set.
I'm always wrong in prediction and will be wrong here but I'd expect openAI is a bad spot long term, doesn't look like they have a product strong enough to withstand the platform builders really going in AI. Once Siri works well, you will never open ChatGPT again.
You can clearly see only people objecting to this new technological integration are the people who don't have a use case for it yet. I am a college student and I can immediately see how me and my friends will be using these features. All of us have ChatGPT installed and subscribed already. We need to write professionally to our professors in e-mail. A big task is to locate a document sent over various communication channels.
Now is the time you'll see people speaking to their devices on street. As an early adopter using the dumb Siri and ChatGPT voice chat far more than average person, it has always been weird to speak to your phone in public. Surely the normalization will follow the general availability soon after.
Who will trust in anything coming from anyone through electonic channels? Not me. Sooner start to talk to a teddy bear or a yellow rubber duck.
This is a bad and dangerous tendency that corporate biggheads piss up with glares and fanfares so the crowd get willing to drink with amaze.
The whole text is full of corporate bullsh*t, hollow and cloudy stock phrases from a thick pipe - instead of facts or data - a generative cloud computing server room could pour at us without a shread of thoughts.
If we assume AI will get even 3-4x better, at a certain point, I can't help but think this is the future of computing.
Most users on mobile won't even need to open other apps.
We really are headed for agents doing mostly everything for us.
Of course LLMs will quickly show their bounds, like they can’t reason, etc - but for the everyday commands people might ask their phones this probably won’t matter much. The next generation will have a very different stance towards tech than we do.
That seems like an effective guardrail if you don't want people trying to pass off AI generated images as real.
The problem is, regardless how hard they try, I just don't believe their statements on their private AI cloud. Primarily because it's not under their control. If governments or courts want that data they are a stroke of the pen away from getting it. Apple just can't change that - which is why it is surprising for me to see them give up on local device computing.
However, The GPT integration feels forced and even dare I say unnecessary. My guess is that they really are interested in the 4o voice model, and they're expecting openAI to remain the front runner in the ai race.
I wonder how they will extend this to business processes that are not in their training set. At https://openadapt.ai we rely on users to demonstrate tasks, then have the model analyze these demonostrations in order to automate them.
I assume it will come to all the iPhone 16’s this fall? Or is Apple Intelligence a Pro Feature?
Either way, my first reaction is that this is going to sell a lot of iPhones.
I’d love to have an app I write be able to subscribe to this stream.
It feels like a sort of perfect moat for Apple - they could say no on privacy concerns, and lock out an entire class of agent type app competitors at the same time. Well, here’s hoping I can get access to the “YouSDK” :)
If I have some "AI" workflow on my MacBook Pro and then it's broken on my iPhone, I would most likely to entirely stop using it, as it's unexpected (I cannot trust it) or in Apple words... lack continuity...
Looking forward to my house gaining a few IQ points.
I don’t see anything that mentions HomePod specifically but hopefully the updates will come.
Microsoft are so boned. They don't even have a mobile proposition.
Can someone explain what Apple has avoided that were such a problem with Recall ?
The good news is that consumers can buy into Apple’s or Google’s AI solutions, and the relatively few of us who want to build our own experience can do so.
1. What is under the “Apple Intelligence” umbrella and what isn’t? There were a lot of AI features shown before that branding was brought up, I think. 2. The only supported iPhone is the iPhone 15 Pro? But any M1 iPad? Does this mean “Apple Intelligence” or all AI features announced? For instance… 3. For instance, is private cloud compute only available on iPhone 15 Pro?
There's a danger that before long, the stuff Apple will take ages to implement into their devices will seem dated compared to the state of the art less encumbered players will be rolling out.
I felt that a few times watching them demo image generation and contextual conversations.
Everyone now will appear to be of a certain intelligence with proscribed viewpoints, this is going to make face to face interviews interesting, me, I think I'll carry on with my imperfections and flawed opinions, being human may become a trend again.
Little annoyances like this being fixed would be great. “Open the address on this page in google maps” better work :)
Presumably this hallucinates as much as any other AI (if it didn't, they'd have mentioned that).
So how can you delegate tasks to something that might just invent stuff, e.g. you ask it to summarize an email and it tells you stuff that's not in the original email?
If not, and if you don’t want practically every typed word to end up on someone else’s computer (as cloud is just that), you’ll have to drop ios.
As for me that leaves me with a choice between dumbphone or grapheneOS. I’m just thrilled with these choices. :/
I think people have been fooled by marketing for this one and the new Co-Pilot PCs into thinking that most of the AI really is running on-device. The models that run fast locally are still fairly limited compared to what runs in the cloud.
Lobbying for the name to shorten to "chatty-g"
appropriating all of this information through legally dubious means and then attempting to replace the communication channels that produced it in the first place is hubris.
Google didn't have the brass balls to call it "Alphabet Intelligence" !!!
Please make it make sense.
All I wish for is user-replaceable battery and a battery lasting for at least 2 full days.
If I can’t opt out from any of this, this is where I stop using an iPhone.
>Can't get many apps these days
>Can't use AI apps at all
>Battery last about 2 hours
>Never used iCloud, barely used iTunes
>Apple announces new "free" Ai Assistant for everyone
well...not everyone
I'm quite creeped out that it uses off-device processing for a personal context, and you can't host your own off-device processing, even if you have top of the line Apple silicon hardware (laptop or desktop) that could step in and do the job. Hopefully they announce it in one of the talks over the next few days.
So only a very small percentage of users will be able to use it.
i understand i'm not going to get the on-device stuff, but something like siri being able to call out to chatGPT should be available on any device, right?
I find most AI products to be counter-intuitive - most of the time Googling something or writing your own document is faster. But the tech overlords of Silicon Valley will continuously force AI down our throats. It's no longer about useful software, we made most of that already, it's about growth at all costs. I'm a developer and day by day I come to despise the software world. Real life is a lot better. Real life engineering and hardware have gotten a lot better over the years. That's the only thing keeping me optimistic about technology these days. Software is what makes me pessimistic.
Figgin’ brilliant.
If so that's somewhat disappointing given how much AI power Apple hardware packs.
> Apple sets a new standard for privacy in AI, with the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon servers
No API keys, no prompt engineering or switching between AI models.
It. just. works.
Just replace Siri with chatgpt and give it actions, that is what everyone wants - why can't we have that?
When they pay us sufficiently
It's great that Apple is capitalizing so well on everyone else's inventions, but couldn't they at least pretend they will give something back to the ecosystem?
I wish someone somewhere creates something like intents for the web browser