I do not agree with this take at all. I think Apple is in bad shape with AI, and it’s extremely hard to overcome that with some sort of “new” AI usage. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are getting smarter and smarter AI, it will be easier and easier for them to just copy whatever idea Apple has because of their more advanced AI capabilities.

AI development tends to follow exponential curves. Once you fall behind, you only fall further behind and it becomes harder and harder to catch up. We’ll see if I’m wrong, but I don’t see Apple becoming a major player in the AI game without some sort of significant shake up (government intervention or something like that.)

Please, Apple doesn’t have to be the best at everything, and it’s fine to say they got blindsided. Everyone other than OpenAI / Microsoft was surprised at how good GPT4 is at a lot of tasks.

Apple straight up isn’t a machine leaning company. Let’s not beat around the bush. Sure, they have the neural engine and some acceleration used in iPhones, but every phone on the market ships with that. It’s not some unique innovation like large language models and transformers have been. Siri is a great example here.

Apple is behind because this isn’t something they’ve seen a reason to care about beyond image processing. It’s fine because the sooner they admit that, the sooner they can work on a solution that actually is competitive. Let’s not blindly give Apple a pass in something that Meta and Google are already scrambling for, and OpenAI is actively thrashing everyone in.

apple often gets criticized for how slowly they move, but I think for once most can agree this is a good area to navigate carefully. generative AI was adopted scary fast by everyone else, and it’s leading to a bunch of garbage that’s ruining the internet / access to information more than it’s helping.

Meh… AI was so H1 2023… no one gives a 💩 about it in H2 2023.

Or Apple has been asleep at the wheel and are years behind the competition.

There’s Ajax - large language models for Siri and then more secretly the Generative AI that’s Apple’s unique take on ChatGPT.

What you’ll hear in the news is the less AI language model for Siri where as the Rope-a-dope is the Generative AI.

Then why does siri suck so much

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball did a write up about this the other day. Apple plays the long game every time. They are rarely first to the market with these type of technologies, instead making sure it’s not only going to do precisely what they want it to do, but also that it fits into their ecosystem. They let others spend billions on marketing and rushing products that don’t work well, all the while spending their money on R&D so that when they do introduce their new Siri/GPT assistant, it’s usually far and above what the competition can offer.

This article is weird. Apple is really good at software and sometimes really good at design (sometimes they are so full of themselves that you get a mouse you can’t use while charging) Apple is great at hardware Apple is great at customer experience and product support

They have been great at those things for a long while

Apple has been shit at AI forever. Photos are processed in an unpleasant way and Siri is shit and music recommendation algorithm is not Spotify and anything AI good on apple hardware has been 3rd party or an app or cloud based.

Apple is not an AI company and they will lose their lead for this.

Google isn’t freaking out about the smartphone market, it’s rope-a-doping the competition

Please. Apple was completely taken off guard here. It’s not rope -a-doping anyone. Apple was focused on the vision pro and how to keep people buying its iPhones and bad tv services. Apple was out to lunch. It wants to have a competing product I’m sure, and it will but for those paying attention apple has been losing is shine.

Whenever apple’s version of generative ai gets released make no mistakes it will serve to further lock in its users. It will rename standard concepts and features, tell people that they care about privacy and somehow upsell users on it and I’m sure a dongle will be involved somewhere.

This whole white knight belief throughout the tech world about how Apple is going to swoop in and ‘save’ us with its apple-ness is so tired and frustrating and frankly not true.

While apple uses ai in its products it hasn’t really been selling users on ai. It hasn’t been telling a story. It wouldn’t make sense for apple if it just released some LLM out of the blue. It will remain behind for some generations. It has to get people used to the idea first. It will be a slow roll out, I’m sure.

Wait about 10 years for their first competent assistant. Until then, you’re dating the dumb Siri chick

Siri didn’t understand neither did I

This is just an opinion piece with no fresh information. We’ll see when Apple’s AI efforts do come out.