Apple Boosts Spending To Develop Conversational AI (theinformation.com) 17
Apple has been expanding its computing budget for building artificial intelligence to millions of dollars a day. The Information: One of its goals is to develop features such as one that allows iPhone customers to use simple voice commands to automate tasks involving multiple steps, according to people familiar with the effort. The technology, for instance, could allow someone to tell the Siri voice assistant on their phone to create a GIF using the last five photos they've taken and text it to a friend. Today, an iPhone user has to manually program the individual actions.
The moves come four years after Apple's head of AI, John Giannandrea, authorized the formation of a team to develop conversational AI, known as large-language models, before the technology became a focus of the software industry, according to people with knowledge of the team. That move now seems prescient following the launch last fall of ChatGPT, a chatbot that catalyzed a boom in language models.
Although Giannandrea has repeatedly expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language models, the fact that Apple wasn't completely unprepared for the language model boom could be considered an accomplishment -- and is the result of changes he made to the company's software research culture, several colleagues said.
The moves come four years after Apple's head of AI, John Giannandrea, authorized the formation of a team to develop conversational AI, known as large-language models, before the technology became a focus of the software industry, according to people with knowledge of the team. That move now seems prescient following the launch last fall of ChatGPT, a chatbot that catalyzed a boom in language models.
Although Giannandrea has repeatedly expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language models, the fact that Apple wasn't completely unprepared for the language model boom could be considered an accomplishment -- and is the result of changes he made to the company's software research culture, several colleagues said.
Apple busy copying everyone else - again (Score:1)
but late to the market - so spending millions to catch up
thats more the title
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If a large language model ai can be put on a mobile device without having to connect to an external server for processing, you could have privacy. If you come to rely on an LLM hosted on the Internet, it would create privacy concerns. It is likely that LLM's will become smart personal assistants that you can delegate tasks to or collaborate with. If they become in as widespread in use as I expect, privacy will become very important.
If I'm having a conversation with my phone... (Score:2)
...it's because there's another human on the other end of the line.
The only voice assistant that has proven to be slightly useful in my household are the Amazon Alexa devices, and not because we're having conversations with them or asking them questions when it's just easier to open a smartphone browser and search Google the old school way. No, what they're useful for is turning the smart lighting on and off and as glorified kitchen timers/alarm clocks. That's it.
I don't bother with the voice assistant on
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Just what we need (Score:3)
An AI assistant to make it easier to make useless, annoying crap
They need to rename Siri if they get it working. (Score:4, Insightful)
Siri's been so shit for so long at doing literally ANYTHING correctly that nobody's going to trust that name if they ever get it to the point of actually being useful. I can't so much as get the silly thing to give me the temperature outside without having to repeat myself so many times I just get frustrated and look it up manually. It is, however, excellent at interrupting normal conversations if you're dumb enough to leave it listening. Any set of syllables that vaguely sounds like Siri and it's popping up and asking what it can help with or saying, "I can't find that right now." Which is pretty much all it says even when you do address it.
For all that money, you'd think it could do better. I don't expect it to get better very quickly at this point, either.
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For all that money, you'd think it could do better. I don't expect it to get better very quickly at this point, either.
I suspect a lot of that is Apple's privacy policy getting in the way of having enough data to properly analyze patterns in the failed queries, but I could be wrong.
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For all that money, you'd think it could do better. I don't expect it to get better very quickly at this point, either.
I suspect a lot of that is Apple's privacy policy getting in the way of having enough data to properly analyze patterns in the failed queries, but I could be wrong.
I actually read that exact thing stated recently by a Siri team head as a big reason for Siri's apparent lack of "context following", along with the horribly-non-extensible original engine design (apparently it is absolute Hell, often requiring a days-long(!) complete recompile, to add so much as a new phrase, let alone new generalized Rules); but can't remember where I saw it.
Auditory basic (Score:3)
Oops (Score:3)
Didn't see that coming! Now they're trying to compensate by pouring money on the problem.
Flow of "AI" jobs (Score:2)
Literally *everybody* is jumping onto the AI bandwagon. It's like the 1990s all over again. Back then, if you knew the word "Javascript" you could get hired at a dot-com startup. Now, it's "AI." People are flocking to AI jobs, leaving behind those who do "regular" software development. But the need for "regular" developers isn't going to disappear "because AI." This leads me to think there will be a sustained need for software developers for several years, and then a huge crash at the end when the bubble bu
Re: Flow of "AI" jobs (Score:2)
In 1995 nobody used JavaScript. It did not became popular until later in early 2000s. A lot of the code iirc was Perl or bash scripts.
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JavaScript was released in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] In the late 90's, JavaScript was indeed a buzzword in the late 90's. Google, founded in 1996, used it from the beginning. Sure, nobody did it well back then, but everybody was talking about it, and put it on their resume. Just like today, when very few actually know about AI, but everybody who has clicked a link leading to ChatGPT puts AI on their resume.
Stock going down? Mention AI... (Score:2)
These are moves of desperation for an aging company in a dying business.
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These are moves of desperation for an aging company in a dying business.
Apple is Mature; but certainly not Geriatric.
And if you think "Consumer Embedded Tech" is "a dying business", then you are even more stupid than everybody says!