Apple Executives Defend AI Strategy 28
Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to."
The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.
The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.
Do not be a follower (Score:1)
Apple should instead be a trendsetter and call out AI for what it is: a fad that will pass. Jobs would have done that (especially after seeing it's horrid mistakes) and he would have told any investors who don't like it to piss off. Cook lacks balls.
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Indeed. At least Apple sees the sheer lack of competence in LLMs and refuses to ship a fundamentally defective product. They should probably be more open about the reasons, but there are many mindless AI fanbois around and they would create a backlash. If you tell people the mesiahs is not actually the messihas (even with solid proof), they get angry (not at themselves as they should, but at you) and start to throw rocks.
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He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
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AI will not just pass. Even if there is absolutely zero development in the AI research, there will still be tons of work to be done in the AI apps that just sort images or sounds to different boxes. E.g. count birds based on sounds, teach students to play piano correctly, sort cucumbers or legos to correct boxes, that kind of work.
It is also extremely likely that we will soon have an AI that will develop drugs. There should be no reason why such an AI could not be made, because AlphaFold3 does almost everyt
Re: Do not be a follower (Score:2)
That is all fine. Why does it have to happen on an expensive Apple device?
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Because if you don't at least attempt to maintain feature parity with your competitors you tend to lose sales?
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The AI to develop drugs is a fantasy, because the data is too corrupt. There already exist AIs that aid in suggesting possibilities, and they will improve, but one that would do the development cycle would require cleaner data (or better robots).
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Not only that, the existing data is mostly useless for that task anyways, even if it were 100% correct. What LLMs can do, to a limited degree, is offer somewhat better search capabilities through mountains of data. That has nothing to do with "developing" anything though.
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LLMs are not equivalent to AIs, they are a subset. Don't take LLMs as a complete model of the capabilities of AIs.
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The current hype is LLMs. The discussion is about LLMs. Are you contrarian just to be an ass?
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The post at the top of the thread was about "AI". The following posts were about AI. Don't be blinded by the current hype into thinking that;s the whole picture. Just because other developments get less press doesn't mean they aren't happening and aren't important. In the field of biochem, most AI is *related* to LLMs, but is significantly different.
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I really do not know what you want here, but it is a failure. I have studied AI 35 years ago and occasionally ever since. I know AI is more than LLMs, but that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
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No. LLMs will only be viable as specialist models and these will be very expensive to train and to run. Things like "bird counting" are completely out of reach. In case you have not noticed, LLMs burn mountains of money at the moment and no profits in sight. The efforts to create a viable market have failed and continues to fail.
Does anyone care? (Score:2, Insightful)
The most angry reaction I've heard, though I'm only privy to anecdotes rather than significant amounts of buying information, is from people who were pissed that Apple went
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It isn't covered by the mass media because it's not yet a big enough story, but there are grumblings in the dev community that using the various LLMs to assist in coding using Swift is orders of magnitude less effective than other languages/platforms. As a relatively new language with fewer compilation and application targets, there just isn't the sheer volume of code out there compared to, say, C++ or PHP. Additionally, Swift has gone through several terminology and technique redesigns, rendering chunks of
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Yes. I went to check out buying an Apple recently, after an appointment with my ophthalmologist. I wanted a computer that would run reasonably with voice control, as the ads suggested was possible. I decided not to, or at least to wait another year.
Now I have no idea how many people are affected this way, but that is a sign that the deficiencies have caused at least *some* damage to Apple.
Re: Does anyone care? (Score:2)
It's anybody's guess if "AI" is really truly going to work
If they every sell verifiable privacy, they could have a new market to themselves
QC (Score:4, Insightful)
A company finds that the product they are developing does not meet their quality requirements and does not launch it. I don't see why an apology is necessary. Nobody is paying for Siri AI stuff.
What they should be apologizing for, and fixing, is why Siri doesn't work as well as it did two iOS revisions ago. I mainly use it to control music playback while driving, and it has problems finding podcasts, bands, albums, songs - just about everything. It all worked perfectly a year ago.
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"A company finds that the product they are developing does not meet their quality requirements and does not launch it."
The problem is they did launch a half-assed implementation of AI. They did not give you a choice as to whether to install it, and then it started turning itself on even if you had already turned it off.
I was so disgusted I reverted to the previous OS version.
Since Augmented Idiocy, er, Apple Intelligence was clearly a beta (at best) it should have been released as an optional download with
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On my I-phone I'm at least two OS revisions behind due to that exact concern. The older shit works for me so for the moment I'm not upgrading.
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Apple is not in the habit of announcing things they don't ship, that's what's up. Some of what they announced at last year's WWDC they haven't delivered. I realize that's not even a problem for most companies but Apple has a good track record by keeping things secret until they can sell it.
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That just means that Apple had a realistic look at LLMs now and found them to be massively worse than they expected.
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A company finds that the product they are developing does not meet their quality requirements and does not launch it. I don't see why an apology is necessary.
Indeed. But the AI fanatics expect an apology for their deranged "world model" to be questioned and even invalidated. Like any group of delusionals, really.
It's not just Siri AI. (Score:2)
There are tons of other issues (bugs) that Apple still hasn't fixed. I am tired of companies not fixing their damn old bugs. I care not about new features.
Siri has never worked as well... (Score:2)
... as the competition as far as speech recognition and integration goes. Alexa and the android recogniser (can't remember the name) walked all over it for years and it looks like nothing has changed.
Quality in an LLM? (Score:1)
Yes, that would be a major showstopper or at least source for massive delays. Looks that Apple is not in the "lets make tons of money and screw everybody" camp here.