If Apple was a frontier lab, this article would not begin with "This is unethical AI, it deceives people, puts people out of work, and draws 100% of its power from coal and LNG."
It's the same flavor of ethics-washing that we saw with Mac LLM inference. Many people rushed to call Mac inference "efficient" when it put up worse per-watt performance than cheap GPUs. It was a marketing platitude to make people accept subpar performance. Same for calling Siri "ethical AI" too.
Is this some sort of avant-garde sarcasm that is meant to be funny? I'm genuinely asking, I am having trouble modeling a live human being that reads any amount of llm-related news and says this without it being facetious.
It's an observation of how people respond to marketing. Apple objectively dragged their feet on LLM software and hardware research. After 3 (!!!) years we finally have a good LLM Siri, and the first note that this guy makes is "oh it's ethical" to cover for Apple's wasted time.
I find it pretty funny, but the author probably doesn't. Americans ought to know better than to utter "ethical" and "Apple" in the same breath.
Here's a better example. Compare these two marketing tones:
Low confidence: "Our engineers work tirelessly to ensure that frontier research doesn't step on the toes of users. It's a deliberate touch to keep people in the drivers seat, emphasizing the importance of human coexistence with technology. Apple Intelligence can never replace our users or the personal touch they bring, and that's what makes Apple products so special to us all."
David Pogue is right, it’s very impressive. He and basically everyone else make the same comment, and I fully agree: it’s hard to remember to even use it.
I used Siri a ton before, but always for basically the same four commands. Create reminder, call X, send a text to Y, set a timer for Z minutes.
And after years of that, it’s hard to remember to do more. But when I do it can often shock me.
It’s not fast. Which is quite annoying for those quick actions I used to do. But I’m OK with that on my phone. Not happy with it on my watch.
It’s not ChatGPT 5.6. And I’m sure they’ll get it faster over time. But in my mind they finally delivered.
Some of it is. He did the classic “book an entire vacation for me“ except he only asked it to plan.
No one is ever going to just tell a phone to book a vacation for them. It won’t know what you want well enough. Planning is much more reasonable because then you can just adjust whatever you don’t like.
But as a demonstration, it certainly shows how far Siri has come. It probably would’ve just offered to do a web search before.
The things I’ve found it really useful for so far is the “find this piece of information that must exist on my phone somewhere, but I don’t have the slightest clue where“ kind of query.
I like how this is cast as a selling point instead of tacit admission that Apple is not on the frontier.
I don’t see what those two have to do with each other. Could you explain?
If Apple was a frontier lab, this article would not begin with "This is unethical AI, it deceives people, puts people out of work, and draws 100% of its power from coal and LNG."
It's the same flavor of ethics-washing that we saw with Mac LLM inference. Many people rushed to call Mac inference "efficient" when it put up worse per-watt performance than cheap GPUs. It was a marketing platitude to make people accept subpar performance. Same for calling Siri "ethical AI" too.
Is this some sort of avant-garde sarcasm that is meant to be funny? I'm genuinely asking, I am having trouble modeling a live human being that reads any amount of llm-related news and says this without it being facetious.
It's an observation of how people respond to marketing. Apple objectively dragged their feet on LLM software and hardware research. After 3 (!!!) years we finally have a good LLM Siri, and the first note that this guy makes is "oh it's ethical" to cover for Apple's wasted time.
I find it pretty funny, but the author probably doesn't. Americans ought to know better than to utter "ethical" and "Apple" in the same breath.
I think this is good and not just whatever.
But hey perhaps i still don't understand your point properly
Here's a better example. Compare these two marketing tones:
Low confidence: "Our engineers work tirelessly to ensure that frontier research doesn't step on the toes of users. It's a deliberate touch to keep people in the drivers seat, emphasizing the importance of human coexistence with technology. Apple Intelligence can never replace our users or the personal touch they bring, and that's what makes Apple products so special to us all."
High confidence: https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/why-apple-ipad-ad-cont...
I’ve been using it off and on since DB2.
David Pogue is right, it’s very impressive. He and basically everyone else make the same comment, and I fully agree: it’s hard to remember to even use it.
I used Siri a ton before, but always for basically the same four commands. Create reminder, call X, send a text to Y, set a timer for Z minutes.
And after years of that, it’s hard to remember to do more. But when I do it can often shock me.
It’s not fast. Which is quite annoying for those quick actions I used to do. But I’m OK with that on my phone. Not happy with it on my watch.
It’s not ChatGPT 5.6. And I’m sure they’ll get it faster over time. But in my mind they finally delivered.
A lot of that list sounds like the "ai, please press the order me pizza button" meme.
Some of it is. He did the classic “book an entire vacation for me“ except he only asked it to plan.
No one is ever going to just tell a phone to book a vacation for them. It won’t know what you want well enough. Planning is much more reasonable because then you can just adjust whatever you don’t like.
But as a demonstration, it certainly shows how far Siri has come. It probably would’ve just offered to do a web search before.
The things I’ve found it really useful for so far is the “find this piece of information that must exist on my phone somewhere, but I don’t have the slightest clue where“ kind of query.