[HN Gopher] Apple's new Transformer-powered predictive text model
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Apple's new Transformer-powered predictive text model
        
       Author : nojito
       Score  : 458 points
       Date   : 2023-09-17 03:00 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jackcook.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jackcook.com)
        
       | jackcook wrote:
       | Wow, it was quite the surprise to wake up to seeing this post
       | near the top of HN! I wrote the post, happy to answer questions
       | if anyone is wondering about any details.
        
         | dkga wrote:
         | Well, that was pretty cool. Plus, I got to know about the way
         | processes communicate via xpc and that opened a whole new
         | rabbit whole!
        
       | callalex wrote:
       | I was surprised to see the direct references to GPT2 by name.
        
         | ShamelessC wrote:
         | It's not an official Apple piece or anything.
        
           | Angostura wrote:
           | I think they mean surprising to see gpt directly referenced
           | in file names.
        
             | furyofantares wrote:
             | I don't see that anywhere.
        
               | rrsp wrote:
               | 'Most of the layers within each decoder block have names
               | like gpt2_transformer_layer_3d'
        
       | ilaksh wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | TheRoque wrote:
         | I know it's infuriating but that's how marketing works, and
         | since they are a successful company, idk why they would stop
         | using it. Just like some people say "RTX" instead of RayTracing
         | now, it's quite a success for the company if it managed to
         | replace a technical term in the mind of most consumers
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | I don't blame the marketing people, I blame Apple fans for
           | adopting the marketing terms as if they were real technical
           | terms. It's ridiculous.
        
             | JimDabell wrote:
             | "Transformer" is a real technical term. It comes from the
             | _Attention is All You Need_ paper published by Google. It's
             | not an Apple marketing term.
        
             | [deleted]
        
         | deprecative wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | What? Transformer model is a standard industry term for a
         | particular machine learning model architecture:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(machine_learning_...
         | 
         | At 34M parameters, it's not very large. A LLM can be a
         | transformer model, but also it can have a different
         | architecture (e.g. RNN, such as RWKV).
         | 
         | Apple has been using RNNs for many things, I believe it's the
         | first time they're shipping an on-device transformer model.
        
         | bobbylarrybobby wrote:
         | This is the one case where the technical term and Apple's
         | marketing actually do happen to overlap! These _are_
         | transformer models. Apple didn 't invent them, but their
         | description of them is technically accurate. "LLM" is the
         | dumbed-down term for the masses, describing only the "what" but
         | not the "how".
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | I know what a transformer model is. But Apple knows the
           | normal technical term is LLM. They are deliberately avoiding
           | it to try to create a new category for themselves, because
           | their model's "intelligence" is very poor when compared to
           | other LLMs.
        
         | mortureb wrote:
         | An LLM is a transformer model. That's the standard, industry
         | term. What are you going on about?
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | I am very aware of that.
           | 
           | Nowhere does the press release say LLM. That's because it's
           | not very large or smart and when compared to most LLMs'
           | "intellectual" performance, it looks bad. By avoiding that
           | term, they are successfully sidestepping an important aspect
           | of the evaluation of this system in the eyes of many Apple
           | fans.
        
             | ShrigmaMale wrote:
             | you want to compare llama2, inflection1, gpt4 et al. to
             | apple's typing assistant model that is designed to run
             | locally and in a tiny scope? large language model literally
             | isn't accurate for something that's two orders of magnitude
             | off what the term usually describes. if anything, give
             | apple points for not hyping up "LLM technology" or whatever
             | to boost their share price like every other tech-adjacent
             | company is rn.
        
             | l33t7332273 wrote:
             | > Nowhere does the press release say LLM. That's because
             | it's not very large
             | 
             | So your gripe is that they don't have a LLM and didn't say
             | they did?
        
         | codeflo wrote:
         | > It's a small, fairly dumb LLM.
         | 
         | I have no idea whether you really don't know what "LLM" stands
         | for or are just trolling. Not calling it an LLM actually _is_
         | more honest marketing precisely because it's small, and
         | "transformer-based model" is a precise technical description
         | that everybody with even superficial knowledge of the field
         | understood immediately.
         | 
         | And I'm actually onboard with most of your other examples. I'd
         | include "all-day battery life" as another empty marketing term
         | that doesn't really say much.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | I know that LLM stands for large language model. It is still
           | that type of model even though that final parameter count is
           | not very large. They are deliberately avoid "LLM" because it
           | doesn't compare favorably with most.
        
             | Me1000 wrote:
             | It's an autocomplete model, it's not designed to compare
             | favorably to LLMs.
             | 
             | And a transformer model is a specific type of LLM. You
             | could also build a language model using a RNN. There's
             | nothing deceptive here.
        
             | codeflo wrote:
             | > It is still that type of model
             | 
             | "That type of model" are called transformers, not "like an
             | LLM but small". The fact that you didn't know that doesn't
             | make it wrong.
        
               | ilaksh wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
             | nurettin wrote:
             | This model wasn't advertised by apple, someone who is
             | probably not even affiliated with apple wrote a piece on
             | how he found, analyzed and activated a small neural network
             | inside of an obscure folder. There are no misguided "apple
             | fans" to incorrect here.
        
       | danjc wrote:
       | Inline predictive text is an anti-feature that disrupts your flow
       | of thought. I've tried but cannot understand how anyone could
       | actually want this.
       | 
       | Edit: I was referring to writing prose where you're making
       | creative decisions rather than code which is closer to a
       | technical document.
       | 
       | In code things are different. Traditional intellisense is usually
       | just filtering a small set of possibilities. For example, auto
       | completion of a reference to a variable.
       | 
       | This is different to code prediction where for example, a
       | variable name will be suggested.
       | 
       | I can see value in code prediciton ala Copilot but personally
       | don't use it.
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | I loved it in OpenOffice Writer in early 2000s: type a couple
         | of letters and press Enter to complete. Same with autocomplete
         | when programming.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Roark66 wrote:
         | My favourite input app on android does real time autocorrect by
         | displaying 3 most likely predictions on a bar above the
         | keyboard. So it is not really inline.
         | 
         | With programming IDEs when I can I configure them to display
         | suggestions below the text I type, but if there is no such
         | setting I don't find inline autocomplete bothersome at all. (as
         | long as it displays it's prediction in dark shade of grey or
         | another color sufficiently different from the text I typed,
         | also there has to be a special key to accept the suggestion,
         | like tab, no "enter accept")
        
       | codeflo wrote:
       | And interesting test. I didn't see a mention of the temperature
       | setting used. Temperature controls the probability to pick a
       | token that isn't the top prediction, which leads to more
       | creative/less robotic results.
       | 
       | For actual input prediction, you probably want the temperature to
       | be zero. But even a model as good as GPT-3 becomes very boring
       | and repetitive with those settings.
        
         | smpanaro wrote:
         | There is an input for temperature in the CPU model. If you can
         | find and hook the call to predict you can probably see what is
         | being passed.
         | 
         | Interestingly the Neural Engine version of the model does not
         | take a temperature input, but it does output the raw embeddings
         | in addition to the logits.
        
         | jackcook wrote:
         | I used greedy sampling (temperature 0) for all of them. Since I
         | didn't have access to logits/probabilities for Apple's model, I
         | wasn't able to do anything else in a way that would be fair.
        
       | ricardobeat wrote:
       | I don't think you can make a fair comparison like this. The
       | examples at the end are essentially praising GPT-2 for
       | hallucinating - is it better when it's suggesting completely
       | irrelevant text to your sentences? Apple's approach can't
       | generate full sentences on its own, but that's not the goal
       | anyway.
        
       | IndySun wrote:
       | Apple's current autocorrect is skewed towards verbal, not typo,
       | errors. Apple wants your voice. Implementing this deliberately
       | worse change also gave Apple a path to 'improve autocorrect'.
       | Comments are correct, T9 was based on the keyboard and common
       | mistyped keys, simple, and effective.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | tpowell wrote:
       | Is it possible for it to improve based on experience/iMessage
       | history or is it locked in? I'd love to opt-in to training it on
       | my previous convos...
        
         | ComputerGuru wrote:
         | It already does and I hate it. If a person you're speaking with
         | misspells a word, it'll happy suggest^w forcibly autocorrect a
         | similar word to that misspelling if it was recent enough.
        
           | mcintyre1994 wrote:
           | Do they do that across conversations, eg if I misspell
           | something while texting you does it recommend my misspelling
           | when you're talking to other people?
        
             | petesergeant wrote:
             | Yes. Ever since I went to the Maldives it wants to
             | capitalize "male" and I have to work quite hard to get it
             | to not correct "Yes" to "Yea", and "Thailand" to "Thailnd".
             | Hate it.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | In _Settings_ there is _Reset Keyboard Dictionary_ to
               | revert to the default dictionary.
        
               | petesergeant wrote:
               | Thank you!!
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | Googling for something like "iphone wrong autocorrect"
               | helps in such cases. ;)
        
             | pjerem wrote:
             | Yes
        
           | artursapek wrote:
           | This is called zoomer slang support
        
           | coder543 wrote:
           | I think tpowell was asking about the all-new autocorrect
           | system. Do you have information on how that works, or were
           | you just talking about the old system that is being deleted
           | on Monday?
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | I have no evidence or reason to believe that the inputs to
             | the corpus of valid word sources for the new system changed
             | - most likely only the prediction model did. This
             | misfeature only recently shipped (iOS 16, I think) and I'm
             | sure Cupertino views it as a net gain.
        
       | dkga wrote:
       | Beyond fixing iPhone's autocorrect as widely mentioned below, I
       | wonder if in future versions Apple will end up switching to
       | phi-1.5 or other models that are much smaller but trained on
       | higher quality data.
       | 
       | Would also be cool if they trained their own copilot for Xcode,
       | given their obviously enturmes code base in Swift and Obj-C.
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | I'd guess they already trained it on high quality (and highly
         | censored) data. It's GPT-2-like architecture, but not GPT-2
         | weights.
         | 
         | phi-1.5 is 1.3 BILLION, this one is a lot smaller at 34
         | million.
        
         | fragmede wrote:
         | What's "high quality" refer to here? The amount of txt spk I
         | use on my iphone keyboard, vs words that are in the dictionary,
         | is heavily skewed in the direction of short words that a corpus
         | consisting of English text is likely to omit.
        
           | egwor wrote:
           | My hypothesis is that this question, "What's 'high quality'
           | refer to here?", is a big challenge and the answer depends
           | upon the audience. Here are a few examples:
           | 
           | - kids use one level of slang
           | 
           | - older ages groups using another (and it might mean
           | something quite different)
           | 
           | - communications for professional wouldn't use slang and
           | would use formal messages
           | 
           | - different cultures/regions will use different phrases for
           | the same thing (and some colloquialisms are quite
           | sophisticated like Cockney rhyming slang)
           | 
           | - on twitter when out of space you might then shorten words
           | 
           | The thing that really 'riles me up' / 'get on my wick' /
           | 'annoys me' / 'is immensely frustrating' / 'is an opportunity
           | for a sales feature' [trying to demonstrate the different
           | phrasing depending upon audience] is when the auto correct
           | 'fixes' grammar incorrectly. It needs to be clever enough to
           | realise the correct use of there/their/they're and its/it
           | is/it's.
           | 
           | I'll leave with a relevant poem:
           | https://allpoetry.com/poem/4010351-They-re-There-with-
           | Their-...
        
           | basisword wrote:
           | You use text speak on an iPhone? How? I find it impossible
           | due to autocorrect. Either it will correct with the full word
           | or it will correct with a wrong word making it more efficient
           | to just type in full.
        
             | tuukkah wrote:
             | Turn off autocorrect: https://support.apple.com/en-
             | us/HT207525
        
               | basisword wrote:
               | My problem with this (I've tried it) is that the iOS
               | keyboard still seems to try to guess which key you meant
               | to type. So you hit "o" and it thinks you probably meant
               | "p" and inserts that. Last I checked this still occurred
               | with autocorrect off and made it even worse than using
               | autocorrect.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | Why? So you can use text speak? Bit silly.
        
               | tuukkah wrote:
               | In general so that what you write is not mutilated by
               | software that doesn't know the words you use. If there
               | are typos, it's not difficult for the receiver to
               | "autocorrect" while reading, but when autocorrect
               | miscorrects, it's not easy for the writer to notice how
               | the message changed nor for the reader to guess what was
               | there before the "fixes".
        
               | kayodelycaon wrote:
               | That assumes your typing and spelling accuracy is high
               | and the other person reading has significant proficiency
               | in your language.
               | 
               | My typing and spelling accuracy is horrendous to the
               | point I use autocorrect on my laptop. For me, it's an
               | important accessibility feature. I also use dictation for
               | single words.
        
               | tuukkah wrote:
               | Normal spellcheck still exists, highlights typos and lets
               | you pick from suggested fixes.
               | 
               | Anyway, I'm not saying you shouldn't use whatever works
               | best for you but one size doesn't fit all.
        
               | macNchz wrote:
               | I've had autocorrect disabled on my iPhone for years--for
               | whatever reason it really bothers me when something I
               | just typed magically changes into something I didn't want
               | to write. I like that what I type is _exactly_ what
               | appears, not the computer's guess at my intent. It's one
               | of the first things I disable when setting up a new Mac
               | as well.
               | 
               | It took a few months to get used to it, but I developed
               | typo-correction muscle memory pretty quickly (RIP 3D
               | Touch, it was awesome for text editing). Plus I think
               | that the copyedit re-read that I give to things I write
               | on my phone is helpful above and beyond just catching
               | typos. So be it if I make the occasional typo!
        
               | dkga wrote:
               | I'm one of the "lucky few" that (a) really needs
               | autocorrect because I can never seem to type correctly in
               | mobile phone keyboards and (b) really hates autocorrect
               | because often it either gets me wrong or worse, changes
               | legitimate words into awkward and incorrect words - like
               | the other day I typed something pretty mundane that got
               | changed into a more... vulgar word.
               | 
               | I got a little reprieve with swiping text, but still,
               | autocorrect should be much better.
        
       | ComputerGuru wrote:
       | Just give me the option of not having autocorrect _change the
       | previous word_ when I am typing a new one. I don't move on to the
       | next word unless the current one was correct or I have already
       | corrected it. Why does it assume I'm stupid? It even does this
       | when I've picked the completion for the prior word or swiped to
       | type and then made manual corrections. It's painfully obvious
       | that it shouldn't be touched again.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | kristopolous wrote:
         | Apple has assumed its users are hapless morons for many years.
         | Most people seem to prefer it this way.
        
         | jeffbee wrote:
         | And then deleting BOTH words with a single backspace. This is
         | its most irritating behavior.
        
           | LeoPanthera wrote:
           | Settings > General > Keyboard > Delete Slide-to-Type by Word
           | = Off
        
             | willis936 wrote:
             | That changes more behavior than what GP wants.
        
       | barathr wrote:
       | We might ask ourselves at some point: if the point of simple text
       | prediction is to speed up text entry, and not generate large
       | amounts of text from scratch, then that's a sign the input
       | interfaces are the bottleneck. If we had a way to get text from
       | our brains to the computer faster, we wouldn't need this kind of
       | prediction.
        
       | r0m4n0 wrote:
       | iPhone's auto complete and form fills drive me absolutely mad.
       | It's honestly just basic stuff that should have just worked a
       | decade ago. I'm not even begging them for LLMs or some fancy ML,
       | just learn basic words I type out all the time. For example my
       | full email address? how about my last name? This seems like basic
       | stuff
        
         | ezfe wrote:
         | My iPhone has always suggested those things...
        
           | r0m4n0 wrote:
           | Sometimes on obvious fields like an email input on a web page
           | (not all though). Not in this comment box for example
        
       | blindriver wrote:
       | I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect.
       | Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the
       | autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible
       | since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either
       | mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the
       | word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant
       | experience and I need it to change. That's just about the only
       | thing better between the iPhone and Android for me.
        
         | Roark66 wrote:
         | For me stock autocorrect was always pretty much unusable, but I
         | have no real complaints about the app I use. I'm bilingual and
         | I type in both languages a lot. I remember when I got my first
         | smartphone I bought SwiftKey app (later bought by Microsoft)
         | that made language switching very easy by just swiping the
         | space. Later the app got so good I just left it on default
         | setting and it would still recommend the right words. Since I
         | bought the app it has been always one if first things I
         | installed on a new android phone (I think I had it on an iPhone
         | 3g back in the day too, but I can't remember for sure).
         | 
         | I recently realised how much of a difference it makes when you
         | type quickly as I got an extra work phone with stock android I
         | have to use occasionally.
         | 
         | There is also a feature of this app I use only occasionally,
         | but when I do its great. It let's you type by moving your
         | finger between letters in one continously motion. When one
         | describes it seems rather weird, but it's really one of the
         | best features of the app. You can write really fast this way,
         | the only difficulty it has is with very uncommon words.
        
           | audunw wrote:
           | > It let's you type by moving your finger between letters in
           | one continously motion.
           | 
           | FYI, this has been included in stock iOS keyboard for a while
           | now.
        
             | recursion wrote:
             | And also stock Android.
        
           | atraac wrote:
           | I also use SwiftKey and can highly recommend. I use Polish
           | and English, sometimes within the same message and native
           | keyboard was an absolute shitshow for me. It would literally
           | never correct properly, sometimes make up non existing words
           | etc. My only pain point with SwiftKey is that since last
           | update it crashes often, I hope they might actually fix it
           | someday. GBoard on iOS was forgotten long time ago so that's
           | a no go...
        
         | kahnclusions wrote:
         | Totally agree. I love my iPhone but autocorrect is absolutely
         | the most painful and most infuriating part of the experience. I
         | am _constantly_ fighting with the autocorrect... sometimes
         | repeating the same word 3 times because I've typed it correctly
         | but iPhone really wants to change it.
         | 
         | Same with proper nouns. If I deliberately start a word with a
         | capital letter it's probably a proper noun and I know how it's
         | spelled, don't correct me.
         | 
         | Fix this shit, Apple, it's the one part of iPhone I really
         | hate.
        
           | olah_1 wrote:
           | Seconding that autocorrect is inexcusably bad on iPhone.
        
         | happymellon wrote:
         | Pretty sure my typing on T9 was faster and more accurate that
         | the current state of keyboards.
        
         | squeaky-clean wrote:
         | I use SwiftKey and it's much better than the Apple one. But it
         | does require giving Microsoft access to most of what you write.
        
           | willis936 wrote:
           | It does seem absurd that the options are "completely broken
           | keyboard features" and "literal keylogger". Meanwhile we're
           | paying for many transistors for NN engines and getting worse
           | results than if they were never leveraged at all.
           | 
           | Is this what progress looks like?
        
         | nixpulvis wrote:
         | How about just fixing the damn spellchecker on iOS?
         | 
         | I can never press on underlined words that are the last word
         | before a linebreak while typing.
         | 
         | It's been broken for years. YEARS!
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | cmehdy wrote:
         | I've had a similar experience with autocorrect on Android
         | across multiple phones (lg, samsung) and keyboards (gboard,
         | swiftkey) around the same time, I'm curious to know whether
         | it's just my own bias being validated or something happened.
         | All predictions have become completely stupid (switching
         | languages mid sentence when they were robust in the past,
         | finding least consistent suggestion first, suggesting very
         | random terms I've never seen like "Gaylene" when I swiped to
         | write "happened", etc).
        
           | nprateem wrote:
           | Same here. I get all sorts of nonsensical suggestions when
           | swiping now that I never used to get. It changed a few years
           | pre-covid, so yeah, 5-6 years ago. I assumed it was stunting
           | to do with a list lawsuit against samsung or something
        
           | colordrops wrote:
           | Same. I suspect everyone switched algorithms at some point
           | because it was "state of the art", but actually a step
           | backwards in reality.
        
             | gleenn wrote:
             | Maybe they were optimizing battery or some other metric
             | that wasn't necessarily prediction performance.
        
           | gkoller wrote:
           | Typing on Android was perfect when Swype was still around.
           | GBoard and SwiftKey were worse and seem to actually decline
           | in accuracy till this day.
        
             | cja wrote:
             | Swype was the best. Google should buy it and release it as
             | the new version of Gboard
        
               | freeone3000 wrote:
               | Swype was acquired by Nuance which was acquired by
               | Microsoft. Its competitor, SwiftKey, was also acquired by
               | Microsoft.
        
             | kevingadd wrote:
             | I reset my gboard training data every 6-12 months since if
             | I don't it seems to steadily get worse.
        
           | navigate8310 wrote:
           | I can vouch for this from personal experience. Back when I
           | had my Nexus 4, the built-in keyboard surpassed the current
           | Gboard by a long shot. I'm not sure what happened along the
           | way, but the spell-checking capabilities of the completely
           | offline and lightweight keyboard that Google shipped back in
           | those days were miles ahead.
        
         | tpowell wrote:
         | This made me realize I was conflating these in my head, and I
         | wholeheartedly agree. I had a 12 Pro Max 256GB until last year,
         | and autocorrect was great/fine/never noticed issues. Fed up
         | with heavy phones, I purchased a 14 Plus 512GB (very similar
         | physical size) and set it up from scratch while migrating
         | whatever is included in iCloud (Photos, iMessage etc).
         | Autocorrect has been bad from the start on the 14 Plus, and has
         | improved little in nearly a year. Typing feels _tedious_ now,
         | where it felt like a strength previously. The phone as been a
         | joy to use otherwise.
        
         | deergomoo wrote:
         | > Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the
         | autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely
         | terrible since then
         | 
         | That was when they first changed to a machine learning-based
         | model. I'm hoping this one is better.
        
         | bboygravity wrote:
         | You could get a phone with a physical keyboard so you would
         | barely need auto-correct in the first place :p
         | 
         | Source: I have one :p
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | It's powered by the same thing. They even mention "Even more
         | accurate autocorrect" in iOS 17 on the product page.
        
         | tasogare wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | I don't understand why people still put up with Apple's
         | autocorrect instead of just turning it off. It's so wrong so
         | often as to be utterly useless.
        
           | M4v3R wrote:
           | Because it depends on the person. For me autocorrect is 99%
           | spot on and so it's a valid trade off for me to deal with
           | correcting the remaining 1%. My wife on the other hand cannot
           | live with it so she turned it off. And every time I type
           | something on her phone I immediately feel slower because I
           | know each of my key presses have to be much more deliberate.
        
             | dbbk wrote:
             | In recent years mine has gone completely crazy and started
             | autocorrecting to random words that don't exist. I think
             | somehow over time it can get corrupted.
        
         | paganel wrote:
         | Look at the positive side, it made you type less on your phone
         | (strangely enough, I had to fight with my SE's autocorrect
         | three times in order to input "positive")
        
         | jonplackett wrote:
         | Totally agree.
         | 
         | And I'd like to add that the editing experience is also dire
         | and getting worse.
         | 
         | Just trying to put the cursor where I want it to fix an error
         | earlier in the sentence in ios17 is a massive pain in the ass.
         | 
         | You tap somewhere and it continually selects entire words - I
         | just want to put the cursor there dammit!
        
           | texuf wrote:
           | Press and hold the space bar to place the cursor exactly
           | where you want it. It took me way too long to learn this.
        
             | brrwind wrote:
             | Thank you for mentioning this! I thought Apple had
             | eliminated this editing mode when they got rid of Force
             | Touch. So happy to learn that it's still available but a
             | little frustrated I'm only learning this now.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | jamiek88 wrote:
           | If you hold down 'space' the cursor becomes Freeform. Works
           | much better.
        
           | artursapek wrote:
           | Yeah I noticed this starting a year or two ago, it drives me
           | crazy
           | 
           | Also, getting the copy/paste menu to show takes a very long
           | time
        
             | jonplackett wrote:
             | Yeah there's just so much delay. Editing/writing text is
             | just plain tedious.
        
               | artursapek wrote:
               | Agreed!
        
         | benreesman wrote:
         | IMHO people don't often enough think through what the Google
         | search type-ahead would be if it had 100s of millis per BPE
         | token and a demanding cost structure.
         | 
         | No one credible, least of all a guy like me who had been an
         | enthusiastic amateur for a few years, is saying the stuff
         | hadn't gotten pretty wild recently.
         | 
         | But unprecedented? Nah.
        
         | pentae wrote:
         | Same with voice to text translation. It's absolutely, utterly,
         | worthless. I end up having to go and edit half the message.
         | Apple can't even get basic things right
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | I use voice to text all the time on my iPhone and find it to
           | be astonishingly good. I'm a 50 year old man who grew up in
           | Southwestern Ontario so that gives you an idea of my accent.
        
           | kaba0 wrote:
           | With ios 17 it also greatly improved (at least the input,
           | mechanism itself).
        
           | jamiedumont wrote:
           | I broke my right (dominant) collarbone on Wednesday so I've
           | entered the realm of the temporarily disabled user.
           | 
           | So far I prefer iOS because the predictive text above the
           | keyboard (in iOS 16 too) and in particular the speech to text
           | feature has been so good!
           | 
           | The only egregious error that I have encountered has been
           | confusion around the phrase "into" when I mean "in two". An
           | understandable mistake.
        
             | messe wrote:
             | Out of curiosity, what accent do you have? In my experience
             | that can have a significant impact on how good speed to
             | text works for you.
        
               | jamiedumont wrote:
               | Fairly neutral British. Born and raised in Guernsey so
               | have a complete absence of regional accent without the
               | very forced enunciation that comes from elocution lessons
               | / Queens English. Admittedly I probably represent the
               | best-case subject.
        
               | messe wrote:
               | > Admittedly I probably represent the best-case subject.
               | 
               | I don't think you could do any better unless you were
               | from Cupertino. With an Irish accent, my experience has
               | been... okay with Apples text to speech, it's certainly
               | better than others, but I still have to make a conscious
               | effort to enunciate quite differently to my normal
               | speech.
               | 
               | OpenAI's whisper has really impressed me though, and
               | transcribes almost everything perfectly, even if I throw
               | in phrases or words from other languages part way through
               | the conversation.
        
         | AmericanChopper wrote:
         | I regularly use 4 languages on my iPhone and my autocorrect is
         | completely broken. I can't be bothered switching between
         | keyboards, so the English keyboard has just completely lost the
         | plot...
        
           | therein wrote:
           | Yup same, that's why I am sticking with Android as well. I
           | want multi-language auto-correct for my preferred languages
           | _on the English QWERTY keyboard_.
        
             | P-Nuts wrote:
             | I want the opposite! I know which language I'm typing but
             | my phone still randomly decides I've written the (French
             | for tea) instead of the.
        
         | Me1000 wrote:
         | Word (or multi-word) prediction is a great starting place for
         | an autocorrect model. If the keyboard I'm using knows the
         | probability of all the possible next tokens I could type, then
         | you can start making the tap targets for those keys bigger. And
         | since the model is super cheap to run, you can replay the last
         | n keyboard taps to simulate a different correction being made.
         | That's at least how I'd make autocorrect better if I worked on
         | the keyboard team.
         | 
         | Anecdotally, I've heard autocorrect is much better on iOS 17.
         | But I won't update until the general release next week.
        
           | deergomoo wrote:
           | > then you can start making the tap targets for those keys
           | bigger
           | 
           | That's how autocorrect has worked since day one, it was just
           | using a simpler heuristic-based prediction rather than a
           | machine learning model.
        
             | willis936 wrote:
             | That's how it should be, but as others have implied and I
             | claim outirght: the heuristic-based prediction has been
             | broken for years.
             | 
             | The solution badly needed isn't a complicated black box
             | model when we know a simple one is good enough.
        
           | aidos wrote:
           | Maybe it's better and I just need to keep typing so it can
           | figure out what I mean.
           | 
           | In the last couple of weeks using the beta I've found myself
           | fighting it more than ever. After years of typing by tapping
           | at the screen, I've switched to swiping the words in because
           | it seems to be more reliable.
        
       | QuadrupleA wrote:
       | Everyone's asking tech details and "how", but I wonder about the
       | "why". Do we want LLMs to always write for us, or whisper in our
       | ear what to say? By design LLMs tend toward the most commonplace,
       | mainstream ideas and ways of saying things. They're not much for
       | originality or human idiosyncracy. Are we engineering a bland
       | world full of pablum?
        
         | runjake wrote:
         | Because at work I'm typing the same bland things all the time
         | in documents and communications. I appreciate stuff like the
         | predictive word stuff in Google Docs. It's helpful because
         | business language is expected to be normalized and boring.
         | 
         | On the other side of that token, the average language abilities
         | of the average American office worker are pretty low so I'm
         | assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they
         | appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.
         | 
         | I agree with your point though. And to answer your last
         | question, unfortunately I think the answer is "yes".
        
           | _a_a_a_ wrote:
           | > because business language is expected to be normalized and
           | boring
           | 
           | why?
        
             | harshaw wrote:
             | I might say it a bit differently. The amazon writing style
             | is to avoid flowery prose, weasel words (maybe, perhaps,
             | etc), give precise dates, use data, etc. I'd love a model
             | that I could hand to engineers to help them write in this
             | style.
        
           | Zambyte wrote:
           | > Because at work I'm typing the same bland things all the
           | time in documents and communications.
           | 
           | This problem can be solved without text prediction by
           | building a personal knowledge base with hyperlinking[0] and
           | backlinking[1] for discovery, and transclusion[2] for
           | automating writing the same bland things. How I org in 2023
           | by Nick Anderson[3] goes over a great workflow for this. The
           | advantage of this is that all of the words that you share are
           | actually words that you wrote, instead of sharing words that
           | Google suggested you share.
           | 
           | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink [1]
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink [2]
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion [3]
           | https://cmdln.org/2023/03/25/how-i-org-in-2023/
        
             | runjake wrote:
             | I use macros for frequently-reused messaging but I meant
             | business communication itself. It's essentially a different
             | dialect of English meant to be "inclusive", unambiguous,
             | and not prone to misinterpretation.
             | 
             | Anyway, I like and use the feature daily at work. So do
             | lots and lots of other people.
        
             | shiponfire wrote:
             | What an obtuse way of saying use links and quote replies
        
               | Zambyte wrote:
               | Thanks!
        
           | vore wrote:
           | On the other side of that token, the average language
           | abilities of the average American office worker are pretty
           | low so I'm assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect
           | and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.
           | 
           | Awfully presumptuous, don't you think?
        
             | dsco wrote:
             | I would also assume this to be largely true, mainly because
             | of how language in media has gone from being formal and
             | informative to casual and less expressive.
        
               | vore wrote:
               | I agree there has been a style shift, I don't think
               | writing has gotten any less informative. I personally
               | don't like formal writing, but either way it has no
               | bearing on whether or not ideas can be gotten across
               | effectively. Substance over style!
        
         | vore wrote:
         | If I'm writing an email to my coworkers, what I really care
         | about is the information I'm getting across and not really the
         | presentation of it. If LLM autocomplete can speed up writing a
         | totally functional email then how bland it is really isn't at
         | the top of my mind.
        
         | dclowd9901 wrote:
         | Maybe not always (I assume an annoyed person could turn this
         | feature off), but I think the general trend is, yes, especially
         | for boring rote writing we have to get done for work or school
         | that doesn't require a tremendous amount of creativity.
         | 
         | I really look forward to using GPT to help me throw together
         | RFCs, documentation, announcement letters, daily standup write
         | ups and other artifacts like that that prevent me from getting
         | actual work done.
        
         | andrei_says_ wrote:
         | Quite likely yes in the context of repetitive daily routine
         | communication.
        
         | brookst wrote:
         | Most human communication is bland, and people who make a point
         | of being unpredictable and shocking are usually pretty
         | annoying.
         | 
         | Think of it like spellcheck : the vast majority of the time it
         | produces desired results, but if you really want to type
         | bjPvc9fQ, you certainly can.
        
           | mtkhaos wrote:
           | This throws out the possibility of high quality content.
        
           | quest88 wrote:
           | Is this an apt analogy? Don't LLMs train off these bland
           | humans you mention? Wouldn't LLMs then also be bland?
        
             | jsolson wrote:
             | Yes, but sometimes that's what's called for. I think I may
             | have found my answer to where LLMs might be useful for
             | short communications: softening something that might be
             | interpreted as "curt" or even "rude" while not really
             | changing the message.
        
           | davio wrote:
           | That's my mental model. First we had calculators. Then
           | spellcheck. Now we have automated "let me google that for
           | you"
        
           | QuadrupleA wrote:
           | Well it's not so much about deliberately / affectedly being
           | original and weird (which is annoying), but just leaving some
           | space for natural idiosyncratic ways of writing.
        
         | avianlyric wrote:
         | As someone with Dyslexia, who struggles a lot with written
         | communication, and frequently finds myself fighting with
         | spellcheckers, trying to get them to provide the correct
         | correction. I'm very excited for these types of autocomplete
         | systems. They're like spellcheckers, except they also use
         | context to produce better results, and frequently remove the
         | need to play "guess the right misspelling" to get a normal
         | spellcheck to provide good suggestions.
         | 
         | I'll accept the risk of blandness, if it means that written
         | communication finally becomes "easy" for me to participate in.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | It's not LLM's writing for us, it's just autocomplete.
         | 
         | If the suggestion doesn't match what you were already planning
         | on saying, you just ignore it.
         | 
         | The human desire to be original and authentic is always going
         | to be stronger.
         | 
         | (It's much less effort to ignore it and keep typing your
         | original thought, than it is to think about it, compare with
         | what you were going to say, decide its version is better, and
         | then accept it.)
        
           | fulladder wrote:
           | > The human desire to be original and authentic is always
           | going to be stronger.
           | 
           | Authenticity didn't start to become a thing people cared
           | about until about the early 1990s, and it didn't blow up and
           | take over the mainstream culture until the 2000s and 2010s.
           | 
           | Prior to the 1990s, there was a lot of interest in
           | professionalism. People spoke and wrote in overly formal,
           | jargony ways that they perceived as being a marker for
           | competence in some specialized professional domain. Being too
           | honest/authentic would have been seen as unsophisticated and
           | lower class.
           | 
           | Just pointing out that what people strive to emulate can
           | change over time. Once LLM writing becomes commonplace, it
           | will probably become trendy to write in the exact opposite
           | way that an LLM does!
        
             | DiogenesKynikos wrote:
             | One of the most famous American essays of the 19th Century
             | is about authenticity.
             | 
             |  _Self-Reliance_ , by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841):
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance
        
             | CharlesW wrote:
             | > _Authenticity didn 't start to become a thing people
             | cared about until about the early 1990s..._
             | 
             | In your lifetime, but...
             | 
             |  _Another common theme in the philosophy of both Dostoevsky
             | and Descartes is the idea of authenticity. Dostoevsky
             | believed that people must live authentically, in accordance
             | with their true selves, and that this is essential for
             | their happiness and well-being. Descartes, on the other
             | hand, argued that the path to knowledge and certainty
             | begins with the rejection of all previous beliefs and the
             | adoption of a completely new and authentic perspective._ 1
             | 
             | And of course, the U.S. counterculture movement of the
             | 1960s was deeply preoccupied with authenticity:
             | 
             |  _You note three themes underlying the American hippie
             | experience: authenticity, individualism and community. Why
             | did these concepts stand out, and what did they mean in the
             | context of the hippie /counterculture movement? / W.R.:
             | Although hippies often disagreed about beliefs and
             | practices, they shared a desire to be authentic. Members of
             | the counterculture condemned mainstream society for being
             | conformist, rule-driven and uptight. Authenticity meant
             | "doing your own thing." Because freaks distrusted both
             | society and government, individual decisions were applauded
             | as the most authentic._2
             | 
             | 1 https://vocal.media/geeks/freedom-authenticity-and-the-
             | mind
             | 
             | 2 https://www.washington.edu/news/2015/08/17/uw-historian-
             | will...
        
           | WirelessGigabit wrote:
           | 2 problems with suggestions:
           | 
           | 1) there is a sort order to them. And we don't know how the
           | 'recommendations' work. What is a recommendation? Why is
           | Google recommending something over something else?
           | 
           | 2) it bogs down creativity. You end up not thinking and
           | accepting the suggestion as 'good' enough.
        
             | Tagbert wrote:
             | Most writing does not need creativity. It is wrote
             | communication. If you want to put some creativity into
             | something or write something where you want to write with
             | some personality, then turn off the predictions or use it
             | just for spell check.
        
             | maroonblazer wrote:
             | My job requires me to correspond with dozens of people over
             | email, Teams, and Slack every day. We're all trying to get
             | work done and need our communications to be as succinct as
             | possible. Sure, occasionally I might dress it up to add
             | some humor, but that's ~1% of cases. An AI, with access to
             | my entire corpus of work-related communication, could
             | likely very easily predict most of my communications, since
             | they fall into a small set of categories.
             | 
             | "When can I expect to get $workproduct?"
             | 
             | "Here's when I can commit to getting you $workproduct"
             | 
             | "What's the estimated date for $milestone?"
             | 
             | "Here's the project plan for $initiative"
             | 
             | "I can't make this meeting, can you be sure to record it?"
             | 
             | I welcome any tool that can predict what I want to type and
             | does it for me. I'm not sure if it's my imagination or not
             | but Outlook and Teams seem to have gotten better in this
             | regard. I'll take more of that.
        
             | nojs wrote:
             | > it bogs down creativity. You end up not thinking and
             | accepting the suggestion as 'good' enough.
             | 
             | This is why I stopped using copilot autocomplete in my IDE.
             | Once you see a suggestion, you can't make your brain un-see
             | it.
        
         | jsolson wrote:
         | I find they're useful as a tool for achieving a particular
         | structure or tone that isn't "my voice," including populating
         | boilerplate from bullet points. Sometimes I'll go back and
         | revisit everything they've produced, but they let me put
         | something tolerable in place early. This lets me focus on the
         | meaty parts of the text sooner than I'd otherwise find myself
         | capable of.
         | 
         | I personally don't find them useful for quick / short /
         | informal communication like email, or at least not yet.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | tempaccount420 wrote:
         | I don't think people write much original thought on phones
         | anyway.
        
           | tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
           | Yeah. I can't wait to see what your parents said about
           | desktop computers.
        
         | dartos wrote:
         | Most sort messages people send on Apple devices aren't meant to
         | be original, just to quickly convey some information.
        
         | dwringer wrote:
         | One approach that I've been using with a local LLM, mostly
         | brainstorming for my friends and my dungeons and dragons
         | sessions, is to set up a prompt to be completed with some
         | certain detail of storyline, character background, etc., Then
         | running that prompt maybe 50 or 100 times and keeping informal
         | statistics on the different results that come out. In such an
         | application, it can be used as much for inspiration of how
         | _not_ to sound bland, commonplace, or derivative. You can pick
         | the one in 100 oddity that strikes you as interesting, or
         | simply make sure not to use any of the outcomes that the LLM
         | came up with.
        
         | MetaMonk wrote:
         | LLMs will by necessity but unintentionally enforce phonotactics
         | but more at the sentence / thought level.
        
         | shawnz wrote:
         | > Are we engineering a bland world full of pablum?
         | 
         | Like any other technological advancement, we're freeing
         | ourselves from the burden of wasting mental energy manually
         | doing those commonplace unoriginal tasks which can be easily
         | automated, so there's more bandwidth left for human beings to
         | focus specifically on the things which can't be
        
         | elicash wrote:
         | "Bing Chat's" implementation already allows you to select more
         | creative generation of text. It's just a radio button option.
         | There are also different technical solutions for the LLM to
         | select which word to generate that allow either for more
         | interesting, or more predictable, words.
         | 
         | This isn't to say a human element doesn't have a ton to offer!
         | Just to say that we aren't necessarily engineering a bland
         | world of pablum, either.
        
           | QuadrupleA wrote:
           | That's just temperature, which evens out the random
           | probability a little of the N most probable next words. It's
           | still vastly favoring the N most common ones based on the
           | training corpus, and will have a hard time producing uncommon
           | ones.
           | 
           | E.g. try asking an LLM to name a real, non-famous person. The
           | internet and it's training corpus is full of regular people,
           | but you won't have much luck - they're statistically too
           | uncommon to remember.
        
             | fulladder wrote:
             | Early versions of GPT would tell me about myself, but July
             | of this year it was saying that it could not comment on a
             | private individual. I'm not at all famous, but there's
             | plenty of writing by and about me in the common training
             | datasets.
             | 
             | So, I don't agree that there's insufficient data for it to
             | remember a random person. This was obviously a conscious
             | decision, probably in response to situations like this one
             | last spring: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ai-
             | made-up-sexual-ha...
        
             | brookst wrote:
             | > That's just temperature, which evens out the random
             | probability a little of the N most probable next words.
             | 
             | Source? A MS exec said that creative and precise are GPT4
             | but balanced is a not (or not 100%):
             | https://twitter.com/MParakhin/status/1693579775590224097
        
               | QuadrupleA wrote:
               | I was assuming those Bing Chat settings are temperature-
               | based, those types of "creative/precise" controls usually
               | are - but perhaps there's more to it.
        
             | xp84 wrote:
             | I would be skeptical of the results of that experiment,
             | just because I assume the minders of the big LLMs have
             | attempted to make it deeply uncomfortable with discussing
             | anything that might be "personal." For a fun time, ask
             | ChatGPT who was executed (as in capital punishment) in the
             | US in a certain long-past year. It responds with a bunch of
             | rubbish about privacy and about how an LLM can't be
             | completely sure about stuff so it wouldn't be ok to
             | speculate for fear of tarnishing someone's reputation, as
             | though the person executed 15 years ago is going to sue
             | OpenAI for sharing their name and what crime they were
             | publicly convicted of and killed for.
        
         | tambourine_man wrote:
         | It's an important question, but one we're not addressing in so
         | many areas. We're 8 billion in the world and more culturally
         | homogeneous than ever.
         | 
         | I think and hope the pendulum will swing back eventually, but
         | my guess is that it's still got some way to go before that.
        
         | babl-yc wrote:
         | I disabled Gmail Smart Compose for this reason; I felt like it
         | was putting words into my mouth suggesting entire sentences for
         | the email.
         | 
         | I'm much more open to using transformers as a better auto-
         | correct, where it's one word at a time and uses the first
         | letter as a filter. Especially on a tiny phone keyboard on the
         | go.
        
         | quadcore wrote:
         | Those who still carefully craft their text messages will stand
         | out.
        
       | Zinu wrote:
       | The example at the end made me wonder if Apple's model is
       | actually better than GPT2 for text prediction. It generated
       | garbage, but all that garbage made somewhat sense in the context
       | of only the word "Today".
       | 
       | Whereas GPT2 hallucinated random stuff about the US government. A
       | text prediction model should predict what the user wanted to
       | type, so if you evaluate the models based on that, GPT2 actually
       | performed horribly, since the user showed zero intent in talking
       | about the US.
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | It seems obvious to me that it's not, because if you asked a
         | human to guess what comes after "today" in a text, they'd never
         | say "probably some gibberish about a day a day".
        
           | ricardobeat wrote:
           | Garbage in, garbage out? The preceding text is gibberish, so
           | the prediction will be worse. Presumably they also only show
           | completions with a much higher confidence threshold.
        
           | coldtea wrote:
           | Maybe: "Today was fine. Since I've retired, I'm taking my
           | life a day a day".
           | 
           | Or maybe I wanted to express myself in the timeless words of
           | the poets:
           | 
           | "A day, a day of glory! A day that ends our woe! A day that
           | tells of triumph. Against our vanquished foe!"
           | 
           | "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Loveliness extreme.
           | Extra gaiters. Loveliness extreme."
           | 
           | "A-well now, everybody's heard about the bird, everybody's
           | heard about the bird, About the bird, the bird, bird bird
           | bird, Haven't you heard about the bird? Don't you know that
           | the bird's the word?"
        
         | rayshan wrote:
         | It's hallucination if you hate it, and creativity if you like
         | it.
        
         | cubefox wrote:
         | The example at the end sounds just like the predictions you get
         | from normal phone keyboards in the last couple of years, which
         | presumably don't use a modern GPT-style language model. A bit
         | disappointing.
        
           | xp84 wrote:
           | Seriously disappointing. I was expecting that it would not
           | produce total gibberish. It acts like it's a Markov chain,
           | and only considers the last 1-2 words. Identical to the
           | currently-shipping thing that we've had for the past however-
           | many years.
        
             | BoorishBears wrote:
             | People trying to draw this comparison proves making good
             | products is harder than it seems...
             | 
             | The default goal everyone is assuming is spitting out the
             | longest correct sequence possible.
             | 
             | But in reality the mental cost of a _wildly wrong_
             | prediction is much higher than the mental cost of a
             | _slightly wrong_ one, so what you 'd train the model for is
             | sequences of a few words at most being with higher
             | confidence.
             | 
             | Most people can/will tune out slightly wrong words
             | especially as they get a feel for what autocorrect is good
             | and bad at.
             | 
             | If you unleash the full range of tokens GPT 2 can normally
             | output, you'll constantly be blasting out words they didn't
             | expect.
             | 
             | --
             | 
             | The fact your long sequence prediction got better doesn't
             | matter because the UI is autocomplete not "auto-write":
             | they're still expecting to drive, and a smart but noisy
             | copilot is worse than a dumb but lazy one in that case.
             | 
             | I wouldn't be surprised if they trained the model to an
             | effective context window of just a few hundred tokens with
             | that in mind
        
         | bloppe wrote:
         | GPT-2 saw "today," and thought "this must be news copy" and
         | generated more news copy. Given a few more words, it could have
         | narrowed down the context. The Apple suggestions aren't even
         | grammatically correct, seemingly no different from the shallow
         | statistical completion we've already had for years, so it's
         | weird that they branded it in lofty AI terms
        
           | fh9302 wrote:
           | Autocorrect doesn't suggest whole sentences so it is
           | irrelevant if the remaining sentence is gibberish or not.
        
             | firewolf34 wrote:
             | Maybe it should though, given we have the power to do so
             | (at least, with just a lil more power)
        
         | shiponfire wrote:
         | Yes but it also looks no better than the existing autocomplete
         | they have, in which case why use a battery-draining midLM?
         | 
         | "Today is a good day for you to be able to do it more than i
         | just a few weeks to get a new."
        
       | xp84 wrote:
       | I want to know if this will be used to improve all the places
       | where Apple devices attempt to interpret what you might mean to
       | type, including the swipe keyboard. I've been suffering for years
       | with their terrible, unusable swipe typing. You can't even get it
       | to swipe "I love you" because it always prioritizes "your" over
       | you, regardless of the context. I've even experimented extremely
       | slowly and taken screen recordings to ensure the swipes are
       | accurate. There are a couple of other completely astonishing
       | common words that it 100% of the time gets wrong. I guess GPT3
       | would probably tax the battery, but on the other hand, I'd like
       | to have the freedom to try it, because it would let me finish
       | tasks much easier if text entry wasn't like fighting with an
       | insane overconfident toddler. Honestly, I don't know what
       | happened. Text entry with iPhones 10 years ago was far less
       | infuriating.
        
         | pmcf wrote:
         | You have to be ducking kidding. Works great for me.
        
         | tornato7 wrote:
         | I love you I love you I love you I love you
         | 
         | Seems to work fine. Though I typically use Gboard because the
         | swipe typing is much better.
         | 
         | I find the most restrictive thing about Apple's autocorrect and
         | speech to text to be the limited vocabulary. Once you start
         | using any industry terms it completely fails.
        
           | gorenb wrote:
           | why are you using a <p> tag
        
       | demarq wrote:
       | I've been arguing this is the way AI should be deployed. Rather
       | than trying to sell ai as an end to end solution, just let it do
       | the small part that it can reliably do. It's cost effective for
       | the host, and valuable for the user. win win engineering!
        
         | tempaccount420 wrote:
         | It makes a lot more economical sense to cloud-host big models
         | like GPT-4 and optimize them for the hardware they run on. But
         | for small models, sure, let the user run them locally,
         | eliminating network latency.
        
           | rgbrgb wrote:
           | I wouldn't want to send everything I type to apple's auto
           | suggest server. For me it's quite important that this is not
           | apple's approach to privacy.
        
         | apozem wrote:
         | I mean, I get why all these startups are trying to sell AI as a
         | panacea. It's an exciting technology and someone has to figure
         | out its limits.
         | 
         | That said, as a user, it is nice to see LLMs used in a small,
         | discrete, undeniably useful way like this. No flashy promises,
         | nothing new for me to learn- it's just autocorrect, but better.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | It's not an LLM. The first L stands for large and this isn't.
        
             | flangola7 wrote:
             | What's the threshold to be called Large?
        
               | brookst wrote:
               | As soon as it exceeds medium.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | chaxor wrote:
       | UnilmCtrl seems to imply some dependence on Sochers CTRL models,
       | but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just another name collision.
       | Would be interesting if it were, as that would likely mean they
       | have been working on releasing this for a few more years than the
       | "chat-gpt craze". I am a bit biased, but I always have more
       | respect if someone has worked in the NLP field for at least ~8
       | years, rather than jumping on after Sparrow and RLHF.
        
       | flakiness wrote:
       | For text input support, being boring feels like a feature not a
       | bug. For writing on mobile, you'll be writing a lot of boring
       | short messages. That's said, it'd be cool if it can precondition
       | with the app name - You'll probably write something more
       | interesting on Pages vs on iMessage.
        
         | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | Toutouxc wrote:
       | Meanwhile my language and dozens of others with hundreds of
       | millions of speakers still don't get the predictions at all,
       | don't support multi-language typing and don't support swipe
       | typing. Typing on a $1000 iPhone in one of these languages is
       | still a 2007 experience.
        
         | qingcharles wrote:
         | Meanwhile, Microsoft managed to add Inuktitut to its products,
         | despite only 30K speakers in the world.
         | 
         | I think the Czech government needs to intervene. I believe
         | that's what happened with getting Welsh into Windows too?
        
         | Krasnol wrote:
         | Well, maybe you're not the target group for this product and
         | company and should buy one from the competition? Also tell it
         | to your friends.
         | 
         | I don't think companies like Apple listen to anything but the
         | numbers.
        
           | Toutouxc wrote:
           | I'm an adult and I bought an iPhone knowing there are pros
           | and cons. Some cons are more absurd than others and this is
           | one of them. Otherwise I'm very happy with my Mini.
        
         | tgv wrote:
         | Modern language processing relies on pretty large corpora, and
         | to bootstrap it requires a part to be of high quality and
         | annotated, although for spelling correction you don't need
         | annotation. Or you can go the GPT-3 route and use really huge
         | corpora. If that doesn't exist for your language, and for many
         | smaller languages it doesn't, it won't get better than 2007.
        
           | corbezzoli wrote:
           | Indonesian is spoken by 200M people (45M of which as first
           | language), I bet they could find some text for it. When
           | joined with the Malaysian family, it brings the total
           | speakers to 290M.
        
             | bobthepanda wrote:
             | My understanding is that the languages with better support
             | have the advantage of official bodies that have section-by-
             | section translations of all their documents; the EU into
             | its 24 official languages and the UN with its six, for
             | starters.
        
             | tgv wrote:
             | Building corpora has been an ongoing research activity
             | since the 1990s. Many countries lacked the academic
             | programs and support to build them. Often, the material
             | isn't even there. E.g., wikipedia is a great source, but
             | many "national" wikis are rather empty. The Bahasa wiki has
             | 1/10th of the articles of the English one. They also seem
             | to be shorter.
             | 
             | But also, Apple doesn't do much research. MS, however, has
             | always had an active NLP research and support program, if
             | only because of the importance of Word. But Apple depends
             | on the research available from third parties.
        
           | fauigerzigerk wrote:
           | I'm not sure about that. It doesn't require a huge corpus to
           | learn the structural features of a language. If you have that
           | plus an English dictionary for the language, an English
           | language model should transfer pretty well to any language.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Roark66 wrote:
         | What language is it?
        
           | Toutouxc wrote:
           | In my case it's Czech, but it's the same for many others,
           | even much more common.
        
         | tasogare wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | post-it wrote:
         | My biggest multilingual gripe on iOS is that highlighting text
         | in, say, Czech and pressing Translate on the popup just tells
         | you to fuck off.
         | 
         | Like, sure, don't support the language, but at least give me a
         | Google Translate link then.
        
           | cianmm wrote:
           | They do this for cycling directions in Apple Maps too.
           | 
           | Come on Apple, you KNOW you don't support cycling directions
           | in Ireland - stop getting my hopes up every time I ask for
           | directions. Just only show the button when you're in a geo
           | that supports the feature.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | Same for Danish :(
        
           | chongli wrote:
           | Did you enable the Czech-English dictionary under Settings ->
           | General -> Dictionary?
           | 
           | You can also add Czech as a language under Settings ->
           | General -> Language & Region -> Add Language. This will let
           | you switch your keyboard to Czech when typing and enable the
           | language on websites and stuff. You can also switch the whole
           | phone to Czech if you like, just by moving Czech to the top
           | of the list of preferred languages.
        
             | post-it wrote:
             | I do have the keyboard enabled, but the long press
             | translation feature is a separate thing.
        
             | a1o wrote:
             | For comparison, by simply using Gboard in iPhone you don't
             | need that and can type English and Czech in the same
             | keyboard.
        
               | SSLy wrote:
               | Same with SwiftKey, if for any reason you'd rather not
               | have your keyboard from GOOGL.
        
         | jval43 wrote:
         | Even worse, on the Apple Watch you cannot input text _at all_
         | in one of these languages, as you cannot (!) turn autocorrect
         | off on the watch.
         | 
         | They managed to fit a full QWERTY keyboard on the screen yet
         | made it completely useless.
        
           | doug_life wrote:
           | The thing I find most interning is that typing (in English)
           | on the microscopic Apple Watch keyboard seems to have better
           | results than typing on my phone keyboard. I don't know what
           | the watch keyboard does differently but it seems to read my
           | brain while my phone does the opposite.
        
       | smpanaro wrote:
       | I've been looking at these files too and have another data point
       | for unilm.bundle being the new text prediction.
       | 
       | If you take an iOS simulator, turn off "Settings > General >
       | Keyboard > Predictive", reboot it and then watch the console logs
       | as you turn that switch back on, you'll see the "kbd" process
       | load the models out of that bundle.
        
       | 01851159997 wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | 01851159997 wrote:
         | [flagged]
        
       | toxik wrote:
       | The example output reads exactly like the existing output, I have
       | had it get caught in exactly that cycle.
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | Even large language models with billions of parameters get
         | caught in the cycle. You don't usually see it exposed to users
         | because there are sampling tricks applied, such as
         | repetition/frequency penalty.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | Such penalties would only exist for fine-tuned models. Base
           | models have only the temperature setting. As the example at
           | the end shows, even GPT-2 seems "smarter" than the Apple
           | model, probably because of the number of parameters.
        
             | dchest wrote:
             | There's no such thing as "base models have only the
             | temperature setting". Models do not have sampling settings
             | (temperature, repetition penalty, etc), the sampling code
             | does, which obviously you can use on any model.
             | 
             | For example, here's a function from llama.cpp that applies
             | repetition penalty: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/
             | blob/master/llama.cpp...
             | 
             | Here's the one from transformers: https://github.com/huggin
             | gface/transformers/blob/0a55d9f7376...
             | 
             | To summarize how they work: you keep some number of
             | previously generated tokens, and once you get logits that
             | you want to sample a new token from, you find the logits
             | for existing tokens and multiply them by a penalty, thus
             | lowering the probability of the corresponding tokens.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | I don't think such penalties were applied to GPT-2 or
               | even GPT-3, yet they weren't repetitive like that.
        
               | dchest wrote:
               | Yes, they are applied. Here's OpenAI doc which describes
               | how to set various sampling parameters for GPT-3:
               | 
               | https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-
               | reference/completions/c...
               | 
               | See presence_penalty and frequency_penalty.
               | 
               | Sampling techniques is one of important arts of LLMs,
               | you'll can find a lot of papers on them.
               | 
               | In general, smaller are more prone to repetition, but you
               | can get caught in it even with larger models.
        
               | dchest wrote:
               | To clarify: I meant that in general they are commonly
               | applied, but in this case they weren't as the author
               | confirmed. The repetition, of course, doesn't happen all
               | the time.
        
               | jackcook wrote:
               | Yes, you're right, I should have mentioned it in the
               | post, but I used pure greedy sampling for the GPT-2
               | outputs since I couldn't do anything but that for the
               | Apple model. So temperature was set to zero, and there
               | was no repetition penalty.
        
           | toxik wrote:
           | I don't agree, it's not very common for LLMs to get stuck in
           | loops simply because loops are not commonly observed in the
           | datasets.
        
             | dchest wrote:
             | Try running llama.cpp with 0 temperature and without
             | repetition penalty and you'll sometimes get caught in a
             | loop.
             | 
             | Or, if you're okay with a smaller LLM, go here, set
             | temperature to zero and enjoy repetition:
             | https://transformer.huggingface.co/doc/distil-gpt2
             | 
             | https://imgur.com/a/hF1Ewk4
        
             | avianlyric wrote:
             | That's where you're wrong. Raw LLM very often get stuck in
             | loops, usually extremely small loops. There's a big chunk
             | of infrastructure that exists on the output end of any
             | production LLM that exists explicitly for the purpose of
             | preventing loops.
             | 
             | That post-processing infrastructure can use all kinds of
             | mechanisms to prevent loops and induce more useful output.
             | With the most basic simply systems simply refusing to
             | select any output token that already in the input, to more
             | complex stochastic process that explore the tree of
             | possible outputs, to find branches whose overall result is
             | improved by choosing less optimal immediate steps.
             | 
             | The vast majority of what make Chat GPT different to
             | simpler GPT-3 models is this complex post-processing phase
             | that allows designers to push and pull on the behaviour of
             | the pre-baked static model underlying the chat interface.
        
       | keyle wrote:
       | In typical Apple fashion, when everyone's going bigger and
       | stronger, they're going in a different direction... With
       | optimising to the smallest model that can run all day without
       | draining your battery.
       | 
       | I love that they're almost never first to market but they find a
       | way to distil value than others don't. It's the almond milk of
       | technology.
        
         | jaimex2 wrote:
         | In typical Apple fanboy fashion they are oblivious to what
         | Google has been doing for over two years now.
        
           | kkielhofner wrote:
           | Apple put neural in their silicon a full four years before
           | Google did:
           | 
           | https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/09/the-future-is-here-
           | ip...
           | 
           | https://blog.research.google/2021/11/improved-on-device-
           | ml-o...
           | 
           | Apple has just been more methodical to the rest of the
           | ecosystem - essentially waiting to understand use-cases
           | before fully embracing it across their ecosystem from Apple
           | Silicon in Mac with neural and `device=mps`, CoreML, and now
           | more-or-less full force with their ML studio now in Xcode.
           | 
           | Many apps didn't wait for this and Snapchat, as one example,
           | has been successfully taking advantage of Apple Neural since
           | the early early days.
           | 
           | There are many reasons Apple has been the world's most
           | valuable company for over a decade. One certainly is that
           | they have a prescient ability to predict where the market is
           | going, even if they have to use their ever-building position
           | to drag things that way. As demonstrated by the facts and
           | references I provided above, not to mention the iPhone
           | essentially re-defining what a smartphone is way back when
           | Blackberry was the current market leader.
        
             | lern_too_spel wrote:
             | > Apple put neural in their silicon a full four years
             | before Google did:
             | 
             | You're confusing when Google started designing its own
             | mobile SOC with when Android devices (including Google's)
             | first started using neural network accelerators, which
             | happened months earlier on Android than on iPhones.
             | 
             | https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2017/01/tensorflow-
             | machine...
             | 
             | As for GP's claim, Android has indeed had what the iPhone
             | is now getting for two years:
             | https://blog.research.google/2021/10/grammar-correction-
             | as-y...
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | > You're confusing when Google started designing its own
               | mobile SOC with when Android devices (including Google's)
               | first started using neural network accelerators, which
               | happened months earlier on Android than on iPhones.
               | 
               | Apple (famously) doesn't announce until new
               | functionality/devices are actually available. When they
               | announce real people in the real world get it within a
               | week if not less.
               | 
               | A press release from Qualcomm that came a few months
               | before Apple actually got it in people's hands only
               | further demonstrates that Apple was working on this long
               | before Qualcomm included it in the chipsets that lag on
               | the market from Android device manufacturers.
               | 
               | > As for GP's claim, Android has indeed had what the
               | iPhone is now getting for two years
               | 
               | You meant to say that Pixel had a variant at that time
               | with Gboard. I'm not going to bother to do the research
               | on Gboard on iOS but I suspect it was also available on
               | iOS with Gboard at the same time or soon thereafter. If
               | not that's on the Gboard team at Google for not
               | supporting neural on iOS and Apple hardware that came
               | far, far sooner.
               | 
               | On a somewhat-negative Apple take they are infamous for
               | being, ummm, "inspired by" successful apps and add-ons in
               | terms of what makes it to iOS. I wouldn't be surprised in
               | the least if Gboard vs built-in iOS keyboard is another
               | one of these cases.
        
               | lern_too_spel wrote:
               | > A press release from Qualcomm that came a few months
               | before Apple actually got it in people's hands
               | 
               | This press release was for a new Tensorflow release for
               | devices that had been shipping for many months before
               | that. It was _in people 's hands_ long before Apple even
               | announced anything similar.
               | 
               | > If not that's on the Gboard team at Google for not
               | supporting neural on iOS and Apple hardware that came
               | far, far sooner.
               | 
               | Once again, Apple's hardware came later than Qualcomm's
               | hardware. Pixel phones come with a lot of features that
               | could be implemented on iOS, but why should Google go
               | through the work of porting it only to promote a
               | competitor's inferior platform? For example, Google Maps
               | with navigation shipped years earlier on Android. Grammar
               | check with a transformer model is now on all Android
               | devices in Gboard (for more than a year and a half) and
               | still no iOS devices.
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | All this thread has taught me is that Google/Apple
               | religious zealotry is a very real thing.
               | 
               | What's interesting about this "debate" is my original
               | links very, very, very clearly show the reality: Google
               | being excited about launching the Pixel 6 (in 2021) with
               | Tensor silicon - a first for them.
               | 
               | All anyone on this thread has done since is refuse to
               | acknowledge how obvious and clear that is while
               | deflecting and throwing things at the wall.
        
             | flangola7 wrote:
             | How does Snapchat use it?
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | https://qz.com/1005879/snapchat-quietly-revealed-how-it-
               | can-...
        
               | smoldesu wrote:
               | The linked paper makes no reference to CoreML or Apple in
               | general. It seems to be CPU-accelerated on all platforms,
               | iPhone included.
               | 
               | Do you have another source that goes into Apple's
               | implementation?
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | I'm pretty fatigued on constantly providing references
               | and sources in this thread but an example of what they've
               | made availably publicly (second result Googling "snap
               | coreml"):
               | 
               | https://github.com/snap-research/EfficientFormer
        
               | lern_too_spel wrote:
               | Your linked source says Snapchat has been using CoreML
               | for neural network acceleration since 2022, which is not
               | "since the early days" as you had originally claimed.
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | The link was provided to refute "Snap uses CPU". The repo
               | is from 2022 but do you really think Snap publishes
               | breaking code and papers on new, novel, and highly
               | competitive functionality? The snap-research GH org
               | wasn't even created until 2020. Do you really think they
               | weren't doing anything before that because it's not on
               | Github?
               | 
               | This thread has been exhausting, I suspect due to the
               | religious war that is Apple/Google. As I've said time and
               | time again - if you're genuinely curious Google is your
               | friend here and it takes seconds to find any number of
               | apps, projects, etc using CoreML in 2017.
        
               | smoldesu wrote:
               | It's important to ask, because your sources are not
               | referring to the same thing. The first is a reference to
               | training techniques that have nothing to do with CoreML
               | or Apple hardware. The second thing you've linked is a
               | transformer model from 2022 that was ported to CoreML
               | (alongside Pytorch, ONNX and 10+ other execution
               | providers).
               | 
               | It's extremely unclear how any of these sources
               | corroborate your claim, particularly the first link. It's
               | why I asked for clarification.
        
               | kkielhofner wrote:
               | Is it really so hard to believe that the technical
               | details of Snap's implementation just may not have been
               | made publicly available at the time they deployed it?
               | It's not as though they're known for running a breaking
               | engineering blog like some smaller companies... Speaking
               | of which:
               | 
               | In my top comment I said "Snapchat, as one example". Feel
               | free to search around to find others that were more
               | transparent on implementation details, such as this
               | random weight loss app from 2017:
               | 
               | https://loseitblog.com/2017/11/10/on-device-image-
               | recognitio...
               | 
               | They actually include the following sentence: "While we
               | are still awaiting the official launch of Tensorflow
               | Lite, Apple released CoreML with iOS 11."
               | 
               | And another:
               | 
               | https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3132787.3132815
               | 
               | If you're genuinely curious there are plenty of
               | references of apps using CoreML in 2017 (again, Google)
               | but at this point I'm pretty confident you're just
               | (lazily) trying to win an argument.
        
         | [deleted]
        
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