[HN Gopher] OpenAI and Apple Announce Partnership
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI and Apple Announce Partnership
Author : serjester
Score : 353 points
Date : 2024-06-10 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| talldayo wrote:
| > The ChatGPT integration, _powered by GPT-4o_ , will come to
| iOS, iPadOS, and macOS later this year.
|
| Jensen Huang must be having the time of his life right now.
| Nvidia's relationship with Apple went from pariah to prodigal
| son, _real_ fast.
| dereg wrote:
| If we know anything about Apple, they're going after Nvidia. If
| anyone can pull it off, it's going to be them.
| talldayo wrote:
| Well, good luck to Apple then. Hopefully this attempt at
| killing Nvidia goes better than the first time they tried, or
| when they tried and gave-up on making OpenCL.
|
| I just don't understand how they can compete on their own
| merits without purpose-built silicon; the M2 Ultra doesn't
| shine a candle to a single GB200. Once you consider how
| Nvidia's offerings are networked with Mellanox and CUDA
| universal memory, it feels like the only advantage Apple has
| in the space is setting their own prices. If they want to be
| competitive, I don't think they're going to be training Apple
| models on Apple Silicon.
| 0xWTF wrote:
| S&P 500 average P:E - 20 to 25
|
| NASDAQ average P:E - 31
|
| NVidia's P:E - 71
|
| That's a market of 1 vendor. That's ripe for attack.
| talldayo wrote:
| Let's check in with OpenCL and see how far it got
| disrupting CUDA.
|
| You see, I _want_ to live in a world where GPU
| manufacturers aren 't perpetually hostile against each
| other. Even Nvidia would, judging by their decorum with
| Khronos. Unfortunately, some manufacturers would rather
| watch the world burn than work together for the common
| good. Even if a perfect CUDA replacement existed like it
| did with DXVK and DirectX, Apple will ignore and deny it
| while marketing something else to their customers. We've
| watched this happen for years, and it's why MacOS
| perennially cannot run many games or reliably support
| Open Source software. It is because Apple is an
| unreasonably fickle OEM, and their users constantly pay
| the price for Apple's arbitrary and unnecessary
| isolationism.
|
| Apple thinks they can disrupt AI? It's going to be like
| watching Stalin try to disrupt Wal-Mart.
| labcomputer wrote:
| > Let's check in with OpenCL and see how far it got
| disrupting CUDA.
|
| That's entirely the fault of AMD and Intel fumbling the
| ball in front of the other team's goal.
|
| For _ages_ the only accelerated backend supported by
| PyTorch and TF was CUDA. Whose fault was that? Then there
| was buggy support for a subset of operations for a while.
| Then everyone stopped caring.
|
| Why I think it will go different this time: nVidia's
| competitors seem to have finally woken up and realized
| they need to support high level ML frameworks. "Apple
| Silicon" is essentially fully supported by PyTorch these
| days (via the "mps" backend). I've heard OpenCL works
| well now too, but have no hardware to test it on.
| anvuong wrote:
| It's ripe for attack. But Nvidia is still in its growing
| phase, not some incumbent behemoth. The way Nvidia
| ruthlessly handled AMD tell us that they are ready for
| competition.
| riquito wrote:
| > That's a market of 1 vendor. That's ripe for attack.
|
| it's just a monopoly [1] , how hard can it be?
|
| /s
|
| - [1] practically, because of how widespread cuda is
| baq wrote:
| cuda is x86. the only way from 100% market share is down.
|
| ...though it took two solid decades to even make a dent
| in x86.
| talldayo wrote:
| CUDA is also ARM: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-
| downloads?target_os=Linux
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i would strongly take the other side of that bet
| dereg wrote:
| Nvidia obviously has an enormous, enormous moat but I do
| think this is one of the areas in which Apple may actually
| GAF. The rollout of Apple Intelligence is going to make
| them the biggest provider of "edge" inference on day one.
| They're not going to be able to ride on optimism in
| services growth forever.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Apple simply does not have the talent pool to take on
| either nvidia or the big LLM providers anywhere on the
| stack except for edge inference.
|
| If you're saying Apple is going to 'take on nvidia' in
| edge inference, then I don't disagree but I would hardly
| even count that as taking on nvidia.
| dereg wrote:
| I can't really dispute any of that.
|
| It took almost a decade but the PA Semi acquisition
| showed that Apple was able to get out of the shadow of
| its PowerPC era.
|
| Nvidia will remain a leader in this space for a long
| time. But things are going to play out wonky and Apple,
| when determined, are actually pretty good at executing on
| longer-term roadmaps.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Personally, I'm taking _both_ sides of that bet.
|
| I think Apple is going to make rapid and substantial
| advancements in on-device AI-specific hardware. I also
| think nVIDIA is going to continue to dominate the cloud
| infrastructure space for training foundational models for
| the foreseeable future, and serving user-facing LLM
| workloads for a long time as well.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| edge inference? sure - but nvidia is not even a major
| player in that space now so i wouldn't really count that
| as 'taking on nvidia'.
| MR4D wrote:
| Why do you think that?
|
| You seem to be positioning this as a Ford vs Chevy duel, when
| (to me at least) the comparison should be to Ford vs Exxon.
|
| Nvidia is an infrastructure company. And a darned good one.
| Apple is a user facing company and has outsourced
| infrastructure for decades (AWS & Azure being two of the well
| known ones).
| dereg wrote:
| Apple outsourced chips to IBM (PowerPC) for a long time and
| floundered all the while. They went into the game
| themselves w/ the PA Semi acquisition and now they have
| Apple Silicon to show for it.
| MR4D wrote:
| But Apple is vertically integrating. Thats like Ford
| buying Bridgestone.
|
| The only way it hurts Nvidia is if Apple becomes the
| runaway leader of the pc market. Even then, Apple hasn't
| shown any intent of selling GPUs or AI processors to the
| likes of AWS, or Azure or Oracle, etc.
|
| Nvidia has a much bigger threat from with Intel/AMD or
| the cloud providers backward integrating and then not
| buying Nvidia chips. Again, no signs that Apple wants to
| do this.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Apple could have moved on Nvidia but instead they seem to
| have thrown in the towel and handed cash back to investors.
| The OpenAI deal seems like further admission by Apple that
| they missed the AI boat.
| gizmo wrote:
| Exactly. Apple really needs new growth drivers and Nvidia has
| a 3bn market cap Apple wants to take a bite out of. One of
| the few huge tech growth areas that Apple can expand into.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I am of course wrong frequently, but I cannot see how that
| would happen. If they create cpu/gpus that are faster/better
| than what Nvidia sells, but they only sell them as part of a
| Mac desktop or laptop systems it wont really compete.
|
| For that they would have to develop servers that has a mass
| amount of whatever it is or sell the chips in the same manner
| Nvidia does today.
|
| I dont see that future for Apple.
|
| Microsoft / Google / or other major cloud companies would do
| extremely well if they could develop it and just keep it as a
| major win for their cloud products.
|
| Azure is running OpenAI as far as I have heard.
|
| Imagine if M$ made a crazy fast GPU/whatever. It would be a
| huge competitive advantage.
|
| Can it happen? I dont think so.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Eh, it seems from the keynote that ChatGPT will be very
| selectively used, while most features will be powered by on-
| device processing and Apple's own private cloud _running apple
| silicon_.
|
| So all in all, not sure if it's that great for Nvidia.
| 01100011 wrote:
| If OpenAI is furiously buying GPUs to train larger models and
| Apple is handing OpenAI cash, then this seems like a win for
| Nvidia. You can argue about how big of a win, but it seems
| like a positive development.
|
| What would not have been positive for Nvidia is Apple saying
| they've adapted their HW to server chips and would be
| partnering with OpenAI to leverage them, but that didn't
| happen. Apple is busy handing cash back to investors and not
| seriously pursuing anything but inference.
| ra7 wrote:
| Didn't Apple say they're using their own hardware for serving
| some of the AI workloads? They dubbed it 'Private Cloud
| Compute'. Not sure how much of a vote of confidence it is for
| Nvidia.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| not for gpt4o workloads they aren't going to
| jsheard wrote:
| Plus even if Apple is using their own chips for
| inferencing, they're still driving more demand for
| training, which Nvidia still has locked down pretty tight.
| ra7 wrote:
| Apple said they're using their own silicon for training.
|
| Edit: unless I misunderstood and they meant only
| inference.
| talldayo wrote:
| They trained GPT-4o on Apple Silicon? I find that hard to
| believe, surely they only mean that _some_ models were
| trained with Apple Silicon.
| ra7 wrote:
| Not GPT-4o, their own models that power some (most?) of
| the "Apple Intelligence" stuff.
| jsheard wrote:
| Interesting, I thought Apple Silicon mainly excelled at
| inferencing. Though I suppose the economics of it are
| unique for Apple themselves since they can fill racks
| full of barebones Apple Silicon boards without having to
| pay their own retail markup for complete assembled
| systems like everyone else does.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| without more details hard to say, but i seriously doubt
| they trained any significantly large LM on their own
| hardware
|
| people on HN routinely seem to overestimate Apple's
| capabilities
|
| e: in fact, iirc just last month Apple released a paper
| unveiling their 'OpenElm' language models and they were
| all trained on nvidia hardware
| ra7 wrote:
| Which is only a subset of requests Apple devices will serve
| and only with explicit user permission. That's going to
| shrink over time as Apple continue to advance their own
| models and silicon.
| stetrain wrote:
| Right, but are those going to run on Apple-owned hardware
| at all? It seems like Apple will first prioritize their
| models running on-device, then their models running on
| Apple Silicon servers, and then bail out to ChatGPT API
| calls specifically for Siri requests that they think can be
| better answered by ChatGPT.
|
| I'm sure OpenAI will need to beef up their hardware to
| handle these requests - even as filtered down as they are -
| coming from all of the Apple users that will now be
| prompting calls to ChatGPT.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| they're going to be using nvidia (or maybe AMD if they
| ever catch up) to train these models anyways
| kolinko wrote:
| not necessarily so, in terms of tflops per $ (of apple's
| cost of gpus, nit consumer), and tflops per watt their
| apple silicon is comparable if not better
| whimsicalism wrote:
| flops/$ is simply not all (or even most) that matters
| when it comes to training LLMs.... Apple releases LLM
| research - all of their models are trained on nvidia.
| talldayo wrote:
| > and tflops per watt their apple silicon is comparable
| if not better
|
| If Apple currently ships a single product with better AI
| performance-per-watt than Blackwell, I will eat my hat.
| lxgr wrote:
| They're even explicitly saying:
|
| > These models run on servers powered by Apple silicon [...]
|
| That doesn't mean that there are no Nvidia GPUs in these
| servers, of course.
| Dunedan wrote:
| That quote is about their own LLMs, not about the use of
| ChatGPT.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yes, but GP was talking about the AI workloads Apple will
| be running on their own servers (which are indeed
| distinct from those explicitly labeled as ChatGPT).
| bbatsell wrote:
| They say user data remains in the Secure Enclave at all
| times, which Nvidia GPUs would not be able to access. I am
| quite certain that their private cloud inference runs only
| Apple silicon chips. (The pre-WWDC rumors were that they
| built custom clusters using M2 Ultras.)
| talldayo wrote:
| Not that it matters anyways, since Apple refuses to sign
| Nvidia GPU drivers for MacOS in the first place. So if
| they own any Nvidia hardware themselves, then they also
| own more third-party hardware to support it.
| Whatarethese wrote:
| ChatGPT will only be invoked if on device and apple
| intelligence servers cant handle request.
| croes wrote:
| To be useful Apple has to share the data with OpenAI
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I can only imagine Apple has some kind of siloing agreement
| with OpenAI, Apple can easily afford whatever price to do
| so.
| talldayo wrote:
| Surely Apple wouldn't simply _market_ privacy while lying
| to their users about who can access their data:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-
| to-...
| noahtallen wrote:
| Yes, also covered explicitly in the keynote that Apple
| user's requests to openAI are not tracked. (Plus you have
| the explicit opt-in to even access chatGPT via siri in
| the first place.)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Not sure Nvidia is too happy with Apple.
|
| They are the first ones to ship on-device inference at scale on
| non-nvidia hardware. Apple also has the means to build data
| center training hardware using apple silicon if they want to do
| so.
|
| If they are serious about the OAI partnership they could also
| start to supply them with cloud inference hardware and
| strongarm them into only using apple servers to serve iOS
| requests.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Apple also has the means to build data center training
| hardware using apple silicon if they want to do so.
|
| i'm seeing people all over this thread saying stuff like
| that, it reads like fantasyland to me. Apple doesn't have the
| talent or the chips or suppliers or really any of the
| capabilities to do this, where are people getting it from?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Apple is already one of the largest (if not the largest)
| customers of TSMC and they have plenty of experience
| designing some of the best chips on the most modern nodes.
|
| Their ability to design a chip and networking fabric which
| is fast/efficient at training a narrow set of model
| architecture is not far fetched by any means.
| talldayo wrote:
| It's worth noting that one of Apple's largest competitor
| at TSMC is, in fact, Nvidia. And when you line the
| benchmarks up, Nvidia is one of the few companies that
| consistently beats Apple on performance-per-watt even
| when they _aren 't_ on the same TSMC node:
| https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Apple also has the means to build data center training
| hardware using apple silicon if they want to do so.
|
| > If they are serious about the OAI partnership they could
| also start to supply them with cloud inference hardware and
| strongarm them into only using apple servers to serve iOS
| requests
|
| Apple addressed both these points in today's preso.
|
| 1. They will send requests that require larger contexts to
| their own Apple Silicon-based servers that will provide Apple
| devices a new product platform called Private Cloud Compute.
|
| 2. Apple's OS generative AI request APIs won't even talk to
| cloud compute resources that do not attest to infrastructure
| that has a publicly available privacy audit.
| wmf wrote:
| I'm pretty sure those points do not apply to ChatGPT
| integration. ChatGPT is still running on Nvidia.
| mistersquid wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure those points do not apply to ChatGPT
| integration.
|
| You're absolutely right. I got too excited about Apple's
| strategy to encourage developers to use Apple Private
| Cloud Compute.
|
| The UX for ChatGPT as shown for iOS 18 makes it obvious
| that you are sending data outside the Apple Silicon
| walled garden.
| talldayo wrote:
| > They are the first ones to ship on-device inference at
| scale on non-nvidia hardware
|
| Which is neat, but it's not CUDA. It's an application-
| specific accelerator good at a small subset of operations,
| controlled by a high-level library the industry is unfamiliar
| with and too underpowered to run LLMs or image generators.
| The NPU is a novelty, and today's presentation more-or-less
| confirmed how useless it is for rich local-only operations.
|
| > Apple also has the means to build data center training
| hardware using apple silicon if they want to do so.
|
| They could, but that's not a competitor against an NVL72 with
| hundreds of terabytes of unified GPU memory. And then they
| would need a CUDA competitor, which could either mean
| reviving OpenCL's rotting corpse, adopting Tensorflow/Pytorch
| like a sane and well-reasoned company, or reinventing the
| wheel with an extra library/Accelerate Framework/MPS solution
| that nobody knows about and has to convert models to use.
|
| So they _can_ make servers, but Xserve showed us pretty
| clearly that you can lead a sysadmin to MacOS but you can 't
| make them use it.
|
| > they could also start to supply them with cloud inference
| hardware and strongarm them into only using apple servers to
| serve iOS requests.
|
| I wonder how much money they would lose doing that, over just
| using the industry-standard Nvidia servers. Once you factor
| in the margins they would have made selling those chips as
| consumer systems, it's probably in the tens-of-millions.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| You're approaching this from a developers point of view.
|
| Users absolutely don't care if their prompt response has
| been generated by a CUDA kernel or some poorly documented
| apple specific silicon a poor team at cupertino almost lost
| their sanity to while porting the model.
|
| And haven't they already spent quite a bit on money on
| their pytorch-like MLX framework?
| talldayo wrote:
| > Users absolutely don't care if their prompt response
| has been generated by a CUDA kernel or some poorly
| documented apple specific silicon
|
| They most certainly will. If you run GPT-4o on an iPhone
| with MLX, it will suck. Users will tell you it sucks, and
| they won't do so in developer-specific terms.
|
| The entire point of this thread is that Apple _can 't_
| make users happy with their Neural Engine. They require a
| stopgap cloud solution to make up for the lack of local
| power on iPhone.
|
| > And haven't they already spent quite a bit on money on
| their pytorch-like MLX framework?
|
| As well as Accelerate Framework, Metal Performance
| Shaders and previously, OpenCL. Apple can't decide where
| to focus their efforts, least of which in a way that
| threatens CUDA as a platform.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Imho, the stronghold of cuda is slowly eroding.
|
| Inference can run without it, and could so for years via
| ONNX. Now we are starting to see more back-ends becoming
| available.
|
| see https://github.com/openxla
| alextheparrot wrote:
| Bit of a detail, but where are you deriving "with hundreds
| of terabytes of unified GPU memory" from?
| talldayo wrote:
| I was an order of magnitude off, at least in the case of
| NVL72: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-
| center/gb200-nvl72/
|
| But the point stands, these systems occupy a niche that
| Apple Silicon is poorly suited to filling. They run
| normal Linux, they support common APIs, and network to
| dozens of other machines using Infiniband.
| Miraste wrote:
| > reinventing the wheel with an extra library/Accelerate
| Framework/MPS solution that nobody knows about and has to
| convert models to use.
|
| This is Apple's favorite thing in the world. They already
| have an Apple-Silicon-only ML framework as of a few months
| ago, called MLX. Does anyone know about it? No. Do you need
| to convert models to use it? Yes.
| wmf wrote:
| I would say MS Copilot+ is shipping on-device inference a few
| months before Apple, although at 1000x lower volume.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Apple's put ChatGPT integration on the very edge of Apple
| Intelligence. It's a win for OpenAI to have secured that
| opportunity, and Nvidia wins by extension (as long as OpenAI
| continues to rely on them themselves), but the vast majority of
| what Apple announced today appears to run entirely on Apple
| Silicon.
|
| It's not especially big news for Nvidia at all.
| summarity wrote:
| It's an interesting vote of confidence in OpenAI's maturity (from
| a scale and tech perspective) to integrate it as a system wide,
| third-party dependency available to all users for free.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| "interesting" is the right adjective. openai's reliability is
| worse than the typical 2-person startup, but the quality of
| their ml is just that good.
| machinekob wrote:
| Nvidia stock going to grow another 10% after that.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Is Siri becoming another "frontend" to ChatGPT?
| shironandon wrote:
| for most requests.. yes.
| qeternity wrote:
| No, for selectively few requests.
| adolph wrote:
| Just the requests that make for a great keynote demo under
| ideal conditions in SF
| quintes wrote:
| I found some web results that may be useful if you ask me again
| from your iphone
| visarga wrote:
| It was cool how you can just ask Siri to connect you to another
| LLM.
| durpleDrank wrote:
| Kind of funny that we got a double LLM situation happening lol.
| jaskaransainiz wrote:
| Clippy crying
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| GOOG stock seems to be ok with the announcement.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I'm convinced that GOOG has the necessary engineering chops to
| pull the same thing off (or to put it less charitably, copy
| Apple), but hitherto they were hindered by bad product manager
| decisions leading them to engineer the wrong thing.
| kernal wrote:
| And why wouldn't it be? The strain on Microsoft servers and the
| free use of their resources by iOS users with very little, if
| any, in return is a win for Apple. Not so much for OpenAI or
| Microsoft.
| quintes wrote:
| I just need Apple to be clearly indicating which settings will
| completely disable this.
| xylol wrote:
| Some for now, none in the future I fear.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I will disable it as soon as it tells me how to also
| permanently disable live photos.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings. Switch "Live Photo" to
| on. Then disable live photos when taking a picture.
| lxgr wrote:
| From the announcement, it seems like it's opt-in, not opt-out:
|
| > Apple users are asked before any questions are sent to
| ChatGPT,
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Introducing Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence
| system_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40636844
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| IMO this really feels like the Facebook / Twitter integration
| from early iOS. That only lasted a few years.
|
| Apple clearly thinks it needs a dedicated LLM service atm. But
| still thinks it is only supplemental as they handle a bunch of
| the core stuff without it. And require explicit user consent to
| use OpenAI. And Apple clearly views it as a partial commodity
| since they even said they plan to add others.
|
| Tough to bet against OpenAI right now...but this deal does not
| feel like a 10 year deal...
| lanza wrote:
| Ditto. They'll use it now while they stand to benefit and in 3
| years they'll be lambasting OpenAI publicly for not being
| private enough with data and pretend that they never had
| anything to do with them.
| nextworddev wrote:
| This partnership is structured so that no data is logged or
| sent to OpenAI.
| wmf wrote:
| The UI shows a "do you want your data to be sent to
| OpenAI?" popup.
| noahtallen wrote:
| The parent is partially right, the keynote mentioned that
| OpenAI agreed to not track Apple user requests.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would like to see that codified in a binding agreement
| regulators can surface in discovery if needed. Trust but
| verify.
| astrange wrote:
| California and EU law require keeping data like that to
| be opt-in afaik, so it doesn't need a promise to not do
| it.
| dosinga wrote:
| That won't stop Apple from lambasting later
| moralestapia wrote:
| Some people here somehow thinking they will simultaneously
| outsmart:
|
| * The CEO of a _three trillion_ dollar company that employs
| 100,000+ of the best talent you could find around the
| world, with the best lawyers in the world one phone call
| away. Also, one of the best performing CEOs in modern
| times.
|
| AND
|
| * The CEO of the AI company (ok ... non-profit) that pretty
| much brought up the current wave of AI to existence and who
| has also spent the best part of its life building and
| growing 1,000s of startups in SF.
|
| Lol.
| observationist wrote:
| You make it sound like it's merit or competence that
| landed Cook in that position, and that he somehow has
| earned the prestige of the position?
|
| I could buy that argument about Jobs. Cook is just a guy
| with a title. He follows rules and doesn't get fired, but
| otherwise does everything he can with all the resources
| at his disposal to make as much money as possible. Given
| those same constraints and resources, most people with an
| IQ above 120 would do as well. Apple is an institution
| unto itself, and you'd have to repeatedly, rapidly, and
| diabolically corrupt many, many layers of corporate
| protections to hurt the company intentionally. Instead,
| what we see is simple complacency and bureaucracy
| chipping away at any innovative edge that Apple might
| once have had.
|
| Maintenance and steady piloting is a far different
| skillset than innovation and creation.
|
| Make no mistake, Cook won the lottery. He knew the right
| people, worked the right jobs, never screwed up anything
| big, and was at the right place at the right time to land
| where he is. Good for him, but let's not pretend he got
| where he is through preternatural skill or competence.
|
| I know it's a silicon valley trope and all, but the
| c-class mythos is so patently absurd. Most of the best
| leaders just do their best to not screw up. Ones that
| actually bring an unusual amount of value or intellect to
| the table are rare. Cook is a dime a dozen.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I was with you until your last sentence. By all accounts
| Cook was one of the world's most effective managers of
| production and logistics -- a rare talent. He famously
| streamlined Apple's stock-keeping practices when he was a
| new hire at Apple. How much he exercises that talent in
| his day-to-day as CEO is not perfectly clear; it may
| perhaps have atrophied.
|
| In any case, "dime a dozen" doesn't do him justice -- he
| was _very_ accomplished, in ways you can 't fake, before
| becoming CEO.
| observationist wrote:
| I look at it from a perspective of interchangeability -
| if you swapped Steve Ballmer in for Cook, nothing much
| would have changed. Same if you swapped Nadella in for
| Pichai, or Pichai for Cook. Very few of these men are
| exceptional; they are ordinary men with exceptional
| resources at hand. What they can do, what they should do,
| and what they can get away with, unseen, govern their
| impact. Leaders that actually impact their institutions
| are incredibly rare. Our current crop of ship steadying
| industry captains, with few exceptions, are not towering
| figures of incredible prowess and paragons of leadership.
| They're regular guys in extraordinary circumstances. Joe
| Schmo with an MBA, 120 IQ, and the same level of
| institutional knowledge and 2 decades of experience at
| Apple could have done the same as Cook; Apple wouldn't
| have looked much different than it does now.
|
| There's a tendency to exaggerate the qualities of men in
| positions like this. There's nothing inherent to their
| positions requiring greatness or incredible merit. The
| extraordinary events already happened; their job is to
| simply not screw it up, and our system is such that you'd
| have to try really, really hard to have any noticeable
| impact, let alone actually hurt a company before the
| institution itself cuts you out. Those lawyers are a
| significant part of the organism of a modern mega
| corporation; they're the substrate upon which the
| algorithm that _is_ a corporation is running. One of the
| defenses modern corporations employ is to limit the
| impact any individual in the organization can have,
| positive or otherwise, and to employ intense scrutiny and
| certainty of action commensurate with the power of a
| position.
|
| Throw Cook into an start-up arena against Musk, Gates,
| Altman, Jobs, Buffet, etc, and he'd get eaten alive. Cook
| isn't the scrappy, agile, innovative, ruthless start-up
| CEO. He's the complacent, steady, predictable
| institutional CEO coasting on the laurels of his betters,
| shielded from the trials they faced through the sheer
| inertia of the organization he currently helms.
|
| They're different types of leaders for different phases
| of the megacorp organism, and it's OK that Cook isn't
| Jobs 2.0 - that level of wildness and unpredictability
| that makes those types of leaders their fortunes can also
| result in the downfall of their companies. Musk acts with
| more freedom; the variance in behavior results in a
| variance of fortunes. Apple is more stable because of
| Cook, but it's not because he's particularly special.
| Simply steady and sane.
| kokanee wrote:
| The partnership is structured so that Apple can legally
| defend including language in their marketing that says
| things like "users' IP addresses are obscured." These
| corporations have proven time and time again that we need
| to read these statements with the worst possible
| interpretation.
|
| For example, when they say "requests are not stored by
| OpenAI," I have to wonder how they define "requests," and
| whether a request not having been stored by OpenAI means
| that the request data is not accessible or even outright
| owned by OpenAI. If Apple writes request data to an S3
| bucket owned by OpenAI, it's still defensible to say that
| OpenAI didn't store the request. I'm not saying that's the
| case; my point is that I don't trust these parties and I
| don't see a reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
|
| The freakiest thing about it is that I probably have no way
| to prevent this AI integration from being installed on my
| devices. How could that be the case if there was no profit
| being extracted from my data? Why would they spend untold
| amounts on this deal and forcibly install expensive
| software on my personal devices at no cost to me? The
| obvious answer is that there is a cost to me, it's just not
| an immediate debit from my bank account.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Sure
| chaosmanorism wrote:
| Careful, Elon got outed by his own xAI:
|
| https://grook.ai/saved_session?id=e269e88a7b1a71eff4f176c864.
| ..
| adolph wrote:
| Not looking forward to the equivalent of the early Apple Maps
| years.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| There's a lot I don't like about Sam Altman. There's a lot I
| don't like about OpenAI.
|
| But goddamn they absolutely leapfrogged Google and Apple and
| it's completely amazing to see these trillion dollar companies
| play catch-up with a start-up.
|
| I want to see more of this. Big Tech has been holding back
| innovation for too long.
| swatcoder wrote:
| They "leapfrogged" _Google_ on providing a natural language
| interface to the world knowledge we 'd gotten used to
| retrieving throug web search. But Apple's never done more
| than toyed in that space.
|
| Apple's focus has long been on a lifestyle product experience
| across their portfolio of hardware, and Apple Intelligence
| appears to be focused exactly on that in a way that has
| little overlap with OpenAI's offerings. The partnership
| agreement announced today is just outsourcing an accessory
| tool to a popular and suitably scaled vendor, the same as
| they did for web search and social network integration in the
| past. Nobody's leapfrogging anybody between these two because
| they're on totally different paths.
| itishappy wrote:
| Siri is a toy, but I don't think that was Apple's intent.
| It's been a long-standing complaint that using Siri to
| search the web sucks compared to other companies offerings.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Apple's product focus is on getting Siri to bridge your
| first-party and third-party apps, your 500GB of on-device
| data, and your terabyte of iCloud data with a nice
| interface, all of which they're trying to deliver using
| their own technology.
|
| Having Siri answer your trivia question about whale
| songs, or suggest a Pad Thai recipe modification when you
| ran out of soy sauce, is just not where they see the
| value. Poor web search has been an easy critique to weigh
| against Siri for the last many years, and the ChatGPT
| integration (and Apple's own local prompt prep) should
| fare far better than that, but it doesn't have any
| relevance to "leapfrogging" because the two companies
| just aren't trying to do the same thing.
| itishappy wrote:
| That's the complaint! They play in the same space, they
| just don't seem to be trying. Siri happily returns links
| to Pad Thai recipes, it's not like they didn't expect
| this to be a use-case. They just haven't made a UX that
| competes with others.
|
| And it's not just web search! Siri's context is abysmal.
| My dad routinely has to correct the spelling of _his own
| name_. It 's a common name, there are multiple spellings,
| _but it 's his phone_!
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| My favorite thing with names is I have some people in my
| contacts who have names that are phonetically similar to
| English words. When I type those words in a text or
| email, Siri will change those words to people's names.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| Ah yes, them saying "we're bad at it on purpose, but are
| scrambling to throw random features in our next release"
| is definitely a great defense.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| Apple bought Siri 14 years ago, derailed the progress and
| promise it had by neglect, and ended up needing a bail out
| from Sam once he kicked their ass in assistants.
|
| Call it whatever you want.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Isn't MS heavily invested in them and also letting them use
| Azure pretty extensively? Rather, I think this is more like
| an interesting model of a big tech company actually managing
| to figure out exactly how hands off they need to be, in order
| to not suffocate any ember of innovation. (In this mixed
| analogy people often put out fires with their bare hands I
| guess, don't think too hard about it).
| beoberha wrote:
| Big Tech is the only reason OpenAI can run. Microsoft is
| propping them up with billions of dollars worth of compute
| and infrastructure
| prince_nerd wrote:
| And the foundational tech (Transformers) came from Big
| Tech, aka Google
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| It came from Google _employees_ who _left_ to found
| startups.
|
| Google _had_ technical founders, now it's run by MBAs and
| they are having a Kodak Moment.
| Fricken wrote:
| Change is inevitable in the AI space, and the changes come in
| fits and starts. In a decade OpenAI too may become a hapless
| fiefdom lorded over by the previous generation's AI talent.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| My gut says that it's a stopgap solution to implement the
| experience they want.
|
| I think Apple's ultimate goal is to move as much of the AI
| functionality as possible on-device.
| romeros wrote:
| yup.. and thats good for the consumers as well because they
| don't have to worry about their private data sitting on open
| ai servers.
| kokanee wrote:
| The idea that they would give ChatGPT away to consumers for
| free without mining the data in some form or another is
| naive.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| But they've also signalled they'll probably support
| Google/Anthropic in the future
|
| > Apple demoed other generative features beyond the OpenAI
| integration and said it plans to announce support for other AI
| models in the future.
| wg0 wrote:
| Actually, just in three to five years, lots of "AI boxes" and
| those magical sparkling icons next to input fields summoning AI
| would be silently removed.
|
| LLMs are not accurate, they aren't subject matter experts
| that'll be maybe within 5% error margin.
|
| People will gradually learn and discover anf the cost of
| keeping a model updated and running won't drastically reduce so
| we'll most likely see dust settling down.
| bee_rider wrote:
| How do you define a percent error margin on the typical
| output of something like ChatGPT? IIRC the image generation
| folks have started using metrics like subjective users
| ratings because this stuff is really difficult to quantify
| objectively.
| airstrike wrote:
| IMHO the terribly overlooked issue with generative AI is
| that the end users' views of the response generated by the
| LLM often differs greatly from the opinion of the person
| actually interacting with the model
|
| this is particularly evident with image generation, but I
| think it's true across the board. for example, you may
| think something I created on midjourney "looks amazing",
| whereas I may dislike it because it's so far from what I
| had in mind and was actually trying to accomplish when I
| was sending in my prompt
| epolanski wrote:
| Your last paragraph is true regardless of how the image
| was generated.
|
| One can find anything YOU produce to have different
| qualities from you.
| airstrike wrote:
| True, but generally what art I produce IRL is objectively
| terrible, whereas I can come up with some pretty nice
| looking images on Midjourney.... which are still terrible
| to me when I wanted them to look like something else, but
| others may find them appealing because they don't know
| how I've failed at my objective
|
| In other words, there are two different objectives in a
| "drawing": (1) portraying that which I meant to portray
| and (2) making it aesthetically appealing
|
| People who only see the finished product may be impressed
| by #2 and never consider how bad I was at #1
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| I truly hope the reckless enthusiasm for LLMs will cool down,
| but it seems plausible that discretized, compressed versions
| of today's cutting-edge models will eventually be able to run
| entirely locally, even on mobile devices; there are no
| guarantees that they'll get _better_ , but many promising
| opportunities to get the same unreliable results faster and
| with less power consumption. Once the models run on-device,
| there's less of a financial motivation to pull the plug, so
| we could be stuck with them in one form or another for the
| long haul.
| namaria wrote:
| I don't believe this scenario to be very likely because a
| lot of the 'magic' in current LLMs (emphasis on 'large') is
| derived from the size of the training datasets and amount
| of compute they can throw at training and inference.
| valine wrote:
| Llama 3 8B captures that 'magic' fairly well and runs on
| a modest gaming PC. You can even run it on an iPhone 15
| if you're willing to sacrifice floating point precision.
| Three years from now I full expect GPT4 quality models
| running locally on an iPhone.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Three years is _more than twice_ the time since GPT-4 was
| released to now. Almost twice the time ChatGPT existed.
| At this rate, even if we 'll end up with GPT-4
| equivalents runnable on consumer hardware, the top models
| made available by big players via API will make local
| LLMs feel useless. For the time being, the incentive to
| use a service will continue.
|
| It's like a graphics designer being limited to chose
| between local MS Paint, and Adobe Creative Cloud. Okay,
| so Llama 3 8B, if it's really as good as you say,
| graduates to local Paint.NET. Not useless per se, but
| still not even in the same class.
| refulgentis wrote:
| They're extremely pessimistic, 3 years is 200% of how
| long it took ChatGPT 3.5.
|
| Llama 8B is ChatGPT 3.5 (18 months before L3), running on
| all new iPhones released since October 2022, (19 months
| before L3). That includes multimodal variants (built
| outside Facebook).
| valine wrote:
| No one knows how it will all shake out. I'm personally
| skeptical scaling laws will hold beyond GPT4 sized
| models. GPT4 is likely severely undertrained given how
| much data facebook is using to train their 8B parameter
| models. Unless OpenAI has a dramatic new algorithmic
| discovery or a vast trove of previously unused data, I
| think GPT5 and beyond will be modest improvements.
|
| Alternatively synthetic data might drive the next
| generation of models, but that's largely untested at this
| point.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| The one thing people overlook is the user data on
| ChatGPT. That's OpenAI's real moat. That data is "free"
| RLHF data and possibly, training data.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't think that's really what Apple is going to do with it
| though, it's not going to be for factual question and answer
| stuff. It will be used more like a personal assistant, what's
| on my calendar this week, who is the last person who called
| me etc. I think it will more likely be an LLM in the
| background that uses tools to query iCloud and such, ie,
| making Siri actually useful.
| onion2k wrote:
| _LLMs are not accurate, they aren 't subject matter experts
| that'll be maybe within 5% error margin._
|
| You're asserting that the AI features will be removed in 3 to
| 5 years because they're not accurate enough _today_ , but you
| actually need them to remain inaccurate in 3 years time for
| your prediction to be correct.
|
| That seems unlikely. I agree that people will start to
| realize the cost, but the accuracy will improve, so people
| might be willing to pay.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| The same argument can be used for Tesla full self driving:
| basically it has to be (nearly) perfect, and after years of
| development, it's not there yet. What's different about
| LLMs?
| jaapbadlands wrote:
| They don't have to be perfect to be useful, and death
| isn't the price of being wrong.
| ale42 wrote:
| Death actually _can_ be the price of being wrong. Just
| wait for someone to do the wrong thing with an AI tool
| they weren 't supposed to use for what they were doing,
| and the AI to spit out the worse possible "hallucination"
| (in terms of outcome).
| ben_w wrote:
| What you say is true, however with self-driving cars
| death, personal injury, and property damage are much more
| immediate, much more visible, and many of the errors are
| of a kind where most people are qualified to immediately
| understand what the machine did wrong.
|
| An LLM that gives you a detailed plan for removing a
| stubborn stain in your toilet that involves mixing the
| wrong combination of drain cleaners and accidentally
| releasing chlorine, is going to happen if it hasn't
| already, but a lot of people will read about this and go
| "oh, I didn't know you could gas yourself like that" and
| then continue to ask the same model for recipes or
| Norwegian wedding poetry because "what could possibly go
| wrong?"
|
| And if you wonder how anyone can possibly read about such
| a story and react that way, remember that Yann LeCun says
| this kind of thing despite (a) working for Facebook and
| (b) Facebook's algorithm gets flack not only for the
| current teen depression epidemic, but also from the UN
| for not doing enough to stop the (ongoing) genocide in
| Myanmar.
|
| It's a cognitive blind spot of some kind. Plenty smart,
| still can't recognise the connection.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| GPT-4 is 1 year old; 3.5 is 1 and a half. Before 3.5,
| this wasn't really a useful technology. 7 years ago it
| was a research project that Google saw no value in
| pursuing.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| There's hundreds+ of companies making LLMs we can choose
| from, and the switching cost is low. There's only one
| company that can make self-driving software for Tesla.
| Basically, competition should lead to improvements.
| ben_w wrote:
| Tesla aren't the only people trying to make self-driving
| cars, famously Uber tried and Waymo looks like they're
| slowly succeeding. Competition can be useful, but it's
| not a panacea.
| wg0 wrote:
| Anyone claiming that accuracy of AI models WILL improve is
| either unaware of how they really work or is a snake oil
| salesman.
|
| Forget about a model that knows EVERYTHING. Let's just
| train a model that only is expert in not all the law of
| United states just one state and not even that, just
| understands FULLY the tax law of just one state to the
| extent that whatever documents you throw at it, it beats a
| tax consultancy firm every single time.
|
| If even that were possible, OpenAI et.el would be playing
| this game differently.
| ben_w wrote:
| > LLMs are not accurate, they aren't subject matter experts
| that'll be maybe within 5% error margin.
|
| The Gell Mann amnesia effect suggests people will have a very
| hard time noticing the difference. Even if the models never
| improve, they're more accurate than a lot of newspaper
| reporting.
|
| > People will gradually learn and discover anf the cost of
| keeping a model updated and running won't drastically reduce
| so we'll most likely see dust settling down.
|
| So, you're betting on no significant cost reduction of
| compute hardware? Seems implausible to me.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _People will gradually learn and discover anf the cost of
| keeping a model updated and running won 't drastically reduce
| so we'll most likely see dust settling down._
|
| As mentioned elsewhere, 3 to 5 years is some 3x to 5x as long
| as GPT-4 exists; some 2-3x as long as ChatGPT exists and LLMs
| suddenly graduated from being obscure research projects to
| general-purpose tools. Do you really believe the capability
| limit has already been hit?
|
| Not to mention, there's _lots_ of money and reputation
| invested in searching for alternatives to current transformer
| architecture. Are you certain that within the next year or
| two, one or more of the alternatives won 't pan out, bringing
| e.g. linear scaling in place of quadratic, without loss of
| capabilities?
| wg0 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that statistical foundations of AI where a
| thing just been shy of 0.004 of the threshold value out of
| a million dimensional space can get miscategrized as
| something else will not deliver AGI or any useable and
| reliable AI for that matter other than that sequence of
| sequence mapping (voice to text, text to voice etc.)
| applications.
|
| As for money and reputation, that's a lot behind gold
| making too in medieval times and look where that lead too.
|
| Scientific optimism is a thinking distortion and a fallacy
| too.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| It's a win for OpenAI and AI. I remember someone on Hacker News
| commented that OpenAI is a company searching for a market. This
| move might prove that AI, and OpenAI, has a legitimate way to
| be used and profitable. We'll see.
| eddieplan9 wrote:
| Steve Jobs famously said Dropbox is a feature not a product.
| This feels very much like it.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Well, Dropbox is a sub $8bn company now that hasn't really
| grown in 5 years, so maybe Steve was right?
| pembrook wrote:
| Yea, I mean...if you're only doing $3.5Bn in annual
| revenue at 83% gross margins...like, are you even a
| product bro?
| epolanski wrote:
| If anything, your words prove he was absolutely wrong.
| dymk wrote:
| Looking at their stock performance and the amount of work
| they've put into features that aren't Dropbox file sync, he
| appears to have been right. iCloud doc syncing is what DB
| offered at that time.
| kovezd wrote:
| Disagree. This feels more like the Google partnership with
| Apple' Safari that has lasted for long time. Except in this
| case, I think is OpenAI who will get the big checks.
| lxgr wrote:
| Why would Apple want to keep paying big checks while
| simultaneously weakening their privacy story?
| dereg wrote:
| If Apple wasn't selling privacy, I'd assume the other way
| around. Or if anything, OpenAI would give the service out for
| free. There's a reason why ChatGPT became free to the public,
| GPT-4o moreover. It's obvious that OpenAI needs whatever data
| it can get its hands on to train GPT-5.
| astrange wrote:
| ChatGPT was free to the public because it was a toy for a
| conference. They didn't expect it to be popular because it
| was basically already available in Playground for months.
|
| I think 4o is free because GPT3.5 was so relatively bad it
| means people are constantly claiming LLMs can't do things
| that 4 does just fine.
| Dunedan wrote:
| Apple doesn't even bother to highlight their cooperation with
| OpenAI. Instead they bury the integration of ChatGPT as the
| last section of their "Apple Intelligence" announcement:
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/06/introducing-apple-
| int...
| blueelephanttea wrote:
| If Apple were paying to use Google the partnership would not
| still exist today.
| halotrope wrote:
| yeah somehow it reminded me of the fb integration too. we'll
| see how well it works in practice. i was hoping for them to
| show the sky demo with the new voice mode that openai recently
| demoed
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I still don't know a single person who wants this crap. I don't
| want "AI" in my web browser, I don't want it in my email client,
| I don't want it on my phone, I just don't want it. And it feels
| like everyone I speak to agrees! So who is this all for?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| maybe you come on too strong for people who disagree to voice
| it
|
| personally i like it and want it, except in places where it is
| shoehorned
| myheadasplode wrote:
| I don't really care for AI in google search results or email.
| It's often wrong and not what I'm looking for. I _would_ like a
| much better Siri, so hopefully that 's part of what we get.
| incognito124 wrote:
| The holders of the shares?
| trustno2 wrote:
| It _did_ help me to translate nursery rhymes for my kid from
| one language to another while they still rhyme and mean
| approximately the same thing. It sucked in gpt-3 but 4o (or
| whatever is the latest one) is actually really great for that.
|
| It excels in "transfering style from one thing to another
| thing" basically.
|
| However every time I asked it a factual thing that I couldn't
| find on Google, it was always hilariously wrong
| sureglymop wrote:
| I highly agree. And everything it has generated so far has been
| incredibly mid. Yeah, there may be some legitimate use cases
| but as it usually goes everyone is overdoing it head first
| without really thinking enough about it beforehand.
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| no one wanted an iphone until it came out either
| ipaddr wrote:
| Everyone wanted something like an iphone and when it came it
| took over the market. We had a product that got shifted into
| a third world product overnight.
| educasean wrote:
| Now you know a few. I love the idea of being able to ask my
| phone for things like "the guy who emailed last week about the
| interview, what was his name?" without having to dig through
| emails trying not to lose the context in my head.
| c1sc0 wrote:
| Me! I'm dumping text I write into an LLM all-day to help with
| editing. And I often start brainstorming / research by opening
| ChatGPT in voice mode, talk to it and keep a browser open at
| the same time to fact-check the output.
| rvz wrote:
| > So who is this all for?
|
| It is for everyone and the rest of us. Like it or not.
|
| "AI" cannot be stopped.
| tymscar wrote:
| Cringe
| rvz wrote:
| Cope.
| jbm wrote:
| Nah, I want it. I use it all the time to do things like
| translate obscure Kanji and learn more about certain religious
| texts.
|
| For example:
| https://chatgpt.com/share/4a31c79b-a380-4fa0-9808-8145e3cfb4...
|
| LLMs are very useful and very helpful, certainly more helpful
| than ony searching the web. Watching people apply the crypto
| lens to it is unfortunate for them, it's not a waste of
| electricity like most crypto, and it isn't useless output.
| 101008 wrote:
| I may be wrong, but the first GPT response says that kanji
| means "spirit" "soul" or "ghost" but a quick Google search
| says it means "drops of rain"... do you trust GPT on this
| matter?
|
| https://hsk.academy/en/characters/%E9%9C%9D
| jbm wrote:
| Yes, the top radical is for drops of rain but the i
| inclusion of the bottom part has a meaning that clearly
| aligns with spirit, especially when you see the rare kanji
| that use it as a component. I only was curious as it was
| part of another kanji (Ling ) that I was investigating.
| anvuong wrote:
| I actually want a virtual assistant that can reliably process
| my simple requests. But so far all these companies look like
| they are still in the figuring out phase, basically throwing
| everything at the wall to see what sticks. Hopefully after 2 or
| 3 years things will settle down and we will get a great virtual
| assistant.
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe this is in the same category as a car that will
| reliably fully self-drive.
| vessenes wrote:
| Um, wow. The major question in my mind: did Apple pay, or did
| OpenAI pay? (A-la google for search).
|
| Apple is not going to lose control of the customer, ever, so on
| balance I would guess this is either not a forever partnership or
| that OpenAI won't ultimately get what they want out of it. I'm
| very curious to see how much will be done on device and how much
| will go to gpt4o out of the gate.
|
| I'm also curious if they're using Apple intelligence for function
| calling and routing in device; I assume so. Extremely solid
| offerings from Apple today in general.
| wmf wrote:
| Apple is definitely paying because they don't let OpenAI save
| anything.
| ec109685 wrote:
| They're letting OpenAI upsell to a professional version, so
| there is a lot in it for OpenAI to offer this for free, even
| without the data.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder how many subscribers OpenAI will lose.
| kernal wrote:
| I don't believe that. Apple is in the driver's seat in this
| negotiation. I believe OpenAI wanted Apple as a jewel in
| their crown and bent over backwards to get them to sign. I
| don't see how OpenAI makes any money off of this, but I do
| see them losing a lot of money as iOS users slam their
| service for free as they eat the costs.
| rvz wrote:
| Quite unsurprising that the prediction of a hybrid solution
| turned out to be true. [0]
|
| The plan is still the same. _Eventually_ Apple will have Apple
| Intelligence all in-house and race everyone to $0.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40630897
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Siri now powered by OpenAI powered by Microsoft Azure
| daft_pink wrote:
| From watching it, it seems like it's just a kit type integration
| as it's super clear that it's going to a partner and they said
| they may allow other partners.
| rgrmrts wrote:
| I really hope so. I don't trust OpenAI and I'd really rather
| not have any integrations with them on any of my devices.
| zug_zug wrote:
| This sounds like exactly what I wanted. There have been a number
| of times I've been in the car and wanting to ask Siri something
| it couldn't handle has been a lot e.g. "What state am I in, and
| how far am I to the border to the state I'm going to cross next,
| and can I pump my own gas on each state I'm driving through?"
|
| Though a bit of that is premised on whether it could extract
| information from google maps.
| jedberg wrote:
| Of course that will only work if you're using Apple Maps.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I think most of what you're talking about is going through
| Apple Intelligence, not chatGPT. That "Apple Intelligence"
| stuff is supposed to be more local and personal to you,
| accounting for where you are, your events, things like that.
| There's an API for apps to provide "intents," which Siri can
| use to chain everything together. (Like "cost of gas at the
| nearest gas station" or something like that.) None of that is
| OpenAI, according to the keynote.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Carplay Siri functionality is currently neutered. A lot of
| times it won't answer more complex questions that would
| otherwise be answered without Carplay.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I haven't found this to be the case. Does Siri explicitly
| refuse to answer questions, or does it misunderstand you?
| Maybe the microphone in your car makes hearing difficult?
| jjulius wrote:
| >... and can I pump my own gas on each state I'm driving
| through?
|
| Huh? Seems like an odd thing to feel the need to ask, as up
| until last year, the answer was always, "Only if you're driving
| through Oregon or New Jersey".
|
| Now, you're only unable to pump your own in NJ.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > "What state am I in, and how far am I to the border to the
| state I'm going to cross next, and can I pump my own gas on
| each state I'm driving through?"
|
| What kind of trip was this where these were pertinent
| questions? Couldn't you have just rephrased most of them?
|
| "What is my current location?"
|
| "Show maps."
|
| "Which states don't allow you to pump your own gas?"
| willis936 wrote:
| Signs of healthy competition and certainly no reason to claim a
| tech monopoly.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Privacy protections are built in when accessing ChatGPT within
| Siri and Writing Tools--requests are not stored by OpenAI, and
| users' IP addresses are obscured.
|
| Does anybody believe Apple will not be able to know who sent a
| given request, and that OpenAI won't be able to use the data in
| the request for more or less anything they want? I read
| statements like this and just flat-out don't believe them
| anymore.
| RedComet wrote:
| "Obscured" sounds weak and deliberately vague on their part.
| ec109685 wrote:
| They have tech to obscure IPs in a way that prevents any one
| entity from being able to de-obfuscate:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
| karaterobot wrote:
| I guess my point is that removing an IP address does not make
| something anonymous.
| breadwinner wrote:
| My biggest disappointment was that Apple said nothing about
| leveraging GPT-4 to improve voice recognition in iMessage. Voice
| recognition of ChatGPT is incredibly accurate when compared to
| iOS. ChatGPT almost never gets anything wrong, while iMessage/iOS
| voice recognition is extremely frustrating.
|
| So much so that I sometimes dictate to ChatGPT then cut & paste
| into iMessage.
| noahtallen wrote:
| They did talk about Siri being better at voice recognition
| using Apple's own on-device models, so I imagine that will
| eventually apply more broadly.
| breadwinner wrote:
| On-device models will not be big enough in the near future.
| What makes ChatGPT so awesome at recognition is that their
| model is huge, and so no matter how obscure the topic of the
| dictation, ChatGPT knows what you're talking about.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Apple also talked about their private compute cloud, which
| allows larger models and workflows to integrate with local
| AI models. It sounds like they will figure out which
| features require bigger models and which don't. So I think
| there is a lot of room for what you're mentioning in the
| future of this AI platform.
|
| Plus, they talk about live phone call transcriptions, voice
| transcription in notes, the ability to correct words as you
| speak, contextual conversations in siri, etc. It 100%
| sounds like better voice recognition is coming
| extr wrote:
| Pretty sure transcription is done locally on Pixel phones
| and it's pretty good. Not as good as ChatGPT, but most of
| the way there. If current iOS is like a 50, Pixel is like a
| 90 and OpenAI is like 98.
| extr wrote:
| You can set up a shortcut that will record you, hit the Whisper
| API, then copy to your clipboard. It's not as smooth as native
| transcription or the SOTA on Google phones but it's pretty
| good.
| processing wrote:
| "Siri add an alarm for an appointment for the dentist tomorrow at
| 10"
|
| _Sets appointment for 10pm_
|
| Will the Siri team be fired or are they in charge of openAI
| integration?
| nullwriter wrote:
| Its given that a dentist appointment is never usually at 10PM -
| this doesn't seem probable. LLMs are good at generalizing
| pjerem wrote:
| And also, that would still be more useful than the current
| situation where Siri would just answer that it can not give
| you the weather forecast because there is no city named
| "Appointment at 10".
|
| Or it may create an appointment at Athens.
| empath75 wrote:
| Siri without it isn't though. It's so garbage as to be
| useless.
| matsz wrote:
| Switching to 24-hour clock solves that problem.
|
| Personally, 12h clock always confused me, so I wouldn't blame
| Siri.
| layer8 wrote:
| Siri still uses AM/PM for me when speaking, despite having a
| 24-hour clock configured.
| philsnow wrote:
| ~~This is not the direction I was hoping Apple would go with AI.
|
| With all the neural this and that bits baked into apple silicon,
| it has seemed [0] for a while that Apple wanted to run all these
| workloads locally, but this partnership seems like a significant
| privacy backslide.
|
| Another comment in this thread said something about they're using
| b Apple silicon for these workloads, but didn't give an
| indication of whether that silicon lives in Apple datacenters or
| OpenAI ones.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725167~~
|
| _edit: I should have mentioned that I didn't have a chance to
| watch the video yet; a reply to my comment mentioned that it's
| addressed in the video so I'll go watch that later_
| astrange wrote:
| Watch the keynote, it's all clearly explained and you don't
| need to learn about it from HN comments.
| philsnow wrote:
| I should have put a disclaimer saying that I hadn't had a
| chance to watch the video yet. Thanks for mentioning that
| it's addressed, I'll take a look later.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I don't think this is a fair take. It sounds like the vast
| majority of the new AI features (including the local personal
| context for Siri, the various text/image editing features,
| better photo categorization, and the list goes on) are all
| local, on-device models, which can, if needed, use Apple's
| private cloud. That requires public researcher verification of
| server software for iOS to even talk to it. (Allegedly :))
|
| The OpenAI partnership is seemingly _only_ if Siri decides it
| doesn 't have the full context needed to answer. (E.g. if you
| ask something very creative/generative.) At that point, Siri
| says "hey, chatGPT might be better at answering this, do you
| consent to me sending your prompt to them?" and then you get to
| choose. Apple's partnership also seems to include the various
| settings that prevent OpenAI from tracking/training on the
| prompts sent in.
|
| Honestly, that more creative side of genAI is not as
| interesting in the full context of Apple Intelligence. The real
| power is coming from the local, personal context, where Siri
| can deduce context based on your emails, messages, calendar
| events, maps, photos, etc. to really deeply integrate with
| apps. (Allegedly!) And that part is not OpenAI.
| atlex2 wrote:
| Agreed. Apple pretty clearly focused on building an action-
| tuned model. Also, notice how in the videos you barely see
| any "Siri speech". I wonder what they used for pre-training,
| but probably they did it with much more legit datasources--
| They're launching with English only.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Apple is in the position where it caters primarily to the tech
| ignorant, so coming out an explaining that Apple LLM is a bit
| worse (read: far worse) than the cool LLM's on the internet
| because they are privacy conscious is a non-starter.
|
| Local LLM's on regular local hardware (i.e. no $500+ dedicated
| GPUs) is _way_ far behind SoTA models right now.
|
| Apple is not gonna be in a position where you can practically
| real-time intelligently chat with Android phones while iPhones
| are churning out 3 tokens/second of near useless babbling.
| philsnow wrote:
| (I haven't watched the video yet)
|
| I completely agree about the market positioning and not
| keeping up with other platforms' abilities being a non-
| starter. I just hope it will be clear how to keep my external
| brain (phone) from being scanned by OpenAI.
|
| (I don't want it to seem like I'm just a hater of either
| Apple or OpenAI; I'm a more-recent adopter of Apple tech and
| I'm not looking back, and I have an OpenAI subscription and
| find it invaluable for some uses.)
|
| Another thing I'm going to be looking for in the video is how
| this initiative jibes with the greenness Apple has been
| passing really hard. If they're bringing this kind of
| generative AI from niches to every iphone, it seems that
| would add a fair amount of power consumption.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > I just hope it will be clear how to keep my external
| brain (phone) from being scanned by OpenAI.
|
| It's very clear, the keynote demonstrates that Siri passing
| a prompt to chatGPT is completely opt-in and only happens
| when Siri thinks the prompt needs the more
| generative/creative model that OpenAI provides.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Yay more shitgpt all over my life
| solardev wrote:
| I'm confused now... Apple's other announcement today discussed
| on-device AI.
|
| So what sorts of queries will be on-device and what will be sent
| to OpenAI? How does this distinction appear in the UI?
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| It's in the keynote video.
| solardev wrote:
| Ah, thanks. Not in a place where I can watch video right now,
| but will check it out later.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I think the headlines are REALLY muddying things. From watching
| the Keynote, most of Apple Intelligence is their own stuff,
| mostly on-device.
|
| Siri _explicitly_ asks you if you want to use chatGPT to answer
| a query. It does so when it thinks chatGPT will have a better
| answer. It sounds like that will be for very creative
| /generative types of things like "please create a 4 course meal
| with xyz foods," at which point Siri asks you if you want to
| use chatGPT. It will be very clear, according to Apple.
| lxgr wrote:
| That said, the Apple Intelligence vs. OpenAI distinction
| seems much clearer than the Apple cloud vs. local
| distinction, which I find somewhat concerning.
|
| Sure, the Apple cloud is ultra-secure and private and all,
| but I'd still like to know what happens where without having
| to test it myself by enabling airplane mode and seeing what
| still works.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Yeah, that's a great point. At the same time, it only takes
| a couple YouTubers/researchers to do some testing for us to
| know the answer
| etchalon wrote:
| When you ask Siri a question, it will prompt you to ask whether
| it can send your query/data to ChatGPT.
|
| All other AI features within the OS are powered by Apple's
| Private Compute Cloud, which is Apple's code running on Apple's
| chips at Apple's Data Center.
| noahtallen wrote:
| > All other AI features within the OS are powered by Apple's
| Private Compute Cloud
|
| Clarification: All other AI features within the OS are
| powered by on device models which can reach out to the
| private cloud for larger workflows & models.
| Hippocrates wrote:
| I was surprised how little they are leaning on OpenAI. Most of
| the impressive integrations that actually look useful are on-
| device or in their private cloud. OpenAIs ChatGPT was relegated
| to a corner of Siri for answering "google queries", if you grant
| it permission. This seems like an L for OpenAI, not being a
| bigger part of the architecture (and I'm glad).
| extr wrote:
| Agreed. The rumors beforehand made it sound Apple and OpenAI
| would practically be merging. This felt like a fig leaf so
| Apple could say you can access SOTA models from you iPhone. But
| for me personally, the deep integration with the ecosystem +
| semantic index are way way more interesting.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| this will work about as well as the tedious fad for chatbots a
| few years ago
| 35mm wrote:
| Anyone know more details about Apple's servers?
|
| "...server-based models that run on dedicated Apple silicon
| servers."
| wmf wrote:
| It could be as simple as a 1U version of the Mac Studio.
| bartuu wrote:
| I wonder, if Apple made a deal with Open AI, how did they solve
| the privacy issue?
| resource_waste wrote:
| People who are getting your data:
|
| >Apple
|
| >OpenAI
|
| >Bill Gates by proxy
|
| >US government
|
| >???
|
| Also, before anyone says "Oh they'd never do that!". Live in
| reality. They were already caught with PRISM.
| cletus wrote:
| This is one of those things that seems like a good idea but is
| really an existential threat to OpenAI.
|
| Having a single extremely large customer gives that customer a
| disproportionate amount of power over your business. Apple can
| decide one day to simply stop paying you because, hey, they can
| afford the years of litigation to resolve it. Can you weather
| than storm?
|
| Famously, Benjamin Moore (the paint company) maintains its own
| stores. They have not (and probably will not) sell their products
| through Home Depot or Lowe's. Why? This exact reason. A large
| customer can dictate terms and hold you over a barrel if they so
| choose.
|
| AI/ML is something Apple cares about. They've designed their own
| chips around speeding up ML processing on the device. A
| partnerhship with OpenAI is clearly a stopgap measure. They will
| absolutely gut OpenAI if they have the opportunity and they will
| absolutely replace OpenAI when they can.
|
| Apple just doesn't like relying on partners for core
| functionality. It's why Apple ditched Google Maps for the (still
| inferior) Apple Maps. The only reason they can't replace Google
| Search is because Google pays them a boatload of money and
| they've simply been unable to.
|
| This may seem like a good move for OpenAI but all they've done is
| let the foxes run the hen house.
| TIPSIO wrote:
| Eh.
|
| Apple is just racing to integrate AI into its current compute
| platform as fast possible.
|
| OpenAI definitely believes a smart enough AI (AGI, ASI) will
| solve way bigger problems or create essentially a brand new
| compute platform.
|
| Heck, ChatGPT as a lame LLM is almost its own compute platform
| already.
|
| Apple is just speeding up people getting used to not needing
| apps and fancy devices vs simply communicating with an agent.
|
| Who really will need Apple in 10-15 years if AI really does get
| good enough then?
| philwelch wrote:
| OpenAI already had a "single extremely large customer":
| Microsoft. In fact the Apple deal is the first sign they're not
| just a de facto Microsoft subsidiary.
| FanaHOVA wrote:
| Is there a single citation for anything you just said?
|
| > Apple can decide one day to simply stop paying you because,
| hey, they can afford the years of litigation to resolve it.
|
| OpenAI and Microsoft also can do the same. Microsoft would be
| ecstatic to hurt Apple in any way. Also Apple has also no
| history of doing this with any of the providers they use.
|
| > Benjamin Moore (the paint company) maintains its own stores.
| They have not (and probably will not) sell their products
| through Home Depot or Lowe's. Why?
|
| Because Home Depot has their own brand, Behr. Each Behr color
| explicitly says what Benjamin Moore color it's copying, and
| they take 100% of the revenue as a direct alternative. Do you
| have any sources on this being a Benjamin Moore decision?
|
| > It's why Apple ditched Google Maps for the (still inferior)
| Apple Maps.
|
| How do you define "still inferior"? How many times a day do you
| use Apple Maps? Do you have any benchmarks that compare the
| two?
| hu3 wrote:
| Microsoft owns 49 percent of OpenAI.
|
| That must be some really detailed 100+ pages contract.
|
| I bet Microsoft is mentioned multiple times with things to the
| effect of: "Under no condition is Microsoft allowed to access any
| of the data coming from iPhones."
| astrange wrote:
| No one is allowed to access any of that data.
|
| Microsoft is mostly a cloud company these days though, and
| they're already an Apple vendor.
| extr wrote:
| Honestly I was surprised at how limited the ChatGPT integration
| seems to be. It felt like they 80/20'd AI with the onboard models
| + semantic index, but also wanted to cover that last 20% with
| some kind of SOTA cloud model. But they didn't necessarily NEED
| to.
| layer8 wrote:
| They need to in order to not look second-class in terms of chat
| capabilities. On the other hand, they want to make it clear
| when you are using ChatGPT, probably not just for privacy
| reasons, but also so that people blame ChatGPT and not Apple
| when it gets things wrong.
| extr wrote:
| This may just be me because I'm a heavy ChatGPT user as-is,
| but I've had my fill of chat capabilities. What I really want
| is the context awareness, which is what they seemingly
| delivered on without OpenAI's help!
| layer8 wrote:
| Note that this is announced as coming in beta this fall,
| which means they are currently well pre-beta. I would curb
| my expectations about how well it will work.
| philodeon wrote:
| It's an interesting choice to announce a brand-new standard for
| privacy guarantees regarding AI/ML queries...
|
| ...then announce a partnership with ChatGPT.
| cdme wrote:
| I hate everything about this. Curious how blocking OpenAI's TLDs
| at the DNS level will go.
| ricksunny wrote:
| So, pick your Apple partnership long-arc: 1. Apple-Google[Search]
| 2. Apple-PaloAltoSemi 3. Apple-PortalPlayer
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| > Privacy protections are built in when accessing ChatGPT within
| Siri and Writing Tools--requests are not stored by OpenAI, and
| users' IP addresses are obscured. Users can also choose to
| connect their ChatGPT account, which means their data preferences
| will apply under ChatGPT's policies.
|
| So does this mean that by default, a random Apple user won't have
| their ChatGPT requests used for OpenAI training, but a paying
| ChatGPT Plus customer will?
|
| Does this also mean that if I connect my ChatGPT Plus account
| that my data will be used for training?
|
| It just seems strange to have a lower bar for privacy for paying
| customers vs users acquired via a partnership.
|
| (yes I'm aware that the "Temporary Chat" feature or turning off
| memory will prevent data being used for training)
| ec109685 wrote:
| You can permanently disable OpenAI from training with your chat
| data for your account:
|
| "To disable model training, navigate to your profile icon on
| the bottom-left of the page and select Settings > Data
| Controls, and disable "Improve the model for everyone." While
| this is disabled, new conversations won't be used to train our
| models"
| blibble wrote:
| and if you believe that you'll believe anything
| ec109685 wrote:
| Companies really don't like being sued for hundreds of
| millions in punitive damages just for the benefit of
| training on the small percentage of people that opt out.
| blibble wrote:
| it's "fair use" mate
| kolinko wrote:
| no it isn't
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| Great to know! Looks like they only made this change at the
| beginning of May. Prior to that you had to turn off chat
| history which wasn't worth it to me.
|
| April 25, 2024: "To disable chat history and model training,
| navigate to ChatGPT > Settings > Data Controls and disable
| Chat history & training. While history is disabled, new
| conversations won't be used to train and improve our models,
| and won't appear in the history sidebar. To monitor for
| abuse, we will retain all conversations for 30 days before
| permanently deleting." https://web.archive.org/web/2024042519
| 4703/https://help.open...
|
| May 02, 2024: "To disable model training, navigate to your
| profile icon on the bottom-left of the page and select
| Settings > Data Controls, and disable "Improve the model for
| everyone." While this is disabled, new conversations won't be
| used to train our models." https://web.archive.org/web/202405
| 02203525/https://help.open...
| tadala wrote:
| You could fill a form and request them not to train; they
| usually approved it fairly quickly, but did not advertise
| it well enough!
| knodi123 wrote:
| Oh my god, finally. I can't get over how bad Siri is, compared to
| Alexa and Google.
| getpost wrote:
| GPT4o access is a handy feature, but, what I was hoping to hear
| about is an improvement in Siri's language "understanding."
|
| In today's WWDC presentation, there were a few small examples of
| Siri improvements, such as an ability to maintain context, e.g.,
| 'Add her flight arrival time to my calendar,' wherein Siri knows
| who "her" refers to.
|
| In my day-to-day experience with Siri, it's clear Siri doesn't
| have the kind of ability to understand language that LLMs
| provide. It still feels like clever son-of-Eliza hacks with stock
| phrases. If your utterance doesn't match with a pre-programmed
| stock phrase, it doesn't work. The other day I said something
| like "Play the song you played before the one I asked you to
| skip," and Siri didn't seem to know what I wanted. OTOH, GPT4o
| can easily handle statements like that.
|
| Does anyone know to what extent Siri's underlying language models
| are being upgraded?
| blcknight wrote:
| > In today's WWDC presentation, there were a few small examples
| of Siri improvements, such as an ability to maintain context,
| e.g., 'Add her flight arrival time to my calendar,' wherein
| Siri knows who "her" refers to.
|
| Didn't Cortana do this? Pretty underwhelming in 2024.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Siri just feels like, tokenize input => run classifier over
| hardcoded actions.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I don't think these actions are hardcoded with the App
| Intents framework. Even today you can ask Siri to run
| arbitrary shortcuts via custom keywords.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I agree, this is the biggest annoyance with voice assistants
| today. The good news is that, as you noted, the technology to
| interpret complex/unclear requests is definitely already here
| today with ChatGPT.
|
| I think that Apple demoed this today where the presenter
| changed her mind mid-sentence during a weather query.
|
| I'm hopeful that means they've added a LLM to interpret the
| intent of user requests.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's something that I keep wondering about. The existing
| voice assistants are all garbage across the board. Whatever you
| say about Siri, Google's assistant is even worse. Meanwhile,
| for the past couple months, I was able to fire up ChatGPT app
| and speak to it casually, in noisy environments, and it would
| both correctly convert my speech to text (with less than 5%
| errors) _and_ correctly understand what I 'm actually saying
| (even in presence of transcription errors).
|
| _All it takes_ to make a qualitatively better voice assistant
| would be to give GPT-4 a spec of functions representing things
| it can do on your phone, and integrating that with the OS. So
| why none of the companies bothered to do it? For that matter, I
| wonder why OpenAI didn 't extend the ChatGPT app in this
| direction?
| zx10rse wrote:
| Well I guess it is time to look around for new devices. This is
| by far the biggest mistake Apple made.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| What would you prefer? Less capable products with fewer
| features? Or a Google product designed in collaboration with
| their advertising data hoovering team?
| solarkraft wrote:
| OpenAI is such a controversial company and good competitors like
| Anthropic, who arguably align better with their brand, exist.
| That makes the deal so weird to me.
| akira2501 wrote:
| OpenAI has nothing of particularly high value. They're giving
| away the store right now just to claim the onboarding. This
| unsustainable game will end badly and soon.
| 101011 wrote:
| Nothing of particularly high value, really?
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's actually a beneficial feature that two people can look
| at a market and come to two completely different
| conclusions about it. Yes, I suspect that OpenAI has
| nothing of lasting competitive value, they're currently
| overvalued by entities who want their money back, and you
| can view their recent actions and partnerships through this
| lens without complication.
| impulser_ wrote:
| It's also weird because Anthropic models are just better for
| these tasks. Claude responses are almost always better than
| GPT4.
|
| I stopped using GPT4 because it would just yap on and on about
| things I don't want in the response. Claude 3 responses feel
| way more human like because it response with similar
| information a human would and not with a bunch of unneeded
| gibber.
|
| By the time this roles out at the end of the year who knows
| what models would be the best. Why bet on one company's models?
| We have seen how fast open source models have caught up to
| GPT4. Why put all your chips into one basket?
| tmaly wrote:
| Imagine Apple being able to search for bad things on your phone
| using AI at the behest of some state or local government request
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Now OpenAI has massive contracts with Microsoft and Apple. Two
| years ago we basically hadn't even raised an eyebrow at OpenAI.
| hurril wrote:
| I love Apple products but I doubt this will become good.
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