[HN Gopher] Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown
Author : ndr42
Score : 94 points
Date : 2025-03-29 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| ndr42 wrote:
| The Quote: "AI can never fail, it can only be failed" is
| something to think about
| bigyabai wrote:
| Ooh I like this one. "Apple's chips aren't slowing down. TSMC
| is."
| gibbitz wrote:
| I think AI is just running up against a company whose mantra was
| "it just works" and finding consumers who expect a working
| product won't tolerate the lack of quality "AI" has delivered.
| Welcome to reality venture capitalists...
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| No, Apple AI is a letdown regardless
| taytus wrote:
| I agree. Both things could be true at the same time.
| bbarnett wrote:
| "Hey, I know! We should spend billions replacing code and data
| that provide the precise same output every time (or random from
| data we choose), with completely random, uncurated data that
| changes with every new model, because why not! It's awesome!",
| says every company now.
|
| AI is not useful if you want curated fact, if you want consistent
| output, if you want repeated quality.
|
| How about training an AI on 1990s style encyclopedias, with their
| low error rate.
|
| Even wikipedia has random yahoos coming in and changing pages
| about the moon landing, to say it was filmed in a studio.
|
| AI is being trained on random, it outputs random.
| simmerup wrote:
| Surely even if you train it on an encyclopedia, if you ask a
| question that isnt in the encyclopedia it'll just make
| something up still
| nixpulvis wrote:
| If you can't explain how it works, I don't want it.
|
| If your explanation boils down to a bunch of "it should do..." or
| "most of the time it does..." then I still don't want it.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The scenario in the article, about how AI is "usually" right in
| queries like "which airport is my mom's flight landing at and
| when?" is exactly the problem with Google's AI summaries as well.
| Several times recently I've googled something really obscure like
| how to get fr*king suspend working in Linux on a recent-ish
| laptop, and it's given me generic pablum instad of the actual,
| obscure trick that makes it work (type a 12-key magic sequence,
| get advanced BIOS options, pick an option way down a scrolling
| list to nuke fr*king modern suspend and restore S3 sleep...
| happiness in both Windows and Linux in the dual boot
| environment). So it just makes the answers harder to find,
| instead of helping.
| pram wrote:
| I've been experiencing "AI" making things worse. Grammarly worked
| fine for a decade+ but now since, I guess, they've been trying to
| cram more LLM junk into it the recommendations have been a lot
| less reliable. Now it's sometimes missing even obvious typos.
| martinald wrote:
| I just do not understand this attitude. ChatGPT alone has
| hundreds of millions of active users that are clearly getting
| value from it, despite any mistakes it may make.
|
| To me the almost unsolvable problem Apple has is wanting to do as
| much as possible on device, but also have been historically very
| stingy with RAM (on iOS and Mac devices - iOS more
| understandably, given it doesn't really need huge amounts of RAM
| until LLMs came along). This gives them a real real problem,
| having to use very small models which hallucinate a lot more than
| giant cloud hosted ones.
|
| Even if they did manage to get 16GB of RAM on their new iPhones
| that is still only going to be able to fit a 7b param model at a
| push (leaving 8GB for 'system' use).
|
| In my experience even the best open source 7B local models are
| close to unusable. They'd have been mindblowning a few years ago
| but when you are used to "full size" cutting edge models it feels
| like an enormous downgrade. And I assume this to always be the
| case; while small models are always improving, so are the full
| size ones, so there will always be a big delta between them, and
| people are already used to the large ones.
|
| So I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud services
| more like their Private Compute idea, but they have an issue
| there in so much that they have 1b+ users and it is not trivial
| at all to be able to handle that level of cloud usage for core
| iOS/Mac features (I suspect this is why virtually nothing uses
| Private Compute at the moment). Even if each iOS user only did 10
| "cloud LLM" requests a day, that's over 10b/requests a day (10x
| the scale that OpenAI currently handles). And in reality it'd
| ideally be orders of magnitude more than that given how many
| possible integration options they are for mobile devices alone.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that
| are clearly getting value from it, despite any mistakes it may
| make._
|
| You assume hundreds of millions of users could identify serious
| mistakes when they see them.
|
| But humans have demonstrated repeatedly that they can't.
|
| I don't think it can _ever_ be understated how dangerous this
| is.
|
| > _I think Apple probably needs to shift to using cloud
| services more_
|
| You ignore lessons from the the recent spat between Apple and
| the UK.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that
| are clearly getting value from it
|
| True, but it's been years now since the debut of the chat-
| interface-AI to the general public and we have yet to figure
| out another interface that would work for generative AI for the
| general public. I'd say the only other example is Adobe and
| what they are doing with generative AI in their photo editing
| tools, but thats a far cry from a "general public" type thing.
| You have all the bumbling nonsense coming out of Microsoft and
| Google trying to shove AI into whatever tools they are selling
| while still getting 0 adoption. The copilot and Gemini
| corporate sales teams have been both "restructured" this year
| because they managed to sign up so many clients in 2023/2024
| and all those clients refused to renew.
|
| When it comes to the general public, we have yet to find a
| better application of AI than a chat interface. Even outside of
| the general public, I oversee few teams that are building
| "agentic AI tools/workflows" and the amount of trouble they
| have to go through to make something slightly coherent is
| insane. I still believe that the right team with the right
| architecture and design can probably achieve things that are
| incredible with LLMs, but it's not as easy as the term "AI"
| makes it sound.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I suspect an issue at least as big is that they're running into
| a lot of prompt injection issues (even totally accidentally)
| with their attempts at personal knowledge base/system awareness
| stuff, whether remotely processed or not. Existing LLMs are
| already bad at this even with controlled inputs; trying to
| incorporate broad personal files in a Spotlight-like manner is
| probably terribly unreliable.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| This is my experience as pretty heavy speech-to-text user
| (voice keyboard) - as they've introduced more AI features,
| I've started to have all sorts of nonsense from recent emails
| or contacts get mixed into simple transcriptions
|
| It used to have no problem with simple phrases like "I'm
| walking home from the market" but now I'll just as often have
| it transcribe "I'm walking home from the Mark Betts",
| assuming Mark Betts was a name in my contacts, despite that
| sentence making much less structural sense
|
| It's bad enough that I'm using the feature much less because
| I have to spend as much time copyediting transcribed text
| before sending as I would if I just typed it out by hand. I
| can turn off stuff like the frequently confused notification
| summaries, but the keyboard has no such control as far as I
| know
| csdvrx wrote:
| > In my experience even the best open source 7B local models
| are close to unusable. They'd have been mindblowning a few
| years ago but when you are used to "full size" cutting edge
| models it feels like an enormous downgrade
|
| Everything has limits - the only differences is where they are,
| and therefore how often you meet them.
|
| If you are working with AI, using local models shows you where
| the problems can (and will) happen, which helps you write more
| robust code because you will be aware of these limits!
|
| It's like how you write more efficient code if you have to use
| a resource constrained system.
| jajko wrote:
| Its just another tool (or toy), great at some stuff, almost
| useless or worse for another, and its fucking downed our
| throats at every corner, from every direction. I start to hate
| everything AI-infused with passion. Even here on HN, many
| people are not rational. I am willing to pay _less_ for AI-
| anything, not the same and f_cking definitely not more.
|
| Cargo culting of clueless managers which make long term
| usability of products much worse, everything requiring some
| stupid cloud, basic features locked up and you will be
| analyzed, this is just another shit on top.
|
| You have any massive hype, you normally get this shit. Once big
| wave dies down with unavoidable sad moments for some, and tech
| progresses further (as it will) real added value for everybody
| may show up.
|
| As for work - in my corporation, despite having pure dev senior
| role, coding is 10-20% of the work, and its part I can handle
| just fine on my own, I don't need babysitting from almost-
| correct statistical models. In fact I learn and keep fresh much
| better when still doing it on my own. You don't become or stay
| senior when solutions are handed down to you. Same reason I use
| git in command line and not clicking around. For code
| sweatshops I can imagine much more added value, but not here in
| this massive banking corporation. Politics, relationships,
| knowing processes and their quirks and limitations is what
| progresses stuff and gets it done. AI won't help here, if
| anybody thinks differently they have f_cking no idea what I
| talk about. In 10 years it may be different, lets open the
| discussion again then.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Private compute cloud is apples solution. It doesn't matter
| what specs your phone has because the inference is sent to a
| data center.
|
| They literally have data centers worth of devices running
| inferences anonymously
| manquer wrote:
| > ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active user that
| are clearly getting value from it
|
| So does OG Siri or Alexa, Letdown does not mean completely
| useless, it just means what the users are getting is far less
| than what they were promised, not that they get nothing.
|
| In this context AI will be a letdown regardless of improvements
| in offline or even cloud models. It is not only because of
| additional complexity of offline model Apple will not deliver,
| their product vision just does not look achievable in the
| current state of tech in LLMs [1].
|
| Apple itself while more grounded compared to peers who
| regularly talk about building AGI, or God etc, has been still
| showing public concept demos akin to what gaming studios or
| early stage founders do. Reality usually fall short when you
| run ahead of product development in marketing, it will be no
| different for Apple.
|
| This is a golden rule of brand and product development - never
| show what have not built fully to the public if you want them
| to trust your brand.
|
| To be clear, it is not bad for the company per se to do this,
| top tier AAA gaming studios do just fine as businesses despite
| letting down fans game after game with oversell and under
| deliver, but suffer as brands nobody will have good thing to
| say about Blizzard or EA or any other major studio.
|
| Apple monetizes its brand very well by being able to price
| their products at premium compared to peers that will be at
| risk if users feel letdown.
|
| [1] Perhaps new innovations will make radical improvements even
| in the near future, regardless that will not change Apple can
| ship in 2025 or even 2026 so still a letdown for users being
| promised things for last 2 years already.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| > ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users that
| are clearly getting value from it
|
| Idk about that, wouldn't pay for it.
| brulard wrote:
| What do you mean? Lot of people pay, (me included) and are
| getting value. If you use it but don't pay, you still get
| value, otherwise you would be wasting your time. If you don't
| use it at all, that's your choice to make.
| jostmey wrote:
| The very fact that Apple thought they were going to run AI on
| iPhones says that leadership doesn't understand AI technology
| and simply mandated requirements to engineers without wanting
| to be bothered by details. In other words, Apple seems to be
| badly managed
| jackvalentine wrote:
| > The very fact that Apple thought they were going to run AI
| on iPhones
|
| Nope
|
| https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Shoulda kept Scott Forstall
| mentalgear wrote:
| There are thresholds for every technology where it is "good
| enough", same with LLMs or SLMs (on-device). Machine learning
| is already running on-device for photo
| classification/search/tagging, and even 1.5b models are getting
| fast really good, as long as they are well trained and used for
| the right task. Something like email writing, TTS and rewriting
| and other tasks should be easily doable, the "semantic search
| aspect" of chatbots are basically a new way of "google/web
| search" and probably stay in the cloud, but that's not their
| most crucial use.
|
| Not a big fan of Apple's monopoly, but I like their privacy on-
| device handling. I don't care for Apple but on-device models
| are definitely the way to go from a consumer point of view.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Do you also judge crack cocaine's value by its number of users?
|
| I don't think most people are capable of doing a cost/benefit
| ratio calculation on how what they do affects the rest of the
| world, and the wealthy are far and away the worst abusers of
| this sadass truth.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The worst thing about "AI" is its name. It isn't intelligent, it
| isn't even dumb. If the current wave had been called "neural
| networks" or "large language models", then the hype wouldn't have
| been as breathless, but the disappointment wouldn't be as sharp
| either, because it wouldn't be used for things it isn't suited
| for.
|
| It's an algorithm; it's just an algorithm. It's useful for a few
| things. It isn't useful for most things. Like MVC, or relational
| databases, or finite state machines, or OOP, it's not something
| you should have to (or want to) tell the end user that you are
| using in the internals. The reason most "AI" products brag about
| using "AI", is there isn't anything else interesting about them.
| pedalpete wrote:
| This is Apple's spin machine working overtime trying to say
| "we're not failing at AI, everyone is failing at AI".
|
| I'm not sure anyone is going to buy it, but it doesn't cost them
| anything to get a few of their PR hacks to give it a try.
|
| It's about as convincing as "we didn't build a bad phone, you're
| just holding it wrong!".
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >If it's 100% accurate, it's a fantastic time saver. If it is
| anything less than 100% accurate, it's useless.
|
| The insane levels of hypocrisy hearing this come from a
| mainstream media source. The damage that has been done to all of
| society by misrepresenting and half-truthing about events to
| appease audiences is unrivaled, yet here they are on the high
| horse of "anything less than 100% accurate is useless"
|
| Take note CNN, take fucking note.
| flippy_flops wrote:
| With Apple/iOS, I can't help but think of the Joker's quote, "You
| have nothing... Nothing to do with all your strength." The
| efficiency half is excellent but what with the power? AR? Gaming?
| AI seems the first broad fit. And where was Apple? Literally
| chasing cars and an ill conceived VR headset.
|
| I say this as a massive Apple fanboy. AI was heavily advertised
| as a selling point of iPhone 15 Pro and is completely MIA 6
| months later. It's a major letdown. It's not the end of the
| world, but let's just call it what it is.
|
| For those saying Apple doesn't release imperfect products, may I
| introduce to you Siri? It was average when they bought it and
| it's become a punch line.
|
| And there are so many uses of AI that don't have to be at the
| risk level of, "Oops, AI left grandma at LeGuardia." Apple should
| go back to its roots and provide high quality LLM/MCP and other
| API sdks to developers and let them go nuts. Then just clone or
| buy the apps that work like they always do.
| epolanski wrote:
| Apple went from $170 to $220 after the Apple Intelligence bs
| promises.
|
| Still sits there despite having long plateaued in revenue and is
| still priced for some impressive revenue growth.
|
| Go figure.
| roughly wrote:
| Two thoughts:
|
| The first is that LLMs are bar none the absolute best natural
| language processing and producing systems we've ever made. They
| are absolutely fantastic at taking unstructured user inputs and
| producing natural-looking (if slightly stilted) output. The
| problem is that they're not nearly as good at almost anything
| else we've ever needed a computer to do as other systems we've
| built to do those things. We invented a linguist and mistook it
| for an engineer.
|
| The second is that there's a maxim in media studies which is
| almost universally applicable, which is that the first use of a
| new media is to recapitulate the old. The first TV was radio
| shows, the first websites looked like print (I work in synthetic
| biology, and we're in the "recapitulating industrial chemistry"
| phase). It's only once people become familiar with the new medium
| (and, really, when you have "natives" to that medium) that we
| really become aware of what the new medium can do and start
| creating new things. It strikes me we're in that recapitulating
| phase with the LLMs - I don't think we actually know what these
| things are good for, so we're just putting them everywhere and
| redoing stuff we already know how to do with them, and the
| results are pretty lackluster. It's obvious there's a "there"
| there with LLMs (in a way there wasn't with, say, Web 3.0, or
| "the metaverse," or some of the other weird fads recently), but
| we don't really know how to actually wield these tools yet, and I
| can't imagine the appropriate use of them will be chatbots when
| we do figure it out.
| artyom wrote:
| Most grounded and realistic take on the AI hype I've read
| recently.
| brulard wrote:
| It was a mistake to call LLMs "AI". Now people expect it to be
| generic.
| exe34 wrote:
| They're pretty AI to me . I've been using chat gpt to explain
| things to me while learning a foreign language, and a native
| speaker has been overseeing the comments from it. it hasn't
| said anything that the native has disagreed with yet.
| stevenally wrote:
| Like the OP said "LLMs are bar none the absolute best
| natural language processing and producing systems we've
| ever made".
|
| They may not be good at much else.
| caseyohara wrote:
| I reckon you're proving their point. You're using a large
| language model for language-specific tasks. It ought to be
| good at that, but it doesn't mean it is generic artificial
| intelligence.
| exe34 wrote:
| generic artificial intelligence is a sufficiently large
| bag of tricks. that's what natural intelligence is.
| there's no evidence that it's not just tricks all the way
| down.
|
| I'm not asking the model to translate from one language
| to another - I'm asking it to explain to me why a certain
| word combination means something specific.
|
| it can also solve/explain a lot of things that aren't
| language. bag of tricks.
| brulard wrote:
| Yes, but your use case is language. I use LLMs for all kind
| of stuff from programming, creative work, etc. so I know
| it's useful even elsewhere. But as the generic term "AI" is
| being used, people expect it to be good at everything a
| human can be good at and then whine about how stupid the
| "AI" is.
| Shorel wrote:
| I tried the same with another foreign language. Every
| native speaker have told the answers are crap.
| exe34 wrote:
| could you give an example?
| lolinder wrote:
| OpenAI has been pushing the idea that these things are
| generic--and therefore the path to AGI--from the beginning.
| Their entire sales pitch to investors is that they have the
| lead on the tech that is most likely to replace all jobs.
|
| If the whole thing turns out to be a really nifty commodity
| component in other people's pipelines, the investors won't
| get a return on any kind of reasonable timetable. So OpenAI
| keeps pushing the AGI line even as it falls apart.
| MR4D wrote:
| I wonder.
|
| People primarily communicate thru words, so maybe not.
|
| Of course, pictures, body language, and also tone are also
| other communication methods.
|
| So far it looks like these models can convert pictures into
| words reasonably well, and the reverse is improving quickly.
|
| Tone might be next - there are already models that can detect
| stress so that's a good first start.
|
| Body language is probably a bit farther in the future, but it
| might be as simple as image analysis (thats only a wild
| guess-I have no idea)
| holoduke wrote:
| I actually believe the practical use of transformers, diffusers
| etc is already as impactful as the wide adoption of the
| internet. Or smartphones or cars. Its already used by hundreds
| of millions and it became an irreplaceable tool to enhance work
| output. And it just started. In 5 years from now it will
| dominate every single part of our lifes.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Transformers still excel at translation, which is what they
| were originally designed to do. It's just no longer about
| translating only language. Now it's clear they're good at all
| sorts of transformations, translating ideas, styles, etc. They
| represent an incredibly versatile and one-shot programmable
| interface. Some of the most successful applications of them so
| far are as some form of interface between intent and action.
|
| And we are still just barely understanding the potential of
| multimodal transformers. Wait till we get to metamultimodal
| transformers, where the modalities themselves are assembled on
| the fly to best meet some goal. It's already fascinating
| scrolling through latent space [0] in diffusion models, now
| imagine scrolling through "modality space", with some arbitrary
| concept or message as a fixed point, being able to explore
| different novel expressions of the same idea, and sample at
| different points along the path between imagery and sound and
| text and whatever other useful modalities we discover. Acid
| trip as a service.
|
| [0]
| https://keras.io/examples/generative/random_walks_with_stabl...
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Something that has been bugging me is that, applications-
| wise, the exploitative end of the "exploitation-exploration"
| trade-off (for lack of a better summary) have gotten way more
| attention than the other side.
|
| So, besides the complaints about accuracy, hallucinations
| (you said "acid trip") are dissed much more than would have
| been necessary.
| caseyy wrote:
| I haven't read Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan, but I
| think he introduced your second point in that book, in 1964. He
| claims that the content of each new medium is a previous
| medium. Video games contain film, film contains theater,
| theater contains screenplay, screenplay contains literature,
| literature contains spoken stories, spoken stories contain
| folklore, and I suppose if one were an anthropologist, they
| could find more and more chain links in this chain.
|
| I use this idea when designing narratives for video games. The
| stories must draw from other commonly understood media.
| Otherwise, the players won't be able to relate. For example,
| you may end up with game stories that only a few people
| understand and value, like stories based on pop culture,
| politics, or modern identities.
|
| It's probably the same in AI -- the world needs AI to be chat
| before it can grow meaningfully beyond. Once people understand
| neural networks, we can broadly advance to new forms of mass-
| application machine learning. I am hopeful that that will be
| the next big leap.
|
| Here's Marc Andreessen applying it to AI and search on Lex
| Fridman's podcast: https://youtu.be/-hxeDjAxvJ8?t=160
| cma wrote:
| Oral cultures had theater.
| armada651 wrote:
| > It's obvious there's a "there" there with LLMs (in a way
| there wasn't with, say, Web 3.0, or "the metaverse," or some of
| the other weird fads recently)
|
| There is a "there" with those other fads too. VRChat is a
| successful "metaverse" and Mastodon is a successful
| decentralized "web3" social media network. The reason these
| concepts are failures is because these small grains of success
| are suddenly expanded in scope to include a bunch of dumb ideas
| while the expectations are raised to astronomical levels.
|
| That in turn causes investors throw stupid amounts of money at
| these concepts, which attracts all the grifters of the tech
| world. It smothers nacant new tech in the crib as it is
| suddenly assigned a valuation it can never realize while the
| grifters soak up all the investments that could've gone to
| competent startups.
| originalvichy wrote:
| AI working with your OS is absolutely the letdown. I do not want
| to give my personal computer's data a direct feed into the hands
| of the same developers who lie about copyright abuses when mining
| data.
|
| 90% of the mass consumer AI tech demos in the past 2-3 years are
| the exact same demos that voice assistants used to do with just
| speech-to-text + search functions. And these older tech demos are
| already things only 10% of users probably did regularly. So they
| are adding AI features to halo features that look good in
| marketing but people never use.
|
| Keep the OS secure and let me use an Apple AI app in 2-3 years
| when they have rolled their own LLM.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "Apple made a rare stumble"
|
| Auto. Vision Pro. AI.
|
| Is there a pattern emerging here?
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| No need to go that far.
|
| Search in Mail is abysmal since forever. Everyone knows it.
| Apple knows it. No change still. So, no surprise here.
| bdangubic wrote:
| search in outlook is abysmal and it is part of microsoft's
| core business... :)
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| well, I think the expectations from Apple's product on a
| much higher level, which makes the situation with search
| even more embarrassing.
| bdangubic wrote:
| how interesting... I expect the opposite, just like maps,
| search is just not apple's "thing" and I don't expect
| much at all
| hu3 wrote:
| whataboutism won't save Apple when Gmail search has been
| great since forever
| bdangubic wrote:
| hm search company's search is decent, that's
| surprising...
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I don't know if the Vision Pro counts as a stumble. If they
| were planning to make a mass-market product, they wouldn't have
| priced it so high. Apple doesn't reveal sales targets, but I
| bet they sold about as many Vision Pros as they expected to.
| henry2023 wrote:
| Everyone one said the same when apple introduced the iPhone.
| It was expensive and it didn't have a keyboard. Clearly made
| for a small niche market.
| ichiwells wrote:
| One of apple's biggest missed with "AI" in my opinion, is not
| building a universal search.
|
| For all the hype LLM generation gets, I think the rise of LLM-
| backed "semantic" embedding search does not get enough attention.
| It's used in RAG (which inherits the hallucinatory problems), but
| seems underutilized elsewhere.
|
| The worst (and coincidentally/paradoxically I use the most)
| searches I've seen is Gmail and Dropbox, both of which cannot
| find emails or files that I know exist, even if using the exact
| email subject and file name keywords.
|
| Apple could arguably solve this with a universal search SDK, and
| I'd value this far more than yet-another-summarize-this-paragraph
| tool.
| brulard wrote:
| I have this same issue with gmail. I can not find e-mails by an
| exact word from text or subject. It is there, but search would
| not show it. I don't understand how a number one email provider
| can fail at that.
| squid_ca wrote:
| Or, say, a number one search provider ;)
| fragmede wrote:
| and search provider! Of all the companies in the world, why
| is Gmail search just not better?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| AI might be disappointing, but Apple Intelligence is definitely a
| stumble. I've been playing with Gemini and it works shockingly
| well. I fully expect Apple to catch up, but it will take a while
| for them to recover from the reputational damage.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Siri didn't need to suck all these years. Even before the LLM
| craze.
| seydor wrote:
| Trough of disillusionment
| andrewstuart wrote:
| AI is at the Web 1.0 stage when people didn't really know how to
| make the most of it.
|
| It sounds ridiculous now but Web 1.0 was mostly about putting
| companies paper brochures onto websites.
|
| It sounds doubly ridiculous that Web 1.0 came to an end when the
| market crashed because no one could figure out how to make money
| from the internet.
|
| Web 1.0 started in 1994 and it would be ten years until Facebook
| arrived.
|
| So AI has some really really big surprises in store that no one
| has thought of yet and when they do, fortunes will be made.
| tallytarik wrote:
| "Hey Siri open the curtains"
|
| "I found some web results. I can show them if you ask again from
| your iPhone"
|
| Nah, Apple is the letdown, and has been since before ChatGPT.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Why is a source about AI from CNN being taken seriously? Isn't
| their "journalism" just clickbait?
| amelius wrote:
| Only if you are susceptible to the RDF.
| stavros wrote:
| To me, "AI is the letdown" is the letdown. The sheer lack of
| imagination and wonder you must have to see what are almost
| virtual people, something that was _unthinkable_ five years ago,
| and to say it's a letdown, I will never understand.
|
| We have programs, actual programs that you can run on your
| laptop, that will understand images and describe them to you,
| understand your voice, talk to you, explain things to you. We
| have experts that will answer your every question, that will
| research things for you, and all we keep saying is how
| disappointing it is that they aren't better than humans.
|
| To me, this is very much the old joke of "wow, your dog can
| sing?!" "Eh, it's not that impressive, he's pitchy". To go from
| "AI that can converse fluently is impossible, basically science
| fiction" to "AI is a letdown" just shows me the infinite
| capability humans have to find anything disappointing, no matter
| how jaw-droppingly amazing it is.
| namaria wrote:
| Frankly the "this didn't exist before" and extend-the-line "it
| will keep getting better" is not only bad reasoning, it's
| getting tired.
|
| Yeah transformers doing NLP well is pretty impressive. No, it
| is not worth burning hundreds of billions of dollars on GPU
| data centers. And please, stop the hype. Non-technical decision
| makers are really spoiling everything with magical thinking
| about "artificial intelligence". We still have to learn domains
| and engineer products. There is no silver bullet.
| voidspark wrote:
| It is worth burning hundreds of billions, because users are
| demanding it and getting value from it.
|
| Grok has already overloaded their 200k GPU cluster and is
| struggling to keep up with the demand.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| But we've had Eliza since the 60's so what is there to get
| excited about?
| stavros wrote:
| We've also had sand, so I'm not sure what this "CPU" hype is
| about.
| bradgessler wrote:
| Apple would be much better saying to the world, "we're going to
| make Siri better". That's concrete, people get it, LLMs are good
| at it, and something we'd all appreciate.
|
| Instead they're failing to build a bunch of stuff that nobody
| asked for under the banner, "Apple Intelligence".
|
| Please Apple, just make Siri better.
| throwawa14223 wrote:
| I've noticed that Siri has gotten far worse at playing a song
| based on a verbal request. Frequently Siri now assures me that
| songs are not downloaded to my phone only for me to discover that
| they have been the whole time.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is a really good insight:
|
| > There's a popular adage in policy circles: "The party can never
| fail, it can only be failed." It is meant as a critique of the
| ideological gatekeepers who may, for example, blame voters for
| their party's failings rather than the party itself.
|
| > That same fallacy is taking root among AI's biggest backers. AI
| can never fail, it can only be failed. Failed by you and me, the
| smooth-brained Luddites who just don't get it.
|
| This attitude has been prevalent on HN from the beginning of the
| hype cycle. Those of us who say that we keep trying AI and it
| keeps letting us down invariably are told that we're just holding
| it wrong. Did you try giving enough context? Did you try the
| latest fancy tool? Did you use the latest models?
|
| The answer is yes on all counts, and AI still has failed to
| transform my work in any meaningful way, but that's _clearly_ a
| me problem because LLMs are so _clearly_ the future.
|
| It's nice to see this attitude encompassed in a little maxim, and
| somewhat appropriate that the maxim comes from politics.
| deadbabe wrote:
| We keep trying to find justifications for business use of LLMs.
|
| We keep getting shut down by simpler, purpose built tools that
| work predictably.
|
| LLM is just good for synthesizing vague inputs.
| ohso4 wrote:
| > Apple's obsession with privacy and security is the reason most
| of us don't think twice to scan our faces, store bank account
| information or share our real-time location via our phones.
|
| Uh do you have any freaking idea of what happens with your
| location data? bank account information is a matter of security.
| So is face ID data.
| icu wrote:
| Where exactly is the Apple Intelligence that was advertised? Siri
| absolutely cannot go into your phone's calendar and see who you
| bumped into at some bar or cafe. I've been using the Pixel 9 Pro
| as my daily driver and while I really wanted to install CalyxOS
| on it, I've found Gemini to be actually useful (and I'm generally
| biased against Google).
|
| Apple is behind the curve like Google was prior to Gemini 2.5
| Pro, but unlike Google, I cannot see Apple having the talent to
| catch up unless they make some expensive acquisitions and even
| then they will still be behind. I was shocked at how good Gemini
| 2.5 Pro is. The cost and value for money difference is so big
| that I'm considering switching away from my API usage of Claude
| Sonnet 3.7 to Gemini 2.5 Pro.
| lvl155 wrote:
| This sort of takeaway is from people who do not have experience
| in cutting edge. AI is developing at such a rapid pace right now.
| I've seen some amazing things in the past three months.
|
| I will say Apple AI completely sucks for a company with all the
| resources available to them.
| krackers wrote:
| No, frontier models are very mindblowing. And Deepseek's open-
| weight V3 right now is as good as frontier model. It's just
| apple's tiny models that are useless for anything. And it's not
| just that they didn't have good open models, there's no excuse
| for shipping the joke that is "Image Playground" when you can run
| any number of diffusion models on a mac and get better quality.
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