There had better be an option to disable any and all LLM tendrils in iOS or I'm going to probably end up throwing my iPhone into a lake. Call me a luddite or neo-amish or whatever, but IMO the entire feature set is cursed and I want nothing to do with it.
I don't think it is cursed yet. Apple seem to be taking a very conservative approach to the whole AI and LLM thing and are externalising it to OpenAI so they can cast it off if it turns out to be a pile of crap.
Where they are investing heavily is in some of the local on-device ML stuff which actually looks vaguely useful. And it's all standard classification, image processing and summarising stuff. All viable, not overhyped solutions. The photos.app contextual search thing is very useful already for example (even if it can't identify the difference between horses and cows very well).
Think of the standard hype/maturity curve. Apple know how to play it.
Apple already force useless "assistants" on you, how is this different? For example, you can't use CarPlay with Siri disabled, even if you dont use Siri at all. Similarly, you cant disable ChatGPT training on your chat history without also disabling history in general.
Forcing me into a voice assistant enabled at all times regardless though kills the whole thing. I end up preferring buttons and gui because the hands-free "assistance" is most often exercises in frustration and I conclude not worth it.
At this point many years of poor quality experience whenever I encounter voice processing is the matter. Happy to call me old, stupid, and bad at speech ... all are probably true. Still won't fix the frustrations I have for Siri, Tesla, Google-something, Bixby's button, and Alexa devices ... much less every customer service line now consistently apologizing that they didn't get that.
Carplay is leaps and bounds a better approach to gui/console in most cars. Much better than Subaru, Ford, Toyota or others can produce and there shouldn't be a voice assistant cost along with it.
You are not happy with the voice recognition quality (me neither). But I don’t see how Siri being an “assistant” changes anything. It’s just (poor) voice recognition (and only when triggered). What is the difference between an assistant and voice commands for you? And which of these differences cannot be turned off?
The key here is when you state "when triggered", it's already of poor quality when listening, why would I apply that low quality to an open mic situation? I don't want Siri available spending the few milliamps listening for something I'm trying to avoid.
I also don't want side button only, this triggers most of the times I drop my phone onto the wireless charger in the car.
Edit: Clearly I should have bought iphone SE, at least home button avoids that?
It doesn't make sense that I should enable it just to avoid it and still get accidental triggers.
Carplay does not need any voice assistance to offer the basics like maps and audio. Lock the whole thing for all I care without Siri enabled, but to be useless if I choose to run my phone without Siri? Seems stupid to me. The trade off here is worse compared to set and forget with just Bluetooth connected for maps and audio at this point.
For a real trade off I'd consider;
How about something easy like a shortcut which enables Siri when Carplay is triggered and disables Siri when Carplay disconnects?
Just don’t use it. Why is it so important to disable it? It’s similar to saying “I don’t want to use pockets, hence I don’t want any cloth with pockets”.
It really feels like you’re fixating a bit on this.
Since your have omitted “6/ person returns iPhone and happily goes on with its life”, I assume it’s the least bad option for you still.
If you really want the level of detailed control you’re about, take a custom rom on android. It’s more work but it’s possible.
I don't get this, at least if it relates to my particular reply. Someone seemed to be having trouble understanding the reasoning of someone else and I tried to summarize it. Where's do you get condescending from this?
Probably, but I don't use it, only use my car buttons/dial for controlling CarPlay. The times I've tried the voice control it got maybe 50% of the instructions correct, which was more distracting than the muscle-learned buttons/dial control, so I keep using what works.
If I was trying to use voice control, it'd make sense. But I don't, so it doesn't.
In the data control of ChatGPT, you can now disable the use of your data for training:
Model improvement
Improve the model for everyone [ ]
Allow your content to be used to train our models,
which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone who
uses it. We take steps to protect your privacy. Learn more
Still, I agree with the OP that all these ML/LLM should be on device. My mobile phone is very personal.
I’m not clear on the “forcing” part. What does Siri do you want it to stop doing? I use it to set a timer from time to time, that’s it. The rest of the time, we simply do not interact. It never triggers mistakenly for me.
but i see it could have a lot of potential benefits - especially on an iphone with multiple apps easily being able to communicate properly through this AI.
and of course it can provide awesome benefits for disabled people - making their device much more capable than before (in their hands)
Oh no, AI used from inter-machine communication is a recipe for disaster in my view. AI it’s simply _not reliable_. You don’t want that for communication between machines…
honestly, I hope regulation allows sideloading and alternative apps sometime soon. We need to firewall our devices from the accelerating pace of data snarfing.
Some developers have a crazy attitude about what they should be able to do and what the customers want. I would guess that a good portion of Apple customers consistently choose Apple products to avoid the developer attitude above. The smugness is truly off-putting and unlikely to create a good customer experience.
Somehow the developer feels enlightened and has taken on the mission of saving Apple customers. Apple customers can be quite technically literate and want a platform that keeps the developers at a distance. This is the feature one of the key features.
Google is as bad or worse, but there are plenty of other choices. Run a FOSS tablet, or forgo using a phone at all. They really are optional. I have not carried a phone in years.
There’s just so many things that have piled on the smartphone train that sometimes it is necessary. The recent blog about turning an iPhone into a dumb phone is realistically the best bet for a regular person - and if you do the sign in to iTunes / don’t sign in to iCloud, you get access to these (realistically. sometimes mandatory) apps
Apple offers people an extended social graph, support, and great UX so long as they leave their freedoms at the door of the walled garden. They win people over with carefully crafted psychological manipulation.
This is toxic behavior that stunts societal progress for money.
That is like a cult in that it exploits peoples tribal nature to lock them in to an ecosystem for the gain of those at the top.
I find that to be evil. I also find Microsoft, Google, and Meta to be just as bad if not worse, as well as all companies who emulate their behavior.
We should be selling users services, useful tools without restrictions, increased freedom, increased privacy, and increased defense against centralized entities that may put them at risk for profit or power.
> I just wish Microsoft could get their act together on their OS and release a Surface Phone
MS has given up on mobile as a OS or device category. In fact I’d argue MS has given up on the entire OS sector, as a revenue stream Windows is increasingly less relevant to their bottom line. They only see windows as a way to bring other applications (read: advertising) to their users but not as a means unto itself. Ask yourself, what new OS features has ms released since windows 10 that is more than UI changes, or applications that aren’t really a core part of the OS? Adding dark mode or tabs to notepad are not real features that anyone needs.
The truth is that the OS has gotten so complicated and it’s nearly impossible to find competent talent that is excited about OS design and development so it’s barely possible to just keep the OS up to date with the latest hardware, there’s simply no time or effort available for new development.
Same as always, apply. Specifically with OS stuff you’ll need to show an aptitude for it, easiest way is if you’re already a college grad and you took an OS design track. If you’re self taught, it’s much harder to prove you have the basics down, so as another person suggested, contribute to OSS projects, which also sounds daunting, but unlike web dev, OS dev is not somewhere where it’s ok to be mediocre.
At first I laughed with your astute comment, then remembered Apple and its customers will now be paying (transitively) Microsoft to put this feature on phones. I still agree with the point, but Microsoft has done such an amazing job of evolving and staying relevant.
The Lumia phones were great. The first iterations of the OS tried to integrate 3rd party services deeply into the OS. (News, Social, Mail, Calendar aggregations) But the service-providers did not like that because: no advertising possibilities.
Then they had to shift towards apps, but at that time they were way too late.
Probably OpenAI giving the whole direct model(s) to Apple like how you could download LLAMA3 locally. It'd be up to Apple to build the infrastructure to run it at scale for their billions of devices.
Not allowing for whatever customisation any particular nerd wants is not ‘anti-competitive’. Have you ever actually written software for public consumption? If some HN user told me that me not allowing them to swap out a dependency is anti-competitive I’d be quite within my rights to call them psychotic.
> Not allowing for whatever customisation any particular nerd wants is not ‘anti-competitive’.
This is plainly wrong. It's not inherently anticompetitive to set limits, it is anticompetitive to break those limits to promote your own product. It's quite literally one of the only formative moments of the internet, where Microsoft was rightfully sued (and nearly broken-up) for artificially blocking Netscape's market access.
Today, Apple is headed down pretty much the exact same road. I've heard apologetics insist that Tim Cook is an angel for years now, but both me and the regulatory bodies remain unconvinced. The long fall begins now, if you're an Apple customer it would be wise to plan accordingly.
> I’d be quite within my rights to call them psychotic.
You'd look like an idiot doing so, but sure you're well "within your right" to look that way. If you call someone else psychotic for paying attention to monopoly practices and wanting to make change that doesn't impact you whatsoever, then it's probably you experiencing psychosis.
I doubt Google and Apple have the relationship of trust such that they could actually sell Apple an API that would be used to power a core iOS service.
The article rightfully points out that Apple had Google Maps for several years on the device before launching their own maps service. I suspect that it will be treated more like search and not have the deep integrations with core API’s that their own eventual Ai offering will have. And of course when they do launch their own AI offering integration with the core API’s will probably be one of the big differentiators
I presume this is about a contract around something deeper than simply having another app, otherwise they could just build the app - no contract involved.
I think that Google & Apple's trust relationship has broken down post-Google Maps.
> I think that Google & Apple's trust relationship has broken down post-Google Maps.
I think Apple's "trust" can be bought by a big enough customer, and Apple's continued interaction with Google's privacy-destroying search engine seems to demonstrate that nicely.
I think it will be like middle-ware one choices their model by radio button. Apple may have a default model that they manage but a user could switch to various models based on whim.
TBF, if you exclude Generative AI, they’ve been ahead of the curve with including an NPU and on device ML features. They’ve pretty much included some ML feature in their product releases since the iPhone X was released.
Came to say the same. My gut tells me they wouldn't go anywhere near this unless they were concerned to be seen not getting on the bandwagon. It is worrying that "AI" (read silly LLM toys) has become so prevalent that they need to do this.
Apple should consider an iPhone/iOS light, a version stripped of anything but the bare essentials. I get why they don't, the market isn't big enough, and they can barely sell their current best phone, the iPhone SE.
> They also need to make 4 inch phone, like iPhone SE 1. That was the perfect size for a phone.
There are dozens of people who agree with you ;)
Apple came late to the big phone and were pulled there by the market. I'm surprised they still release a smaller phone at all given the rumors of such low sales.
But people need a new phone eventually. If you continuously manufacture phones anyways you might as well update the hardware while you're at it. (It also helps with keeping the price up at >1k)
I for one wouldn't buy a one year old new phone. Used sure but then the price is right.
Hallucinations would be terrible for brand appeal beyond being limited. Nobody has solved that problem yet. Just take a look at Google’s latest search results giving actively harmful information.
They could use OpenAI only as the natural language processing part, and constrain it to only using the vetted services/actions that Siri already can do rather than answering open-ended questions. That would still make Siri massively more useful than it is today since it would remove the need to word things in a specific way.
It wouldn't be bullet-proof (there are always "jailbreaks" to these kinds of prompts) but it might be good enough if they slap a "beta" tag on it.
I suspect that current ML tech is good enough to constitute a big discrete step forward in terms of how much value Siri is providing as a digital assistant that's also in charge of your home. If that's the case, there's more harm in being reputed as the company that is one serious step behind in a space that isn't yet settled vs facing the same level of gaffs that Google and Microsoft are putting out.
Just look at Microsoft right now. They're experiencing all the heat that OpenAI brings, including unforced errors like Sky. Reputationally speaking, are they better or worse off having made such an early push for LLM product integration?
I would argue that Microsoft do not have the same brand that Apple does. So they’re much more free to pursue OpenAI partnerships regardless of how well it works.
I don’t mean brand as in purely recognition, but what it means to people. Apple are held to a higher standard because of the specific identity they’ve cultivated. (Arguing the specifics of whether that’s deserved or not will be its own essay so I’m leaving that out)
You see this all the time on HN or Reddit, where any negative subject about Apple gains significantly more traction than other companies.
Meanwhile Microsoft has an identify that is more “meh”. Users expect Microsoft products to not have the polish, to have ads and be weird/quirky. Microsoft did Windows phone and the zune, Apple did the iPhone and the iPod.
Does that mean one companies products are better or worse? Maybe? Maybe not.
But it does mean that the brand appeal of every company has different characteristics that need to be accounted for. Siri giving bad answers is much worse perceptually than Cortana/Bing giving the same answers.
It also means Microsoft is more free to experiment and do things that are half baked because their brand identity allows for that. Often that leads to really interesting use cases ahead of its time.
I’d also add that Apple being “behind the curve” perceptually has rarely been an issue. The brand is that they enter late and redefine the segment. Again, not always deserved, but that’s the association. They often ride out trends that way.
You can see this even with Google vs Microsoft/OpenAI. Google had their LLM chat-bot working internally (remember the ethics guy who got fired because he was so convinced that the chatbot had a soul?), but they clearly thought that the level of hallucinations at the time would be bad publicity as all the news would be "Google's chatbot spews nonsense!". But OpenAI and Bing had nothing to lose, they could launch them with no expectations of quality, taking Google by surprise, and now everyone just says Google was behind instead and had to scramble to catch up.
Same thing with Apple - if Apple had launched Siri with GPT-3.0 before ChatGPT, they would have been a laughing stock with how bad it was. But instead now they're behind, even though the competing products are STILL unsuitable.
Yeah the Google vs OpenAI comparison is really apt.
ChatGPT will give terrible hallucinations as well, but Google is getting lambasted right now for theirs. But even then, it’s written off as Google being Google.
If Apple did it, it would take over the tech news cycle for weeks. Personally I do think it’s better for Apple to be seen as behind in this trade off.
It can't be any worse than how bad Siri and Alexa are right now. Amazon gave me one of those Pop things recently and it was set up with the wrong zip code. I kept asking it for the weather in Chicago, every way that I could think of, but it had no idea what I was trying to ask for. The speaker is great in it, though.
Alexa telling you the wrong weather is a lot less harmful than it telling you to do something that would harm you (staring at the sun, running with scissors, smoking when pregnant) or spreading political misinformation (telling you conspiracy theories).
Everyone is trying to sell AI as AGI. Apple’s genius will be in breaking from that. Simply, dependable, tightly controlled LLM that isn’t even branded as AI. Just a thing that does certain tasks for you better.
What would you be using it for? More and more I fail to see the value in LLMs. Something like Copilot, if used correctly, does have a bit of usefulness, but that's really the main use case right now. You can't trust the LLMs, so you can't use them for anything where you aren't going to go through the output meticulously afterwards.
Then again, I don't see the point in Siri either, it's useful in only a handful of cases.
I went back to iOS recently, and with AirPods or CarPlay, I found Siri to be a really pleasant surprise. If I need something done, like a text message sent or a quick calculation done, I can just ask without taking my hands or eyes off what I’m doing. It’s also gotten a lot better at taking the hot word + command + arguments without breaks. “hey siri, send a message to dan I’m here” gets you “to dan: I’m here, send it?” For CarPlay, “hey siri, navigate to xyz restaurant” works great to start the navigation if you change your mind about where you’re going once you’re already on the road.
Combine that with “announce notifications” and it really feels like the future, “dan says, are you on your way” and it listens for a few seconds, where you can just say “reply yep I’m 15 minutes away”.
They’re already bringing AI into it a bit, if you get a picture it will try to describe what’s happening in the picture “dan sent a photo of a piece of paper with text on it” which is interesting but it’s not getting enough detail in the descriptions to be of much use just yet. A good multimodal model could definitely improve that, though it must be noted I prefer a worse on-device model to a server based model that can collect a bunch of data.
I think for really off the wall questions/brainstorming, going out to an LLM would yield better results than the current behavior of pointing you towards Google in the browser. “hey siri, what are the typical speeds people achieve on a SPI bus” would be nice if it could give some answer even if it’s not always 100% perfect, it’s kinda like bouncing questions off a slightly unreliable coworker, but you know, better than nothing when you can do it hands/eyes free.
I also have a hope that AI (although maybe not specifically LLMs) would help these assistants handle more complex tasks, like “add eggs to my grocery list” where your grocery list is just in a note and not in some special place. It doesn’t feel out of the question given current technology, I just think nobody’s done it yet.
I have the opposite experience with Siri. Maybe it’s my Australian accent. I have HomePods around, and I use them for lots of stuff. But the voice assistant is barely useful.
“Hey siri, turn on the amp.” “Ok, your media will play louder.” “Siri Set alarm for 4:18” “I’ve set an alarm for 8 o’clock” “hey siri cancel alarm” - radio silence. (Listening to podcast, and my alarm goes off) “hey siri stop” (the alarm stops, so does the podcast). “Hey siri play” “ok, here is some media” (random music plays) … uuurrrrrgghhhh.
> You can't trust the LLMs, so you can't use them for anything where you aren't going to go through the output meticulously afterwards.
People keep saying things like this, and I’m confused because I go to Google for facts, and chatgpt is still super useful. Things I’ve used chatgpt for recently:
- Here’s some text I’m writing for a paper. Help me reword it to make it sound more natural.
- I want to put coconut crème into a stew. When should I add it? What else would go well?
- I’m making a Makefile which has some unusual requirements. How do I do that? Here’s the actual commands I want it to run. Write the makefile. (The makefile wasn’t great, but it was a good start and let me hit the ground running.)
- Generate 100 quirky characteristics for an npc in D&D
And so on. It’s a tool for creativity. I absolutely can’t wait for my HomePods to be replaced with chatgpt.
