It’s doing what to the competition?
A boxing term in which one leans against the ropes of the ring letting the opponent tire themself out. It was incorrectly used in this title.
How do you think it’s incorrectly used?
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others are blowing through billions of cash developing standalone AI products and services that have a lot of issues, such as high energy use, the ethics of curating the corpus with offshore labour, and privacy concerns.
Apple could leapfrog them and push out a new AI that runs securely on its own hardware. They’re letting everyone else create the appetite for AI, then will sweep in and clean up. If they do it right.
Your explanation is more in line with the boxing term used in the article.
Google, Microsoft, Mera and OpenAI are all software companies that sometimes sell hardware. Apple is a hardware company that sells software on the side.
Sure, Apple could leapfrog both Google and Microsoft. But I wouldn’t count on it. If you want to see how good Apple is right now, compare Google Assistant to Siri.
Haha seems the same strategy as foldable phones.
However I think we can all agree, that fad will burn out before Apple even is going to get involved.The day Apple brings out their foldable the market will graduate from fad to mainstream
Think about the graphics cards they’re putting in everything…
And the ML chips they put in everything down the their watches
Unless they’re going around spending millions in AI startups at the right moment they’re not going to get ahead, also it might not even be their endgame since generative AI is very controversial atm and them not fiddling with it until its been regulated, or at least put on a leash, it’s probably the smartest thing to do. With the current AI offering (MetaAI, ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc.) you need to pick a side that might bite you back in the future, and lock you into a product that might not give your users the polish that you expect from their software.
Made famous by Muhammad Ali, it means you’re luring the opposition into spending all their energy while you hang back in defensive posture, then you wipe them out with all your strength while they’re exhausted.
That’s how I play squash lol. I just sit back and make my rally partner run around with soft/hard shots. I happily lose points in the start. I’m always down like 3-0 and then win 3-5
Do you wear those little shorts and the sweater?
Omg you’re so amazing!’
Not sure if that strategy works well in this domain
They’re not great with Siri but they excel at it in hidden behind the scenes places like in their chips etc
When these products come out year after year, what’s the rush? They have clearly decided to try and perfect the features before release.
Proofs in the pudding…
Siri has consistently been behind every other smart assistant (ignore AI) despite being one of the first, so this article seems like a balm to soothe anxious shareholders rather than anything legitimate.
Siri is the ultimate example of the “law of the handicap of a head start”. Apple were the best at first, then sat on their complacent asses while the competition overtook them left and right.
Most of Apple’s machine learning is in other systems, like photography. They’ve got years of development in ML, it’s just not been applied to things like ChatGPT-style text generation or Midjourney image generation.
ChatGPT-style text generation
Nor does it need to buy into the hype that will die in 2 years.
I will say that photos OCR capabilities are pretty great.
The other day I needed into my router to a change something and I couldn’t remember the password, but I remember I took a photo of the sticker, so I pulled up photos and searched ‘admin’ and found the picture immediately. I’ve done the same with “ice cream” to find an old photo we really like of my daughter eating ice cream. It’s search function is pretty great
Siri doesn’t bring a DIME to Apple at this moment. They are waiting for AI to mature. When they find a way to make money with it, they will milk it to exhaustion. That’s how capitalism works.
Siri isn’t that far behind Amazon echo or Google assistant. They all suck. Try chat gpt’s new text to voice where you can talk to it. It puts the rest into perspective.
If I were Apple I wouldn’t spend time to iteratively improve outdated tech like Siri. I’d try to be the first to have something like chat gpt built in assistant. It would be a differentiator. Siri vs google assistant isn’t changing anyone’s minds on phone choice.
Google’s already announced it’s putting its generative ai (Bard) in with the Google assistant…
https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard-generative-ai/
Apple likes control. Generative AI is still not as controllable as Apple want.
If the public somehow can influence AI they will, and it usually turns ugly and that’s not acceptable for Apple.
Well Siri is a decade old and it still lacks control
Maybe it lacks features and cant do much, but I’d say Apple has Siri well under control.
Bring out the Gimp.
Why not? Especially if they can make the models run locally on device?
For all we know–they could be. People have gotten Meta’s Llama running on small devices. Definitely not ideal, but neat proof of concept. I’d love to see how far a company can push it with dedicated mobile hardware and software choices. My gut feeling is that Apple’s little experiment with learning and mimicking your voice using on-device ML algorithms is an indication of where they are going to take things.
When a word in the headline is more interesting than the article
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball did a write up about this the other day. Apple plays the long game every time. They are rarely first to the market with these type of technologies, instead making sure it’s not only going to do precisely what they want it to do, but also that it fits into their ecosystem. They let others spend billions on marketing and rushing products that don’t work well, all the while spending their money on R&D so that when they do introduce their new Siri/GPT assistant, it’s usually far and above what the competition can offer.
Wake me when Siri gains a better brain.
There is more to ai/ml than Siri. The ai/ml most impactful from Apple is the one you don’t even notice.
Name three examples for those of us who don’t notice
Even if apple does nothing here they know that any GenAI progress will show up on their devices as an app. Unless of course someone creates a new piece of hardware with GenAI built in that everyone goes crazy for.
Please. Apple was completely taken off guard here. It’s not rope -a-doping anyone. Apple was focused on the vision pro and how to keep people buying its iPhones and bad tv services. Apple was out to lunch. It wants to have a competing product I’m sure, and it will but for those paying attention apple has been losing is shine.
Whenever apple’s version of generative ai gets released make no mistakes it will serve to further lock in its users. It will rename standard concepts and features, tell people that they care about privacy and somehow upsell users on it and I’m sure a dongle will be involved somewhere.
This whole white knight belief throughout the tech world about how Apple is going to swoop in and ‘save’ us with its apple-ness is so tired and frustrating and frankly not true.
While apple uses ai in its products it hasn’t really been selling users on ai. It hasn’t been telling a story. It wouldn’t make sense for apple if it just released some LLM out of the blue. It will remain behind for some generations. It has to get people used to the idea first. It will be a slow roll out, I’m sure.
It hasn’t been selling users on AI because AI doesn’t exist. An LLM isn’t real AI, it’s a party trick brought to you by statistical analysis.
Saying AI doesn’t exist is stupid, unless you use a definition of AI that no one else uses it clearly exists
Google isn’t freaking out about the smartphone market, it’s rope-a-doping the competition
Siri didn’t understand neither did I
I do not agree with this take at all. I think Apple is in bad shape with AI, and it’s extremely hard to overcome that with some sort of “new” AI usage. Google, Microsoft and Facebook are getting smarter and smarter AI, it will be easier and easier for them to just copy whatever idea Apple has because of their more advanced AI capabilities.
AI development tends to follow exponential curves. Once you fall behind, you only fall further behind and it becomes harder and harder to catch up. We’ll see if I’m wrong, but I don’t see Apple becoming a major player in the AI game without some sort of significant shake up (government intervention or something like that.)
This is just an opinion piece with no fresh information. We’ll see when Apple’s AI efforts do come out.