This fiasco reminds me of an incident at a Computer World in Chicago eons ago. I walked up to a display of a large hard drive with a clear cover. The heads were moving back and forth uniformly across the disk. After a minute or two, I asked the vendor, "is this already an operational product?" He smiled and said yes.
I said you have a switch in the device going from plus to negative voltage to swing the head across the disc continously with no random head movement. This is not really operational. He looked embarrassed and said I was correct. They hoped to have it working soon......
I think people are being way too hard on Apple over this. For all we know, it sounds like they actually did have these features most of the way completed, but ran into issues later in the process, and so now have to spend time repairing and reworking elements. And the ads they ran were very clear that those features weren’t available yet. Sometimes things come up and happen, I’d rather they spend the time to fix whatever issues they ran into with it then them rushing it out for release…
"If these features exist in any sort of working state at all, no one outside Apple has vouched for their existence, let alone for their quality....
Why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year, and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why, for that matter, do they now claim to “anticipate rolling them out in the coming year” if they still currently do not exist in demonstratable form?
And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when.
Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work."
Mark Gurman reported info about them from his sources, first saying they would be ready by 18.4, then saying they had been delayed to 18.5 due to issues that arose with the features. So there is no reason to believe they don’t exist at all. Creating AI features like this with privacy and security is a difficult task, and likely they discovered an issue with it recently after the features were most of the way completed that will require some reworking to fix. That’s the way complex software like this ends up working out sometimes. There is absolutely zero reason to believe the features don’t exist.
Furthermore, Apple basically never demonstrates unreleased software features before they’re in beta to journalists or any outside sources, so expecting that is incredibly unreasonable. Just because Apple hasn’t shown these features to journalists doesn’t mean they don’t exist. That’s a preposterous leap that doesn’t even make any semblance of logical sense…
Just because I haven’t shown my time machine, perpetual motion machine and cure for cancer to journalists doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The fact is, Apple got blindsided by AI and decided to lie and mislead the public into purchasing an iPhone to satisfy stockholders sales expectations. Tim Cook is at the helm and needs to go. In fact, they need to clean house at the highest levels.
Garbage! Apple didn’t lie about upcoming AI features. Knowledge of AI is open source. Much of the science is well understood by thousands of computer scientists and programmers around the world, Apple is no different. They have the tech. They had working prototypes. They were ready to launch. They produced launch videos. All the whole, they were testing and debugging, and the test results were coming in… and holy sh*t, it was a hot mess. Errors, misinformation, hallucinations, dubious results,, ill-advised stuff, you name it. So Apple pressed ‘pause.’ Because 50% reliable is not good enough if you’re Apple.
50% reliable is fine for companies like ChatGPT, or any one of the dozens of other AI entrants. Never mind that their entire business model rests on plagiarising and circumventing copyright of the original creatives around the world.
The fact is, Apple got blindsided by AI and decided to lie and mislead the public into purchasing an iPhone to satisfy stockholders sales expectations. Tim Cook is at the helm and needs to go. In fact, they need to clean house at the highest levels.
Nah. I'll counter with AI is a bad name for a decent technology that won't change the world, but will help make certain workflows better. Apple is best positioned to win the AI race while all of its competitors are promising impossible scenarios that involve the end of the world, destruction of the economy, or sentience.
Errors, misinformation, hallucinations, dubious results,, ill-advised stuff, you name it. So Apple pressed ‘pause.’ Because 50% reliable is not good enough if you’re Apple.
50% reliable is fine for companies like ChatGPT, or any one of the dozens of other AI entrants. Never mind that their entire business model rests on plagiarising and circumventing copyright of the original creatives around the world.
That's what pundits like Gruber are missing. Other products that Apple has made in the past had a deterministic outcome whether it was software or hardware. It doesn't matter how someone uses an iPhone or an OS, it will behave mostly as intended. AI, especially generative AI, is non-deterministic and unpredictable because the amount of inputs and outputs are so many that it can't be fully tested.
People like to rewrite history about Apple delivering timely products. There were promises about the G5 chip for years that never panned out, reaching certain clock speeds and making it into laptops. This was promised for multiple years by Steve Jobs and this was a deterministic product.
Attempting to sugar-coat Apple's history is just an excuse to complain about Apple. Apple's products reach over 1.5 billion people overnight, they have to work much harder to make sure they perform as expected.
Errors, misinformation, hallucinations, dubious results,, ill-advised stuff, you name it. So Apple pressed ‘pause.’ Because 50% reliable is not good enough if you’re Apple.
50% reliable is fine for companies like ChatGPT, or any one of the dozens of other AI entrants. Never mind that their entire business model rests on plagiarising and circumventing copyright of the original creatives around the world.
That's what pundits like Gruber are missing. Other products that Apple has made in the past had a deterministic outcome whether it was software or hardware. It doesn't matter how someone uses an iPhone or an OS, it will behave mostly as intended. AI, especially generative AI, is non-deterministic and unpredictable because the amount of inputs and outputs are so many that it can't be fully tested.
People like to rewrite history about Apple delivering timely products. There were promises about the G5 chip for years that never panned out, reaching certain clock speeds and making it into laptops. This was promised for multiple years by Steve Jobs and this was a deterministic product.
Attempting to sugar-coat Apple's history is just an excuse to complain about Apple. Apple's products reach over 1.5 billion people overnight, they have to work much harder to make sure they perform as expected.
As a practical matter, the functioning of personal computers has been non-deterministic for decades. Once the number of software packages grew into the hundreds there was no way a single entity could reliably test each and every possible combination for bugs before an upgrade was released and the whole process had to start again. The community of computer users was forced to accept that nothing was guaranteed, and that in the case of conflicts it was up to the individual user to convince the makers of the software (OS or otherwise) to fix the problem.
So I don't buy the argument that Apple should be given a pass for this situation. They have historically waited until they were confident they could deliver something world-shaking; this time they did not and so they have to eat the crow... unless or until, as with earlier mis-steps, they manage to deliver a new thing that is so good that people forgive/forget the bad stuff.
And Gruber isn't looking at Apple through rose-coloured glasses: he knows the history of the company more than most and has always tried to show the truth of any given matter. Sometimes this means he supports Apple when the media-bashing is in full swing, at other times he supports the criticism. Apple has earned its reputation as a company that, by and large, does the right thing and rarely does anything egregiously wrong. The approach they took with this AI debacle, however, has seriously damaged that reputation and John is kicking himself for ignoring the warning signs. He's not blaming Apple for failing to deliver, or for needing all the stars to align in order to ship on time(-ish) - certain people within the company KNEW they couldn't deliver in the expected timeframe, and they were overruled. Maybe it's just hubris, maybe there was fear about the "Apple is behind in AI" story, ... we'll never know. What we DO know is that Apple over-promised and has spectacularly under-delivered. Nobody's saying the features they promoted would have been easy to implement, but we have trusted the company's judgement in the past because of how many times Apple HAS fulfilled its promises. Now that trust is shaken.
Also, given the challenges AI as a technological approach faces, it's concerning that Apple has chosen to follow the industry rather than continuing to forge its own path. There are so many attack vectors available to a sophisticated actor that it's doubtful user privacy can be guarded once even minimally useful features are implemented. And if you don't have the features everyone else has, you're "behind"... even if those features open you up to having every scrap of data silently exfiltrated from your device and invisible monitoring tools installed to probe for any exploitable weakness in your life.
The current AI push is a massive bubble built on unbelievable hype and gullibility. Apple doesn't need to take the risk and I'm disappointed that they haven't come out more strongly in opposition to the nonsense being peddled by the get-rich-quick crowd.
This is really a tempest in a teapot. With all the shit going on in the world today, this is what people freak out about? Ya’ll need to get your priorities straight.
Comments
I said you have a switch in the device going from plus to negative voltage to swing the head across the disc continously with no random head movement. This is not really operational. He looked embarrassed and said I was correct. They hoped to have it working soon......
Sound familiar?
They hope to have AI soon......
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/03/11/everyone-is-a-loser-in-the-apple-intelligence-race
People like to rewrite history about Apple delivering timely products. There were promises about the G5 chip for years that never panned out, reaching certain clock speeds and making it into laptops. This was promised for multiple years by Steve Jobs and this was a deterministic product.
Attempting to sugar-coat Apple's history is just an excuse to complain about Apple. Apple's products reach over 1.5 billion people overnight, they have to work much harder to make sure they perform as expected.
So I don't buy the argument that Apple should be given a pass for this situation. They have historically waited until they were confident they could deliver something world-shaking; this time they did not and so they have to eat the crow... unless or until, as with earlier mis-steps, they manage to deliver a new thing that is so good that people forgive/forget the bad stuff.
And Gruber isn't looking at Apple through rose-coloured glasses: he knows the history of the company more than most and has always tried to show the truth of any given matter. Sometimes this means he supports Apple when the media-bashing is in full swing, at other times he supports the criticism. Apple has earned its reputation as a company that, by and large, does the right thing and rarely does anything egregiously wrong. The approach they took with this AI debacle, however, has seriously damaged that reputation and John is kicking himself for ignoring the warning signs. He's not blaming Apple for failing to deliver, or for needing all the stars to align in order to ship on time(-ish) - certain people within the company KNEW they couldn't deliver in the expected timeframe, and they were overruled. Maybe it's just hubris, maybe there was fear about the "Apple is behind in AI" story, ... we'll never know. What we DO know is that Apple over-promised and has spectacularly under-delivered. Nobody's saying the features they promoted would have been easy to implement, but we have trusted the company's judgement in the past because of how many times Apple HAS fulfilled its promises. Now that trust is shaken.
Also, given the challenges AI as a technological approach faces, it's concerning that Apple has chosen to follow the industry rather than continuing to forge its own path. There are so many attack vectors available to a sophisticated actor that it's doubtful user privacy can be guarded once even minimally useful features are implemented. And if you don't have the features everyone else has, you're "behind"... even if those features open you up to having every scrap of data silently exfiltrated from your device and invisible monitoring tools installed to probe for any exploitable weakness in your life.
The current AI push is a massive bubble built on unbelievable hype and gullibility. Apple doesn't need to take the risk and I'm disappointed that they haven't come out more strongly in opposition to the nonsense being peddled by the get-rich-quick crowd.