Wesley_Hilliard

ne1 said:

"The issue isn't that Apple got caught off guard or has some kind of talent brain drain."

Usually, I would say the assertion of this article is correct. But in this case, Apple was caught off guard by the popularity of consumer available AI tools, that's why they have not yet gotten a model working to their satisfaction and have been delayed. They likely had too much of a focus on the abandoned Apple Car and Apple Vision Pro and failed to devote resources to AI early enough and recognize its importance. We all know they sat on Siri and didn't improve it for years.

So normally, you would be right but in this case, they did drop the ball. I blame the executive team for not putting enough emphasis on it earlier. 

I think the framing is important. It's not as if Apple wasn't working on LLMs in 2022 or earlier, it's just that the leadership didn't see them as worthy of pursuit that early on. I'd even argue that Apple engaging in the AI nonsense in 2024 was still too soon and only brought about because of ceaseless chatter from pundits. To be clear, I'm glad the announced and released what they did, but it was still too soon by Apple standards. And the delay was necessary, why release something that'll just spew garbage like the rest of the industry, we already have garbage generators, why add another?

yyzguy said:

I had to double check my calendar.  Indeed we’re merely halfway through 2025.  Must be a slow news day 

It's actually been quite busy! Turns out, we cover all rumors whether you like them or not. This one was obvious, but reaffirms other recent rumors about shifting release schedules and iPhone Fold, so worth pointing out.

discountopinion said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

discountopinion said:

Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea - make someone outside of Apple the CEO. Someone who can act as a massive talent magnet in AI. Someone with incredible vision.

i sense that Apple would benefit from a 1997 Steve Jobs like entrance and transformation.

Apple has had decades of incredible profits and share price growth, only to stagnate and likely suffer from common corporate malaise. It would not be hard to imagine most staffers cruise their stock options rather than want to change the world.

Unpopular opinion - poach someone very senior from Tesla.
implement Elons work ethic and relentless innovation ethos.
i doubt you can get Elon but you can potentially get one of his protégées.

So you want to replace the CEO of one of the most profitable and globally popular companies on Earth that continually pumps out astronomically successful products with someone from one of the worst run companies in the history of silicon valley with one of the worst reputations on Earth?

Solid plan.

Thank you, it is definitely an option. I suggest parking your likely personal views on Elon’s politics as it does not help your line of argument.

Perhaps a brief moment reviewing his track record of innovation and building world class engineering teams can help. It is unparalleled and don’t take my word for it, listen to luminaries in the business. Most people would be exceptional running just one of the portfolio of companies. Tesla is an exceptional company (or collection of companies rather) taking huge risks shaping and building markets.

Hence any protégée of Elon will have much of his innovation DNA which is what Apple needs to make a meaningful difference in the next couple of decades. This is the most evident on the software side where evolution speed has been a large meh for quite some time. Look at xAi moving from standstill to parity or leadership in model quality in about 2 years. Apple is slow coach evident of a stagnant company.

Tim Cook says that Apple will be best known for its Health work in the future (paraphrased). Well ok, Apple Watch is nice and all but sorry it pales with the real hard problems that Neuralink is tackling which has a reasonably good chance at game changing improvements in the quality of life for many people. Yep, its an Elon company

Ah yeah, takes a lot of talent to take your daddy's diamond money and throw it at tech startups until they are successful. Elon doesn't understand anything and isn't an inventor, but he did get lucky picking businesses to invest in when they were clearly onto a good path for future use. An internet payment platform that got bought out gave him the ability to fail upwards, get Tesla moving at just the right time when EVs were taking off as a concept. Then everything went downhill from there. Musk worked best as an investor that let quality product tell the story, then he got had implants and thought he was hot shit.

Now we have a car company that is tanking in the market and the first vehicle actually pushed by Musk's vision is a rusty bucket held together with glue that they can't sell in any number. He's heralding a space program full of exploding rockets and every missed deadline imaginable. Weren't closer to mars today than we were a decade ago.

xAi almost broke the curse, then Musk got involved and turned an innovative team of ChatGPT competitors into a Nazi guild promoting genocide.

Yeah, excellent track record. No, it isn't bias against Musk or some kind of political ideal, it's just reality. The numbers are there. And I even used to think Musk was smart, until I heard him talk about things I was familiar with, and now I know he's a moron with money.

Not hard to strike gold when daddy paved the way to a gold filled chamber. Musk does have one thing though, he has a strong sense of what businesses can print money with the right push. If he had stuck to that and shut his mouth, he might have even been in the books as an incredible businessman. But now, after X, Tesla, and likely soon, SpaceX and xAi, he's become the richest embarrassment baby man the world has ever seen.

But if facts don't matter and you like him in spite of being directly responsible for the death of millions around the world via DOGE, cool. Cheer for your weird baby man and his pile of degenerate associates. I'm sure he and Big Balls would be the destruction of Apple.

blastdoor said:

What about this is Mac-specific? 

If only there was an article that explained that.

CrossPlatformFrogger said:

Wesley_Hilliard said:

CrossPlatformFrogger said:

I mean this all sounds good until you realize Apple doesn't really have a product in this field. Apple Intelligence is a nothing burger and instead of publishing research papers they should get on the ball and get competitive in this field.

Believe it or not, publishing research papers is how you compete in the field. Engineers fought with Apple to get their names on public documents for this reason.

As for not having a product in the field, see above. I really don't know what people expect Apple to have when they make statements like this. Apple isn't in the business of chatbots, but what they're doing seems to be much more useful, legal, and ethical. And at the least, for those looking for access to those other models, Apple is giving users that access via a private and secure access point.

I think you guys look at the small picture when you keep mentioning AI chatbots because AI is more than that!
I'm building custom scripts for trading, looking forward to building apps for personal use, going to be using an AI agent to do my online shopping for me, completing tasks like building a Google sheet that will constantly scan the market and build me a watchlist based on my criteria, etc. I mean I'm really getting into learning all I can and I hope to one day get rid of Google Home and replace it with a custom built ChatGPT agent. 
Apple is nowhere on this level and I honestly don't see them ever getting close! Apple piggybacking off ChatGPT is not them having a product in the field and I'm sure nobody in this field considers Apple competition. Apple Intelligence by itself is a nothing burger, and Apple writing some research paper about how ethical their non-existent product is means nothing, they need to get in the game. 
This is so frustrating because instead of letting you replace Siri and Apple "Intelligence" with something more useful, we are stuck waiting on Apple to actually do something and not just talk about it

Scripts for trading? As in money on the stock market? Good luck with that. And shopping too? Yeesh. I wonder if there's AI insurance available for bank accounts yet.

If you've been paying attention, Apple is building the framework for any and every task to run via Apple Intelligence. The on-device model being private and secure is an amazing boon, and soon developers will be able to use it for any general task that they can target the AI at. We'll see what people do and what the limitations are after the public release, but it sounds promising.

Again, "I don't want to use these tools" doesn't translate to "non-existent product." I don't want to let ChatGPT spend my money, but that doesn't mean that the feature doesn't exist. Apple Intelligence provides useful features and will only improve going forward. App Intents and contextual AI with Siri will be a game changer too, once it launches.

I use Apple Intelligence every day, but I don't use ChatGPT except in the rarest of occasions, and even then, I use it through Siri. Should I be declaring ChatGPT a useless AI tool? No, because that's silly.