Marvin

jeffharris said:

I read that. Apple's description is incredibly vague. So vague, as to be pointless.
Their concept of "scaling text" is actually changing the monitor resolution. Sorry, but that ain't scaling.

So, I decided to check it out with my M3 Max MacBook Pro. I have a screen resolution utility installed, Resolutionator.
I tried the different Apple text "descriptions", the checked Resolutionator.

Sure enough, change the "Larger Text _____________ More Space" settings and the screen resolution changes. 
There's no UI "scaling" at all. The screen resolution is changed.

I want high res images, with READABLE Menu bar, Dialogue Boxes, etc. without having to drop resolution down to 1440p or whatever.

Good try Apple, I was born in the morning, but not THIS MORNING. It's total BS.

Take a screenshot (shift-command-3), open it in Preview, show info (command-i) and you can see for yourself it's not 1440p resolution.

You can also take a screenshot at 4K with a couple of windows/panels open. Then switch the scaling to 1440p and take a screenshot. Then in Photoshop, manually scale up the menu, panels etc you want larger in the 4K screenshot and compare it to the 1440p image.

Maybe you want something like what's in Linux that allows scaling icons and text individually rather than a global scale but the end result is pretty much the same (compare 0:36 to 2:21):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Rnan9avoM

A bigger monitor would do the job too. 43" is as large vs 27" as 4K vs 1440p so this will show the UI at a good size without scaling:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-43-ips-4k-uhd-60hz-smart-monitor-hdmi-usb-c-black/6563291.p?skuId=6563291

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdFF0AYdvTU

Wesley Hilliard said:

This so-called AGI is just more nonsense packaged in a way that means OpenAI can charge more money for whatever mediocre model the release under that guise. I can't comment on something that doesn't exist yet, so let's see how AGI goes if it ever really happens.

I have a feeling we're already way past peak AI and all that's left for the current iteration is refinement. No, that doesn't mean a new more capable model won't be out next week, what I mean is we've seen the peak of what it can do and it's just going to get better at those tasks. Like these examples, better movie deepfakes, better translation skills, better scientific research and data parsing.

I doubt we'll see something significantly different emerge beyond the AI slop images, video, and text. And we most definitely are not on the way to a sentient computer.

People have different interpretations of AGI, some would say that sentience is a requirement but this isn't required to replace a human role and there are human characteristics that drive sentience that a machine will never need and may never have like motivations driven by physical constraints, which would need to be simulated in a machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

All that would be needed from an AGI initially is to replicate a human in a role:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

AGI is described on the following page as doing all the work of a company of people independently and is generally expected within the next 5 years:

https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-is-coming-in-2025-and-machines-will-be-able-to-think-like-humans-when-it-happens

Online customer service is the most obvious use case as many of those roles are online and this is millions of jobs. AI is not at this level yet and it's obvious when an AI is being used but it can reach a level where it's not obvious.

Another example would be a film editor who would edit product review videos. This person would take a lot of raw footage, crop it, sort the files in order, drop them into a timeline and make a sequence where the dialog is cohesive.

Let's say Apple adds an AI feature to Final Cut Pro where you select a group of clips and ask it to make a review video. It would transcribe the audio from all the clips, do image recognition, abbreviate the text into an interesting short form and arrange the clips in Final Cut according to the audio timestamps. It can do this very quickly. This would be capable enough to replace the editor entirely.

It might be more apt to describe it as advanced automation vs intelligence but either way, it is replacing the human role entirely.

The more roles that a singular AI can replace, the more of a general intelligence agent it will be.

Then add it to a physical robot and it can be asked to make dinner, clean the house, take the dog for a walk, do the tax returns, wash the car:



This kind of personal robotics is huge for elderly people.

tht said:

Yes, useful, but not national strategic initiative worthy. I liken it to more advanced grammar checkers, more advanced code completion. Great stuff, but that doesn't drive Nvidia to be worth $3T in the stock market. It's "robots replaced humans" and all the money that used to flow to humans will be flowing to AI service owners and AI hardware owners. So, concentrating billions for the many to a few.

Nvidia is making a lot of revenue from hardware sales:

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2025

Their stock valuation is based on growth rate and earnings. Nvidia's latest earnings show $72b net income for the year (112% revenue growth), $2.9t market cap. Apple's last report showed $93b net income ($3.2t market cap, 2% revenue growth).

AI is well beyond simple tools and needs to be taken seriously at the national level. It poses a national security risk when it comes to cybersecurity. It has applications for everything: military strategy, security, facial recognition, medicine, it is discovering new materials, new drugs, new processes for diagnosing diseases.

https://moneywise.com/investing/stocks/bill-gates-says-this-new-technology-is-the-first-that-has-no-limit

People are being complacent with it now because it's at the stage of a child/adolescent where it makes a lot of mistakes. It will need the right training to correct this and this will need more research but once people reconcile with the fact that humans are just smarter apes that have evolved through massive training programs, it's easy to see that we can put machines through the same process and things accelerate quickly when the AI is used to train itself.

Look how advanced this video and audio generation is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdQaiDT-Ecg&t=526s

The rate of improvement over the last few years has been very high. AI will go beyond basic tools. Add in augmented reality and robotics and there will be a lot of interesting directions to go in. Many possibilities won't happen for commercial reasons so healthy skepticism is justified but people are overly focused on the mistakes of the early products.

king editor the grate said:

Why would it be translated through iPhone speaker rather than AirPods?

So that the other person can hear it e.g Spanish person speaks to English person who has Airpods. Spanish to English audio is on the AirPods so the English person can hear it, the reply English to Spanish is on the iPhone speakers so the Spanish person can hear it.

tht said:

Still confused on how AI or AGI is going to benefit us.

Like, these AI companies are offering a service for subscription money. That type of business model will limit revenue and seems doubtful they can make money that way? It ultimately will be powered by ads. So the race is really to be in the position that Google is in right now? Ads, ads, ads?

The race is to build the software and hardware to replace humans in factories? Humans are probably cheaper. The race to replace desk and service workers? Desk work has been whittled down so much. So, it’s just the continuing trend. Humans are probably cheaper? Service workers? Humans are probably cheaper. 

Perhaps it will allow an auteur to make a movie with a million budget look like a movie with a billion dollar budget? Sounds like that would make the movie business be like YouTube? Time wasters. But the ads!

I think my position has settled on Butlerian jihad. It’s really just a normal resistance to robber barons, but Butlerian Jihad sounds apropos. 

Companies are using it to replace some jobs. Duolingo replaced some contractors with AI being used for translations:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/09/tech/duolingo-layoffs-due-to-ai/index.html

Klarna replaced customer service staff with AI:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/klarna-ceo-ai-chatbot-replacing-workers-sebastian-siemiatkowski/

Employees are expensive:
100 employees x $50,000 = $5m/year
100 x M3 Ultra ($4k) = $400k over multiple years

The code-generating AI is very useful and boosts productivity:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/google-ceo-says-over-25-of-new-google-code-is-generated-by-ai/

It's like having a user manual on steroids.

For media, it is being used for VFX and audio. The fake celebrity video on the following site was AI generated:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/kanye-west-viral-video-scarlett-johansson-1236134290/

It has been used for de-aging actors:



James Earl Jones who was the voice of Darth Vader died and AI is now being used to replicate his voice. The voice in the Obi-Wan TV show was AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogNzvIoD2Qo&t=51s

It's most useful and reliable as a tool to help with tasks that are tedious and repetitive. Transcribing audio for subtitles for example.

People are not aware just now of the impact AGI will have because AI doesn't seem reliable enough to replace a human. It doesn't have to though, it only has to replace a job role and it can replace a significant amount of job roles that make up a huge segment of the economy. This will mainly benefit corporations at the expense of lower skilled jobs but it can also empower individuals to compete with companies. Game studios hire thousands of people. When an AI can replace a lot of the job roles, an individual will be able to spool up a digital army of workers and be able to manage a virtual game studio. This will allow individuals to make millions or even billions in revenue where they never could before. It will also create a flood of mediocre content way bigger than we see already.

jeffharris said:

djames4242 said:

meterestnz said:

I feel your pain. My daughter purchased a m2 Mac Mini when it first came out out. She used it with a second hand Display until it failed. Money was tight so she went with a Samsung smart display. She ended up taking the Mini to the store and asking their tech manager to fix the display or replace it with something else. It took the manager nearly two hours of fiddling around with display settings to eventually get it setup correctly. When you connect to an Apple monitor it just automatically sets itself up but another brand needs manual settings to make it work and they are in many different places. It can be accomplished through so keep trying. 

Odd. My MBP is connected two dual LG 4K displays and I’ve literally had no issues. I could force my Mac into a native resolution, in which case I’d have tiny everything, but that’s certainly not the default. One would have to explicitly select that display resolution. It’s also quite simple to select a non-HiDP resolution to resolve the problem.

I bought a 4K monitor to have 4K for my CAD and 3D work and photography. 

Mine is a new Viewsonic IPS monitor with Thunderbolt ports (VK2776T-4K).

Nice monitor, but maybe Apple hates Viewsonic and doesn’t support their stuff?

When I looked for an answer to UI scaling in the Apple Forums I was told to drop the resolution down to 1440p. 

This option is scaling the UI, it's not rendering at 1440p like a 1440p display would be. You are expecting to leave the resolution setting at 4K and for Apple to scale the UI up. This is what the 1440p scaled setting does. It scales the UI up to look like how it would at 1440p but draws it into a 4K or 5K buffer and displays this. This way you get larger UI elements but media content and text renders at native resolution.

1440p UI scale is the default setting Apple uses on their 5K Studio Display:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJuruNqxiP4&t=129s