mpantone
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John Giannandrea out as Siri chief, Apple Vision Pro lead in
It's not magic, that's for sure. Asking several AI chatbots to fill in a March Madness bracket was a complete joke and illustrated how painfully obtuse LLM-powered AI assistants still are in March 2025. They are years and years away from replicating something that a thoughtful adult could do.mrstep said:
Agreed. I think it probably needs to be something like 99.999% right, the current "AI" doesn't cut it. The delight of "this is incredible" is a thing ("it's a monkey juggling watermelons... haha"), but that's when you also laugh off bad summaries, 7-fingered hands, and hallucinations - none of which are endearing when asking a question like "when does XYZ close today?" if you have to count on it while planning your day. Obviously Siri offering to search the web for that isn't good, but a confident wrong answer doesn't help either.mpantone said:As far as I can tell, consumer-facing AI isn't improving in leaps and bounds anymore, and probably hasn't for about a year or 18 months.
A couple weeks before Super Bowl I asked half a dozen LLM-powered AI assitant chatbots when the Super Bowl kickoff was scheduled. Not a single chatbot got it right.
Earlier today I asked several chatbots to fill out a 2025 NCAA mens basketball tournament bracket. They all failed miserably. Not a single chatbot could even identify the four #1 seeds. Only Houston was identified as a #1 seed by more than one chatbot, probably because of their performance in the 2024.
I think Grok filled out a fictitious bracket with zero upsets. There has never been any sort of major athletic tournament that didn't have at least one upset. And yet Grok is too stupid to understand this. It's just a dumb probability calculator that uses way too much electricity.
Context, situational awareness, common sense, good taste, humility. Those are all things that AI engineers have not programmed yet into consumer facing LLMs.
An AI assistant really need to be accurate 99.8% of the time (or possibly more) to be useful and trustworthy. Getting one of the four #1 seeds correct (published on multiple websites) is appallingly poor. If it can't even identify the 68 actual teams involved in the competition, what good is an AI assistant? Why would you trust it to do anything else? Something more important like schedule an oil change for your car? Keep your medical information private?
As I said a year ago, all consumer facing AI is still alpha software. It is nowhere close to being ready for primetime. In several cases there appears to be some serious regression.
25% right isn't good enough. Neither is 80%. If a human assistant failed 3 out of 4 tasks and you told them so, they would be embarrassed and probably afraid that they would be fired. And yes, I would fire them.
Apple senior management is probably coming to grips with this. If they put out an AI-powered Siri that frequently bungles requests, that's no better than the feeble Siri they have now. And worse, it'll probably erodes customer trust.
"Fake it until you make it" is not a valid business model. That's something Elizabeth Holmes would do. And she's in prison.
Prompting "Siri, I don't think that's right. Double-check that answer' and getting "hmm, it looks like that was wrong..." is the state of current ML models. I don't really see how that gets turned into a significantly better output just because it's Apple investing in it - loads of companies are investing in it, it's just not baked - and that's the current state of the art. They're statistical models with ungodly amounts of information used to train them, so it looks like magic, but it's still science. Cool, sometimes helpful, but damn you better not just assume the output is correct.
Someday we can look back at this and laugh at it ("boy, those were crazy times"). But right now there are morons paying subscription fees to have early access to alpha software. True insanity but hey, it's not my money they are spending. Feel free to shell out your hard earned dollars to be a tester.
Based on recent failures for these AI assistants in tackling the March Madness bracket as well as identifying the time for the Super Bowl kickoff (asked less than two weeks before the game), I've deleted all AI assistants from my various devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.). Even ChatGPT is gone for the time being.
I'll revisit these in a year or two. Right now they're just an embarrassment and a massive time sink. Or maybe I should keep one and put it in my Games folder on my iPhone.
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New Apple TV+ studio buildings taking shape in Culver City
Odds are pretty low on that based on the number of other Apple Stores at corporate locations. To my knowledge, the only one housed in the same building was the now-closed Infinite Loop store. The Visitor Center Apple Store is in a separate building across the street from the Spaceship (Campus 1).iOS_Guy80 said:Wonder if they’ll have an apple store on the street level.
I'm not aware of any other retail operations at their corporate locations today.
The original Company Store at Infinite Loop started out selling Apple-branded merch (soft goods, coffee mugs, etc.). It slowly transitioned to selling actual Apple products (initially iPods and earbuds, later iPhones and cases and even later a few Macs). Even in its final iteration, the Infinite Loop store was not a full fledged Apple Store, there were no classes and I don't think there were full repair services either. By then there was very little merch, no more "I visited the mothership" t-shirts.
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John Giannandrea out as Siri chief, Apple Vision Pro lead in
No one can be the best at everything. Clearly Giannandrea wasn't. Neither is Cook. Neither was Jobs. Neither are you. Neither am I.
It's important to point out that Services revenue has grown massively under the current leadership.
I think Cook is smart enough to know that when brainstorming future software roadmaps, there might be someone else in the room who should be holding the whiteboard marker for the majority of time.
Tim isn't writing code for Apple, he relies on his direct reports to say "Yes, we can make ____ happen by ____." This is not unique, this happens in all sorts of businesses all around the world every single minute. Somewhere on this planet, there is a restaurant kitchen getting slammed. Some line cook is telling their chef "I got this" or "I could use a hand here".
Clearly some deadlines were missed concerning AI-powered Siri hence the change. However it's also important to point out that Siri is not a P&L center unlike Apple TV+ or iCloud or Fitness+ or the Apple Watch hardware division.
A person can make all the snarky armchair CEO comments they want. But doing so risks unveiling how much that person knows about working in a business, whether it be some mom-and-pop shop, a Fortune 10 megacorp or somewhere in between.
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John Giannandrea out as Siri chief, Apple Vision Pro lead in
Let's remember that John Giannandrea was the former head of AI at Google. It's not like he was unqualified for his post at Apple. However being a good researcher and shipping product are two very different disciplines.
Unfortunately Apple took its sweet time to make this change, just like letting Project Titan fester for years.
Let's also remember that consumer-facing AI is new technology still in its infancy. It's not like there's any (consumer) company that has been doing this for 20+ years. Apple only started including machine learning silicon in their chips in 2017.
Everyone is pretty new to AI which is why not a single consumer-facing AI assistant is head-and-shoulders better than the competition. It's all alpha quality right now. And it doesn't look like whoever has the most datacenter Nvidia GPUs wins either.
Like most Americans with a retirement plan, I am an indirect investor in almost all of the major players. I have a vested interest in seeing some level of success from all of them. Competition is good, it drives quality, innovation and value. I also appreciate Apple's commitment to privacy. This reason itself makes me want Apple to be a top competitor in this field.
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iPhone 17 Pro dummies show where glass ends and metal begins
Joe Consumer cares more about having a great camera module in their phone over having a handset that has uniform thickness across its entire construction. That's why phones with camera bumps sell well.
There's very little demand for perfectly flat phones. Doing so requires far more compromises in optical quality and performance.
The thinness will have a different feel in the hand. The bump itself isn't felt since no one holds their phone touching the camera module. Nothing new about this.
I think the last phone I owned with flush camera optics was the original iPhone SE. That ship sailed a long time ago, it is unlikely that people will ever see another iPhone with flush camera optics given the progression of digital photography and videography. Today's smartphones are far more capable at both compared to their predecessors from ten years ago. However there's no way to dodge physics, the sensors and lenses take some space for satisfactory performance.
At some point in the not too distant future, we should expect an iPhone to start offering 8K video at 60fps. This won't be done with a smaller camera module, that I can guarantee you. Note that Japanese television has been doing 8K terrestrial broadcasts for a couple of years now. It's already here -- not a fanciful imaginary scenario in some egghead dreamworld.
In the end, these are just silly rumors. Let us not forget that most rumors posted here (or other similar news sites) end up being wrong. The rumor mill is highly inaccurate. It's not gospel until Apple ships product.
