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KaiserPro 5 days ago

> Apple in particular is inexcusable

This isn't me defending apple, but, let me play out a little scenario:

"hey siri, book me tickets to see tonight's game"

"sure thing, champ"

<<time passes>>

"I have booked the tickets, they are now in your apple wallet"

<<opens up wallet, sees that there is 1x £350 ticket to see "the game", a interactive lesson in pickup artistry>>

You buy apple because "it works" (yes, most of that is hype, but the vertical integration is actually good, not great for devs/tinkerers though.) AI just adds in a 10-30% chance of breaking what seems to be a simple workflow.

You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit. (although if you've tried to ask for a specific track whilst driving, you know how shit that is. )

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theptip 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with this as one reason Apple hasn’t rolled out Apple Intelligence. It’s a fair point.

However, I think it was a strategic blunder to go announce a full guns-blazing release that solves all of these problems, before taking the easier iteration of just making Siri not suck.

If you had the conversational fluency of ChatGPT with a very locked down set of tool calls (maybe no write actions, or maybe it can only propose simple intents that you must manually confirm, and definitely no purchases) I think they would not be perceived to be as far behind.

Nobody has solved the AI personal assistant product. It’s an insanely massive market segment just for consumers. Going after this as your V1 seems like a bad choice to me.

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thewebguyd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> You don't notice with chatGPT, because you expect it to be the dipshit in your pocket. You don't expect apple to be shit.

So many people don't realize this for some reason, but I think it's precisely why we haven't seen anything shown at WWDC '24. Apple tried and quickly realized the tech wasn't ready, and letting it run wild on their platforms would do irreparable brand damage.

This tech (LLMs) have barely been available to the public for ~3-4 years. That's no time at all, anyone using AI regularly now is very much an early adopter, something Apple historically isn't and Apple's users generally appreciate that aspect of them.

I get wanting to stay ahead of the curve and be competitive, but I don't understand this seemingly deep seated fear of these big tech companies that is making them go 100% all in on AI at the cost of all other areas of their business.

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theptip 4 days ago | parent [-]

OpenAI is the fastest growing consumer tech company of all time. The big guys have to move at what for them is breakneck speed, just to have a chance at retaining their market share.

They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years for some uppity startup to build the AI disruptor and eat their lunch.

	▲	KaiserPro 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> They will be swept away if they sit and wait a couple years I'm not sure that assertion is entirely correct, but I'm aware that I'm making tech predictions that I am very bad at. The long term future is AR glasses. But the problem is, physics and battery chemistry means thats not going to happen for ~10 years at the very minimum. Until then its still tablet/phones. The problem for openAI is that for them to provide useful results, they need access to all your "context" (messages, photos, location, spending, conversations, videos everything) Apple isn't going to allow that, which means that openAI isn't going to be all that useful on ios. Android however is much more loosey goosey. The issue is, will google allow a competitor to steal all that context and muscle them out of their own platform? I'm not sure openAI is going to win this, mainly because they need their own platform, and they only thing they have is brand loyalty, rather than a network effect. chatGPT is fungible with any of the other providers. The only thing that makes them stand out is the tools that are bundled with chatgpt. that and weird personification/pack bonding.