I love this video. It's classic Steve Jobs in a real meta way.
While I agree with the thesis, the response is total reality distortion field.
He says "you have to start with the customer experience" rather than the technology.
Then he name drops 4-5 technologies that were speculative endeavors and says when Apple put them all together to make the laser printer: "we can sell this".
> "You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works.
Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that?
How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and I have __one__ need right now.
Wait, I'm supposed to use maps again to find a public toilet? Chances are it's going to be smelly and dirty. Not the great UX I am looking for, Apple.
Seriously, Apple has been addressing the wrong problems for far too long now. They are not looking from the user's perspective, but rather from the viewpoint of: we have a CPU and a touchscreen and a camera, what can we make with that so that more people will buy it? And how can we sell people even more stuff __through__ it?
But of what use is a better camera if the device can't even solve basic needs?
If you want to call yourself a revolutionary company, you gotta step back and think different.
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
To do this right, you probably need to learn from the many attempts others made before. I bet nobody knows yet what a good customer experience for AI will be. They are all still experimenting until somebody puts together all the parts in a successful package.
This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale.
All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference.
and alot of software still has only dropbox sync support. As every Cloud Storage Provider facing Consumers just implements their own propriatary bullshit protocoll so there is always only 3 supported Cloud Storages and usualy they are Icloud, Dropbox, Google Drive.
I totally agree - the phone as a form factor is not going away. People are always going to want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life. The phone is not going to be replaced by smart glasses or some other wearable or screen-less pocket device.
It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI.
Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall?
There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.
>want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life.
Well before the iPhone flew off the shelf, using the the previously established smartphones I never had to settle for less than a week of battery life.
Plus anybody could just slap in another spare battery whenever they wanted to, whether they were off the grid for an extended period or not.
Never thought it was going to end, only get better not worse.
GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America.
To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
The MP3 spec was defined a decade before we had iPods. Spreadsheets took a decade to become indispensable to businesses.
Clifford Stoll had used the internet for two decades before writting his infamous 1995 essay in Time saying the internet was overhyped, and "normal" people would never e-mail because they can just fax.
CRISPR was first observed in 1987, and the gene-editing breakthrough came in 2012.
It's really, really unclear why you think LLMs would have faster adoption, when they are already that being adopted faster that anything other tech, ever.
Do you honestly know of no non-technical person who use LLMs? Because an absurd number of people report on surveys that they use it every week.
LLM apps are regularly the top downloads on the iPhone.
The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.
The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music.
> This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.
Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?
Do people want that? I mean I don’t think it can discern if I say 15 or 50. Why would I leave that to chance that the ai properly grokked my message when despite what I’m guessing decades of work in the speech to text field, it is still pretty unreliable? Doing the task myself is trivial enough and 100% reliable.
They keep banging on Siri hoping for a different outcome is insanity by definition. Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things, it isn't very private, it's prone to mistakenly think I'm talking to it, and is bad for dense info/info organization. Siri should only be activated very very deliberatly, not "Hey siri", and don't make it act like jarvis because you will not in the near future with the smarts it needs.
People keep on saying Apple is far behind its competitors on AI. If Apple just waited on their Apple Intelligence announcements about Siri or other features that would have been best. Right now Apple makes money off of any subscriptions through the App Store which is actually profitable compared to the foundational AI companies which are spending trillions to make a technology which everyone will have but no one will expect to pay the cost of making the technology.
Exactly this. I use Siri for two things: remind me x at date/time and set a timer for x. And it even screws these up 10% of the time. If you make those work flawlessly but it also works with any app on the device I'm sold. I'd even buy a new device if it was limited to that. Let OpenAI and Anthropic worry about changing how we work in a revolutionary way. Whatever the outcome is there people still need great products to do ordinary things and that's where Apple has always excelled.
It's crazy to me that even with a strong accent ChatGPT can nail my voice messages. If Siri can suddenly do that (and there's no reason it can't anymore) the device becomes much more useful to everyone that doesn't speak English and doesn't have an American accent.
I felt the same way about NFT's. Its a cool protocol. Theres some cool stuff that could hypothetically be built on the protocol. Selling people NFT's felt like trying to sell someone a TCP or a DNS. The protocol is not the product lmao.
Earlier today Siri notified me over and over again to message a particular contact on the GMail app. I have no earthly idea why this was important enough to notify me about, I can figure out whether I need to message people. It provided no hints what the contents of the message were supposed to be, or why I might need to message them now instead of some other time. 20yr ago when I worked in an industrial steel fabrication shop, a couple times a week someone would exclaim "shoot the fuckin' engineer that came up with that one!" usually regarding some bone-headed physically impossible weld on a plan or a procedure that would clearly result in an assembly being out of tolerance, but sometimes something more serious like a weak or dangerous design. Now we're well into the "shoot the fuckin' engineer" stage with tech products. Abusing people like this is wrong. Their attention is a finite resource. Their reward centers are vulnerable. Mindlessly pushing the buttons in the psychological control room of vast, diverse, and increasingly stressed populations is a profoundly stupid idea. If we're not careful somebody is actually going to start shooting the engineers. Would they be wrong to? I don't think the backlash against this shit is going to be small or subtle, and I'm honestly afraid to be associated with this industry right now. Y'all are playing with fire in the most reckless, clueless, thoughtless, and callous fashion. Be better. Stat.
When that happens, it will notify the end of the hype cycle. Knowing about tech and working in it, you might have a very different perspective on AI and its limitations, but the companies are still literally selling it as if it's some magic black box that'll solve every problem and make humanity 100x more efficient. If we reduce that to a "smarter Siri that makes fewer errors", the public perception will be massively disappointed. They have promised AGI and people have bought that promise given their valuation, walking back on it = suicide.
Yep. I am pleased to say that after over a decade of development and high tens of billions USD in costs, Siri can finally play Knights of Cydonia in Youtube Music at a first try. "That Queen song from Sonic hedgehog movie" will probably need another 20-50 billion $ and I am happy to let Ternus spend it.
If they could get "Hey Siri, play 'Song Title' by 'Band Name'" to open the Music app and play the song I ask for, that's the extent that I give a damn about AI being introduced to iOS.
The only thing I have ever wanted from a voice assistant or AI assistant or anything like that on the phone is the ability to be listening to music, interrupt the music and tell it “add ‘X by Z’ song next in now playing” and then have it add it and continue playing the same playlist, but it’s never done that. It always replaces the entire now playing list.
It’s a lot of noise out there. That's the problem with these threads—everyone wants to sound profound, so they end up debating abstractions instead of building something that actually works. "AI is a political ideology" or "AI is a fascist artifact"—that’s just academic posturing. It’s a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a skull; the hammer doesn't have an opinion. The people using it do. The person talking about Siri? That's the only one in that whole thread actually making sense. Everyone else is tripping over themselves to define "AI," but they're missing the point. If your device can't pull up the context for your dinner reservation, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand agents living in your pocket. It’s useless. I’m tired of hearing about "AI products." We didn't build a "Microprocessor Product." We built a computer. The technology is the foundation, not the house. I'm going to look at the state of the local models. If everyone is so worried about corporate bias and closed systems, the only answer is to make the tech small enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough that anyone can run it on their own hardware. Then we'll see who's still talking about politics.
Why is every consumer hardware company sleeping on AI? The best product is Openclaw and it is embarrassing.
Today I wanted to book a public transport ticket in Germany but it was simply too hard to keep copy pasting screenshots from the app to ChatGPT. This seems to be a very easy problem to solve and standardise at the OS level but no one seems to want to do it.
I agree its not a totally different "product" but does require some thought. Apple can't sleep on this.
Everybody wants to do it, but doing it in a way that's survivable to a company with a brand image to preserve and potential legal liability for the consequences is not nearly as easy.
This is important to think through, does one have a product, tech, tool, or even just a feature. I given thing is not necessarily at the bottom of this stack, but also not always at the top.
If capable humanoid robots are really closer than most people think, I'd be surprised if Apple isn't exploring them. That may be the counterexample to "AI is not a product": a physical AI product where hardware, sensors, UX, privacy, and integration matter as much as the model.
Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy:
> By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”
Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? I basically think it's just people that want to broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds it takes to hail an Uber. Its like all that "productivity optimization" porn that people spew online to show how focused they are.
I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate.
These folks like Levy who view this dystopian future as some sort of nirvana (and not because they view a different future, they actually want all this nonsense) can go F themselves. You can also tell how incredibly sheltered these people are because you can see they're rarely interacting with people outside their bubble. For example, a lot of people that open the Uber app make their decision based on data in the app, like "surge pricing, nevermind, I'll just walk" or "this looks expensive, let me try Lyft". You could argue an agent could learn all those rules, but again, these minutia of life are not exactly a nuisance to most people.
...in the same way that people used to just accept bulky laptops with terrible batteries, I think people today have become inured to just how annoying it is to get your phone in and out of your pocket. This is why phones get dropped at broken constantly. Phones suck, and I don't think they are the final form factor.
The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pretty far away. Before that can happen, we need computer chips and batteries to become almost microscopically small.
For the foreseeable future—still long term, but much closer than glasses—I think the logical form factor is a smartwatch. For photos, it would have an under-screen front-facing camera, and an outward facing camera on the wrist band. The screen would be a bit larger than today's largest Apple watches, and it would fold out like a folding phone when you need more space.
Even unfolded, the screen would have to be smaller than what we're currently used to on smartphones. However, this would be less important if most interaction was done via AI, just as limited-interaction iPods and Blackberries never commanded massive screens. People who want to watch movies, read longer books, or play games on larger screens could still carry folding tablets in their pockets on some occasions, but the watch would be the central device everyone always has.
Apple, of course, already makes smartwatches, arguably the best ones on the market. But an Apple Watch is very much not the device I'm describing, and I'm not sure if Apple will let it get there. Apple is stuck in the innovator's dilemma, where the iPhone prints so much money they can't afford to cannibalize it. For the moment, the iPhone has been so good that this hasn't caught up to them. I think—and for the sake of innovation, I hope—that this doesn't last forever.
For those that care, Gruber (author of this blog), said the following about news about the Genocide in Palestine:
Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..."
Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out."
Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts,
Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun"
Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..."
Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties"
Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.
I've always looked at it as a platform to build stuff on top of as well. I expect that we'll be treating this tech the same way we treat stuff like Linux today. It'll become common open infrastructure that will be used to build products. Incidentally, this is exactly what Chinese companies seem to be banking on, hence why they don't worry about releasing their models in the open. They understand that getting more people using their models is the key part right now.
> Only a fool would argue that Apple can stand on the sidelines and ignore AI.
Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments.
There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.
So far, Google has been better than Apple at treating AI as a technology/feature and not just a product.
Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages.
And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.
By 2021, we'll have completely abandoned light switches. We'll just use an app on our phones to turn off the light in the bedroom, or perhaps request out loud for Alexa to do so. The future is the Internet of Things.
I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.5 ms ] thread"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
AI was never going to be on Apple's roadmap in a significant way because it's in their DNA to differentiate technology from products.
[1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=ndUU1H5D3pNifWss
answer... ditch phone/screen, just have an earpod you talk to.
While I agree with the thesis, the response is total reality distortion field.
He says "you have to start with the customer experience" rather than the technology.
Then he name drops 4-5 technologies that were speculative endeavors and says when Apple put them all together to make the laser printer: "we can sell this".
Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works.
Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that?
How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and I have __one__ need right now.
Wait, I'm supposed to use maps again to find a public toilet? Chances are it's going to be smelly and dirty. Not the great UX I am looking for, Apple.
Seriously, Apple has been addressing the wrong problems for far too long now. They are not looking from the user's perspective, but rather from the viewpoint of: we have a CPU and a touchscreen and a camera, what can we make with that so that more people will buy it? And how can we sell people even more stuff __through__ it?
But of what use is a better camera if the device can't even solve basic needs?
If you want to call yourself a revolutionary company, you gotta step back and think different.
To do this right, you probably need to learn from the many attempts others made before. I bet nobody knows yet what a good customer experience for AI will be. They are all still experimenting until somebody puts together all the parts in a successful package.
All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get away with it for a while, but only insofar as hardware prevents advanced use. Once we get that hardware[1] there will only be two types of AI companies: hardware manufacturers, and labs. Just like sync became trivial and ancillary, so will AI inference.
[1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/
It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI.
Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall?
There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.
Well before the iPhone flew off the shelf, using the the previously established smartphones I never had to settle for less than a week of battery life.
Plus anybody could just slap in another spare battery whenever they wanted to, whether they were off the grid for an extended period or not.
Never thought it was going to end, only get better not worse.
To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
Clifford Stoll had used the internet for two decades before writting his infamous 1995 essay in Time saying the internet was overhyped, and "normal" people would never e-mail because they can just fax.
CRISPR was first observed in 1987, and the gene-editing breakthrough came in 2012.
It's really, really unclear why you think LLMs would have faster adoption, when they are already that being adopted faster that anything other tech, ever.
Do you honestly know of no non-technical person who use LLMs? Because an absurd number of people report on surveys that they use it every week.
LLM apps are regularly the top downloads on the iPhone.
The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.
The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does not like AI for its own sake or the weirdos who ramble about putting them into a permanent underclass. The user likes messaging their friends and playing music.
To much of this hype cycle has no user in mind.
Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?
It's crazy to me that even with a strong accent ChatGPT can nail my voice messages. If Siri can suddenly do that (and there's no reason it can't anymore) the device becomes much more useful to everyone that doesn't speak English and doesn't have an American accent.
Upon learning about LLM's however many years ago (3? 4?), literally my first thought was:
"Oh, how Siri is supposed to work."
It's the single most obvious application.
"Hey Siri turn on the livingroom lights" "Hey Siri set the thermostat to 19'
Being able to go "Hey Siri turn on the livingroom lights and set the temperature to 19" would be so much easier.
For a real AI this would be no issue. But Siri is completely hand scripted.
They literally have forgotten as they’re just following orders from investors (public or private).
Before those orders were “get as many users as possible” as valuation is based on credibility of reaching TAM.
Now the orders are “just use AI as this will be necessary to stay relevant and avoid being displaced” in addition to of course “profitability now”
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the perspective in the daring fireball post aligns exactly with this author’s perspective:
https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-e...
Today I wanted to book a public transport ticket in Germany but it was simply too hard to keep copy pasting screenshots from the app to ChatGPT. This seems to be a very easy problem to solve and standardise at the OS level but no one seems to want to do it.
I agree its not a totally different "product" but does require some thought. Apple can't sleep on this.
I agree with Gruber's take, if the seller is Apple.
> By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” may be replaced by “Let the agent do that.”
Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? I basically think it's just people that want to broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds it takes to hail an Uber. Its like all that "productivity optimization" porn that people spew online to show how focused they are.
I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. This stuff is generally considered "life", not some back breaking drudgery like washing clothes in a stream that I'd like to automate.
These folks like Levy who view this dystopian future as some sort of nirvana (and not because they view a different future, they actually want all this nonsense) can go F themselves. You can also tell how incredibly sheltered these people are because you can see they're rarely interacting with people outside their bubble. For example, a lot of people that open the Uber app make their decision based on data in the app, like "surge pricing, nevermind, I'll just walk" or "this looks expensive, let me try Lyft". You could argue an agent could learn all those rules, but again, these minutia of life are not exactly a nuisance to most people.
The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pretty far away. Before that can happen, we need computer chips and batteries to become almost microscopically small.
For the foreseeable future—still long term, but much closer than glasses—I think the logical form factor is a smartwatch. For photos, it would have an under-screen front-facing camera, and an outward facing camera on the wrist band. The screen would be a bit larger than today's largest Apple watches, and it would fold out like a folding phone when you need more space.
Even unfolded, the screen would have to be smaller than what we're currently used to on smartphones. However, this would be less important if most interaction was done via AI, just as limited-interaction iPods and Blackberries never commanded massive screens. People who want to watch movies, read longer books, or play games on larger screens could still carry folding tablets in their pockets on some occasions, but the watch would be the central device everyone always has.
Apple, of course, already makes smartwatches, arguably the best ones on the market. But an Apple Watch is very much not the device I'm describing, and I'm not sure if Apple will let it get there. Apple is stuck in the innovator's dilemma, where the iPhone prints so much money they can't afford to cannibalize it. For the moment, the iPhone has been so good that this hasn't caught up to them. I think—and for the sake of innovation, I hope—that this doesn't last forever.
They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..."
Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out."
Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts,
Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun"
Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..."
Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties"
Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.
Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments.
There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.
Um iMessage?
Staying on hold for you. Google Lens on that coat or bag. Warning you in the middle of a text convo with a stranger, if the conversation veers into typical scam patterns. Better text/email spam detection than Apple. Hanging up spoofed calls posing as your bank. Magic Cue. Magic Eraser. Better transcriptions and translations, in far more languages.
And who could forget, a good touchscreen keyboard. Those are real "AI as a feature". Not a better Siri.
I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.
The more invisible AI inference becomes in systems, the more they start feeling more practical.
I personally find it more engaging to have an agent visualize things for me using matplotlib.
The problem is that too many startups are trying to do to OpenAI and Anthropic, what merchants do with commodities in the market.
Seems more driven by profit in mind than by actual value creation.