Tests of the New AI Siri(pogueman.substack.com)

14 pointsby MBCook4 hours ago3 comments

MBCook3 hours ago
I’ve been using it off and on since DB2.
David Pogue is right, it’s very impressive. He and basically everyone else make the same comment, and I fully agree: it’s hard to remember to even use it.
I used Siri a ton before, but always for basically the same four commands. Create reminder, call X, send a text to Y, set a timer for Z minutes.
And after years of that, it’s hard to remember to do more. But when I do it can often shock me.
It’s not fast. Which is quite annoying for those quick actions I used to do. But I’m OK with that on my phone. Not happy with it on my watch.
It’s not ChatGPT 5.6. And I’m sure they’ll get it faster over time. But in my mind they finally delivered.
danjcan hour ago
A lot of that list sounds like the "ai, please press the order me pizza button" meme.
- MBCookan hour ago
  Some of it is. He did the classic “book an entire vacation for me“ except he only asked it to plan.
  No one is ever going to just tell a phone to book a vacation for them. It won’t know what you want well enough. Planning is much more reasonable because then you can just adjust whatever you don’t like.
  But as a demonstration, it certainly shows how far Siri has come. It probably would’ve just offered to do a web search before.
  The things I’ve found it really useful for so far is the “find this piece of information that must exist on my phone somewhere, but I don’t have the slightest clue where“ kind of query.
bigyabai3 hours ago
> Also, this is ethical AI: It deceives nobody, puts nobody out of work, and draws 100% of its power from renewable sources.
I like how this is cast as a selling point instead of tacit admission that Apple is not on the frontier.
- AIiscoming2 hours ago
  I think this is good and not just whatever.
  But hey perhaps i still don't understand your point properly
  - bigyabaian hour ago
    Here's a better example. Compare these two marketing tones:
    Low confidence: "Our engineers work tirelessly to ensure that frontier research doesn't step on the toes of users. It's a deliberate touch to keep people in the drivers seat, emphasizing the importance of human coexistence with technology. Apple Intelligence can never replace our users or the personal touch they bring, and that's what makes Apple products so special to us all."
    High confidence: https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/why-apple-ipad-ad-cont...
    MBCook11 minutes ago
    You realize this isn’t an Apple marketing piece, it’s an extremely well known tech reviewer who used to work for the NYT and was one of the two(?) who was allowed to test the iPhone before its release.
- MBCook3 hours ago
  I don’t see what those two have to do with each other. Could you explain?
  - bigyabai3 hours ago
    If Apple was a frontier lab, this article would not begin with "This is unethical AI, it deceives people, puts people out of work, and draws 100% of its power from coal and LNG."
    It's the same flavor of ethics-washing that we saw with Mac LLM inference. Many people rushed to call Mac inference "efficient" when it put up worse per-watt performance than cheap GPUs. It was a marketing platitude to make people accept subpar performance. Same for calling Siri "ethical AI" too.
    krageon2 hours ago
    Is this some sort of avant-garde sarcasm that is meant to be funny? I'm genuinely asking, I am having trouble modeling a live human being that reads any amount of llm-related news and says this without it being facetious.
    bigyabaian hour ago
    It's an observation of how people respond to marketing. Apple objectively dragged their feet on LLM software and hardware research. After 3 (!!!) years we finally have a good LLM Siri, and the first note that this guy makes is "oh it's ethical" to cover for Apple's wasted time.
    I find it pretty funny, but the author probably doesn't. Americans ought to know better than to utter "ethical" and "Apple" in the same breath.