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AI-Infused iOS 18 Lauded as 'Ambitious and Compelling' by Apple Execs
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No one cares? About generative AI?
You sound like the ones who said “nobody wants smartphones with no physical keyboards” in 2006. If they said it in 2012.
Everybody cares about this and it’s one of the reasons why Siri sucks, they were waiting for a major tech breakthrough that would make every incremental update they could have worked on instantly obsolete.
Apparently its going to be a big upgrade. Before you would ask Siri play Chemical Brothers and she would say "Here's what i found on the web for chemical symbols". Now with the upgrade, it will be "i asked ChatGPT to explain chemicals to brothers"
Ambitiously compelling... so folks, you should get ready as fast as you can: savour whatever battery life and performance you have left, because next year you will have none. If an iOS update is feature-ambitious, say hello to the most power-hungry, the most battery-draining, performance-obliterating iOS update.
Are you talking about generative AI in all its forms?
There was just a several months long strike by actors and writers against it. They won. Generative AI has been crippled there. It can no longer be used as maliciously as AI stans wanted.
We now need the same fight against the use of generative AI for spam on social media and scamming the public.
As for the bad keyboards example you used against the forum member.
Software keyboards are still kinda crap 18 years later. Yes they are great but it comes with caveats and limits.
And talking to a computer is really crap unless you are Stephen Hawking and need assistance.
I don't know about the Contacts, but when you set a meeting in another time zone, you can chose the time zone in Calendar while you input the meeting. When you get invited to a meeting, it should be correct automatically. But just in case, when scheduling other time zones, I always set the local times in the subject.
I won’t be surprised if this is an iPhone 16 pro (mostly) on device feature only.
As you say, LLM Siri will need more ram (and likely a bigger neural engine) on the chip package.
That way, Apple gets to drive more sales and gets its gadget hungry users to beta test LLM Siri.
And as is now becoming usual with Apple, the plain iPhone 17 will likely get this feature next year (after beta testing from iPhone 16 pro users!).
As you say, it could make a cloud version of LLM, but that doesn’t feel very Apple.
The headline product features for LLM Siri will surely be:
- v Fast processing on device.
- LLM Siri trained on high quality data sources- encyclopaedias, BBC news, etc etc.
- secure, encrypted & anonymous requests to the web, or to Apple’s siloed off data sources.
- your data and conversations with LLM kept on device and fully encrypted.
- Siri is able to access your data (on Apple apps & via an API for third party anpps and now truly be an intelligent assistant. But again, don’t worry users - it’s all happening on your device.
It could of course, do all of this in the cloud - minus the speed - but that doesn’t feel very Apple.
A big USP will surely be the security of this all happening on device.
Finally, for older iPhones, I’m sure that there will be lots of new ML magic woven into iOS - as they do now - that will still provide great experiences. Just not the full LLM Siri experience.
Like it or not, generative AI will evolve and thrive in many applications, but it has nothing to do with this, just like the strike.
Here we're just talking about how we will replace taking your phone and spending a minute for a google search or navigating menus with a single Siri question. In the first case, I already replaced many of those with ChatGPT, there's no way I go back to wasting my time. When I'll be given the possibility to do that with voice assistants, to control my phone or house and ask for complicated tasks, I'll immediately hop on. I'll probably keep watching series with human writers and actors but I'll spend 10 seconds and not a minute to know what's the name of the husband of the actress who plays Robin in How I met your mother, with my phone in my pocket.
And about the keyboard, your arguments proves it was a good example: some people preferred it but it disappeared, that was exactly my point.
I love how many of you believe the whole world shares your opinion, that's exactly why I quoted the anti-iPhone people from 2006.
Edit: the tone in my "everybody cares" in my head was meant to say we all care in some way but I wrote it wrong. Take it as "everybody care for good or bad, many, many people already use AI and many more will in the years coming".
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Yes, from the standpoint of saying the trite phrase every year, as if Apple would “updated” a product to a “less powerful” version. I say let the products shine.
Heh...
No.
These things consume enormous amounts of energy, lots of water for cooling, and burn out a lot of GPUs which need to be replaced yearly and end up creating more e-waste than anything we have seen in tech.
Awareness of that has stepped up in the middle of the year and even more awareness will happen if there is a knock on effect on electricity supplies, electricity prices and pollution.
This stuff doesn't scale well, the majority of the stuff it generates is next to useless so it creates more waste than any tech we have ever had, it is another rent extraction grift, the use of it by spammers and scammers will be hard to control because the services don't mind taking subscription fees from crooks.
This is late stage capitalism at its worst and its most die hard fans appear to be as mentally degenerate as NFT fans.
So it is not a surprise to see that NFT grifters pivoted from crypto to this new wave of garbage. They are just anti-human cretins who are so hated that they need a cyber toy to be their friend...for a subscription fee of course.
Apple wants an annual release cycle for all their major products
Between moving from Intel to Apple Silicon for Macs, to continually rearranging the iPad lineup to figure out what is most profitable, to developing the hardware & OS for Vision Pro, to moving to Swift & SwiftUI across all its OSes & developer tools, Apple has had a lot on its plate the past 5 years
Now that Apple is in control of their CPU & GPU destiny, expect annual releases for all major products, even the iPad and seemingly ignored Apple TV as they push gaming in a big way the next few years
Thanks, I like those examples. I'n still very skeptical that it'll work that way, but hopefully!
That is an interesting perspective. As someone with a graduate degree in AI and who has worked in the field for 10 years, I had no idea there was so much negativity. I'm with you on NFT's + crypto being worthless. Also, I agree that the costs of running the models are huge and bad for the environment. However, I'd think improvements in algorithms will eventually kick in. EG smaller models via compression or via targeted applications (a simple model that routes queries to experts). Do you not see any benefits to society from better AI?
"with Vision Pro, iPhone gaming and M3 MacBooks Apple could be the gaming platform to watch in 2024."
I've been writing about games for 20 years and Apple has finally impressed me
Honestly, with Vision Pro, iPhone gaming and M3 MacBooks Apple could be the gaming platform to watch in 2024.
If processing is on the cloud rather than on-device (since probably none of these phones have enough RAM), I'd think we don't really have much in terms of hardware requirements.
Some things will likely still require server side processing if it involves large amounts of data. Other things may be able to be handled locally. Hopefully they are flexible enough about it that older devices would do more remote processing and the benefit of newer devices would be more local processing.
Probably the A16. The M3 is equivalent to a A17 Pro because both supports AV1 hardware decoding, and the GPU supports mesh shading and ray tracing that the M2 GPU doesn't.
Just trying to make sure that the M2 chip is one generally thought to support AI updates. People always mention the iPhone chips, but I only have an iPad and I didn’t know what the equivalent was. You’re dealing with a non-techie here.