Yes but the party doesn’t start until Apple arrives
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Hired Dozens of AI Experts From Google for a Secretive Zurich Research Lab
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
With 174b in cash and cash equivalents and 110b in annual free cash flow you can do these things as a matter of fact you can pretty much do whatever you want.
Google has all the best AI researchers in the world and they invented the transformer behind the LLM revolution but it was the people at OpenAI who were the ones that knew what do to with the technology. Just because Apple has these same talented researchers doesn't mean anything will come out of it. Remember, Apple had all the money and talent in the world but they didn't know how to make a car. It takes people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk to make products from new technology that consumers actually want to use.
Also this is a friendly reminder that Apple couldn't add a functioning autocorrect to the iPhone keyboard until 2023. Autocorrect is more or less a more primitive version of an LLM. Let's not mention Siri because that's a dead horse. What makes people have any faith that Apple has any shot at all at being competitive in the AI race?
Also this is a friendly reminder that Apple couldn't add a functioning autocorrect to the iPhone keyboard until 2023. Autocorrect is more or less a more primitive version of an LLM. Let's not mention Siri because that's a dead horse. What makes people have any faith that Apple has any shot at all at being competitive in the AI race?
Siri and its brothers are almost useless. I do not understand why. I want a natural language assistant that can control the computer and do stuff for me, dictate and so on. It is just not there...
Hiring specialized technology experts to work in a secretive lab in the mountains of Switzerland? This is some James Bond villain-type behavior.
You have missed that many people here talk like bots and reply to stuff in a very stereotypical way regardless of the news itself, e.g.:
- Google adds whatever random feature in one of their apps
"Did you know that Google sells your data? I know this because I am very informed and smart"
- Apple does something for the environment
"Did you know that even after this Apple will still produce emissions? I know this because I am very informed and smart"
PS: Google does not sell your data to anyone. Google keeps your data for themselves. What they sell is a promise that the ad you will give to them will appear to the right person. But good luck explaining this to the average, "informed" but technically clueless guy.
Good grief. Generally Apple is always late to the party. They sit back and watch the market then improve on the crap that is put out their "first". It is one of the reasons Apple is the best at what they do.
OpenAI is not much small. One of the founders was Elon Musk. Also Microsoft has invested lots of money into it. Tho I agree that company is still comparably small in terms of investments to what Google/Alphabet has
You are right, and I don't know about you, but certainly I myself are guilty of this on some topics time to time.
It's not easy to not limit one's opinions only to things one is an expert in, but hopefully we can all learn from our missteps
QuickType suggestion in my language are not bad, but also not great. The vocabulary is rather limited in my experience. I think this is an area were Apple could still improve a lot. German has many very long words. A predictive algorithm that would be able to predict words after only a couple of characters of input would be VERY useful.
Actually Apple is doing exactly the opposite of what you’re fearing : they’re having the A.I run locally on your devices precisely to avoid the privacy issues. The fact that they hired some techs from Google doesn’t mean they‘ll want to have the philosophy as Google, just like hiring developpers from Microsoft doesn’t mean Apple wants to license MacOs to everyone.
This also explains in part why they‘re late to the party. The privacy issues aren’t easy to solve.
THANK YOU! I keep hearing this arguement that “apple is late” and if anything apple has been here the longest. I think the confusion is coming from the terminology. Apple generally referred to it has ML all these years (machine learning) they rarely if ever called it AI. They’ve been ahead of the game in terms of image processing and other ML based tasks. They had the best hardware for it in mobile devices and frankly since AS they’ve been right there in computers. We will know soon enough if Qualcomm has caught up/beat them here soon.
The marketing switched to AI and Apple only really started including that term since the launch of the m3 macbook pros. It was at that point that I think they felt the need to switch over but they’ve been including the core tech for years. Even last year the iOS17 autocorrect system they went to is based on transformer models (developed by google and what the T in ChatGPT stands for). If anything I would say Apple is right there with everyone else, maybe a little ahead in some things and a little behind in others. I would also say they may actually be ahead in a lot of consume focused applications of AI. A lot of the features that set their devices apart actually rely on good use of it.
If apple is potentially behind to any company it’s Nvidia, while the m series has a much better value esp for the 128gb m3 max (yes good luck getting that performance with larger models on a $5000 budget using any nvidia card, the gpu alone will blow the budget). They aren’t however winning the raw performance training crown from nvidia. A big chunk of that is ironically software, an area apple usually leads but Cuda has wider adoption. The GPU shortage for AI training last year and everyone’s reluctance to be beholden to JUST nvidia who has a worse reputation for ruthlessness than apple is going to drive people to other non-cuda approaches. Apple should make moves here on their hardware and the software side by releasing an open source tookit for programming for AI that is hardware agnostic collaborating with AMD and compatible with NVIDIA and Intel.
What exactly are they planning on doing with all this AI work? Make their own useless Copilot that everyone just uninstalls/turns off?
Maybe I’ll be able to set alarms and reminders 0.5 seconds faster.
Joking… sort of
Maybe I’ll be able to set alarms and reminders 0.5 seconds faster.
Joking… sort of
To everyone talking about Siri I would point out that Siri isn’t the end all be all of AI. Even google assistant is much worse. I would argue that in terms of controlling your device (phone) while driving Siri is better than current google assistant. Google assistant is only better in that it doesn’t send you to…well ironically…google for most question based searches and will actually read out results to you. Apple shied away from that and it seems google and apple have if anything been decreasing capabilities here. The more important ML/AI technology apple has been using have been images (think about how it separates subject from background and let’s you extra subject from a photo or video, same with text and objects in an image being searchable) a lot of that is “AI” based and apple does actually really great.
Siri has been too big and slow and too much of a liability to make any serious progress with. Apple’s announced efforts over the past 5 years have been on 1. Making Siri sound more natural, and they have it’s much better than it was 2. Relying on shortcuts to reliably improve Siri’s capabilities without taking on liabilities. Both of those aspects are much better than what google has in those areas. But they’re not “AI” and google is much better able to handle weird queries and to read out google search results which is what makes Siri sound like it’s way worse. But google assistant on android controlling your device is a mess and a half. Google assistant in the home for controlling your TV is somehow worse than Siri.
None of that is to say Siri is great just that it’s not a good example of apple’s ability in AI since it’s based on the same outdated tech it debuted with just bolstered with some additional structure from the workflow acquisition and enhanced sound. We will see if they continue with Siri as is and enhance other AI aspects or if they revamp or replace Siri. I would expect them to keep/enhance Siri but i wouldn’t expect them to turn Siri into ChatGPT, that is too much risk for apple. Let’s see what we get, hopefully it’s better than the features the S24u got this year, circle to search is great but I want something more reliable from apple.
Siri has been too big and slow and too much of a liability to make any serious progress with. Apple’s announced efforts over the past 5 years have been on 1. Making Siri sound more natural, and they have it’s much better than it was 2. Relying on shortcuts to reliably improve Siri’s capabilities without taking on liabilities. Both of those aspects are much better than what google has in those areas. But they’re not “AI” and google is much better able to handle weird queries and to read out google search results which is what makes Siri sound like it’s way worse. But google assistant on android controlling your device is a mess and a half. Google assistant in the home for controlling your TV is somehow worse than Siri.
None of that is to say Siri is great just that it’s not a good example of apple’s ability in AI since it’s based on the same outdated tech it debuted with just bolstered with some additional structure from the workflow acquisition and enhanced sound. We will see if they continue with Siri as is and enhance other AI aspects or if they revamp or replace Siri. I would expect them to keep/enhance Siri but i wouldn’t expect them to turn Siri into ChatGPT, that is too much risk for apple. Let’s see what we get, hopefully it’s better than the features the S24u got this year, circle to search is great but I want something more reliable from apple.
How does this work? Surely those ex-Google employees would have had to take quite significant "garden leave" periods?
I searched for some text on iOS Photos the other day, and was surprised (and impressed) to see that it was able to read and correctly identify the word in a photo of my scrawled cursive handwriting. I can barely read it at times, so hats off to Apple there.
This is actually a good point. Considering the obvious biases and pre-programmed responses we've seen from OpenAI and Google, I have no doubt that Apple's will be programmed to toe the Apple line.
Hadn't even considered this but it's very likely. Adversarial training could heavily weight against Apple criticism.
"Hey AI Siri, how many workers have committed suicide in factories which make Apple products?"
"I'm sorry, I'm unable to answer that."
"Well never mind, what phone should I buy for my son, he likes taking photos."
"The iPhone 15 Pro Max is the best option for your son."
🤡
I might agree if we were talking about hardware. But this is different. IMO, Appe do not have the best record when talking about services. For example, iCloud lags behind Google and Microsoft. And other services such as Apple Music, Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade are behind compared to the competition. And looks like they are also behind in generative AI. That could be the reason there are rumors of Apple is in conversations with Google and OpenAI.