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.
Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users.
This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users
Like many new things, or newly marketed things, the natural acceptance factor is lower than the proponents would need in order to fulfill their dreams.
Beyond that though is the dream that highly persuasive efforts will be effective at overcoming hesitation and converting it into new desires and preferences. Like the way it has worked under so many situations. But with survivor bias firmly in mind, those are the orgs where no miracle was actually required before it could lead to a windfall.
Proper search is far more powerful. I can set the weights for the results to various parameters, focusing on certain metadata in particular. Sad to see popular search tools have gone stupid in recent years. But search is still very powerful and Imo ai is no replacement for good search. An example of a powerful search engine is pubmed and the logic you can craft in your queries.
Right. It's deterministic, and determinism should be the goal. It's not metaphysical. Some users know what they want while others do not. The software we create (by any means) should give users who know what they want the tools to find it, and guide those who don't until they do. Software exists to help us create our fate. It surprises me how many people are willing to relinquish that control or never wanted it, even within our ranks, by using AI to simplify experiences. IMHO, the optimization for most, but not perhaps not all, tools is to introduce AI internally to refine, create and expose more parameters, not less. Search is a perfect example of this.
> 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?
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a car, you win.
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a trebuchet, you lose, no matter how fast the trebuchet would technically get them to their destination.
Nothing wrong with a faster horse when AI isn't reliable enough yet to produce the car. Don't leave me with my aging horse while you cross your fingers that something better might come along someday.
Exactly as a UX person who watched the movie H.E.R. A few times i feel something like is the next UX internet evolution… talking and texting to AI where all visuals need to be seen appear your iPhones lock screen. Siri would in the background communicate with AI agents of businesses to govt organizations to organizations to your friends and family to get things done for you. Lessen the need to unlock your phone and Apples creating AI AirPods just use the iPhones lock screen to create/show the appropriate visuals and text.
As UX / UI professional of 17 years I think design is a dying field the above would kill digital UI design quicker. Yet the UX would be less steps / friction to complete tasks which is the harbinger of UX design…less is more.
On a side note I’m just in medical school studying a mid level
Concentration. I don’t foresee a LONG term future in digital design and development much anymore.
Now I’m picturing a dystopia movie. No one knows how to plan any events anymore, some event appears in their calendar and they show up and find some people there matched to their profile. People get silenced from certain events and can’t get back in. Like a personalized music playlist but it’s your entire life. People forget how to organize and create original ideas, and any prospect of revolution becomes as likely as expecting a farmers cattle to rise up.
That’s a common UX pattern that would need to be carried over ( could just give a thumbs up & ur AI understands it as you accept lol) into the new UX internet paradigm I mentioned above ..which I don’t think is that far fetched. What I propose is really just chatGPT on ur phones lock screen one that connects to Ai agents I mentioned (not present day thing but surely will be).
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.
They're reportedly already doing that, AI services will be able to publish "Extensions" that Siri will use and then those services can compete amongst themselves to power it.
But this is contingent on the same services not being able to replace Siri and being able to reserve its APIs for Apple's exclusive use, and they have a pretty tenuous grasp on that these days.
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.
> Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things
Agreed. But it is a good UI for some things, and which things is probably situation and user specific. Many people’s frustration with Siri is that many of the things it should be good at based on their decision to try, Siri cannot do.
Voice is only good in the context of something that is high priority(e.g talking to a customer service agent) / highly satisfactory (e.g talking to a friend in real time).
Setting aside the blind and others with challenges for whom voice has the potential to be (if it isn’t already) a magical interface, I find it great for my HomePod for very narrow use cases. Wake me at 7am. Tell me the weather forecast for the weekend. Have I received any new messages?
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.
On my Newton MessagePad, one could write things such as "Lunch <name> Friday" interact with it using a stylus to activate "Newton Intelligence" and it would create a calendar event for the next Friday, and attach the contact as a link.
I have a grander vision for an ideal Apple “AI”: anti-AI.
I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.
In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.
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.
In an ideal world in which LLMs behave as advertised, the idea is that you'd be delegating to the agent what you might otherwise be doing yourself. And just like when delegating to an intern who called you collect from a payphone, you may need to spell out "one-five" when you say 15 to make sure they don't hear 50.
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.
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.
Once I extracted the medicine from the poison I am very glad that Amazon was my first corporate work experience. Many of the leadership principles and cultural norms there are actually very good ideas when not taken to extremes.
I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy
This is great when everyone is smart, aligned in the purpose, has no politics, dog in the fight, but awful everywhere else.
It's the difference between peer review by leaders in the field trying to make your paper better, and juniors wanting to be heard or insecure academics trying to get an ego boost by nit picking and wasting time.
Intellectual bloodbath sounds like so much of the latter with point scoring being the goal.
We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
The what is the idea behind the "ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence" part?
The fact that people that have already read it have nothing to do and waste time sitting around bored sounds like an obvious flaw, are we missing something?
AWS had great culture when I worked there, maybe they still do. The leadership principles are universal and I don't know of any other company that took their principles so seriously.
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."
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.
> "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.
I mean, one of the last big things Jobs did was buy Siri and he reportedly saw it as the next big interaction model. Apple just messed it up by letting it get progressively worse ever since.
Who wants to talk to an earpod in 95%+ of real world situations? I remember the original Siri ads where a guy was configuring his schedule via Siri on a run. 15 years later and most of the world still thinks you're a doofus if you're running and talking to your voice assistant. Some things will never change.
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 the differentiating factor on hardware will be the seamlessness of the interface, in software. the combination of voice, eye tracking, swiping, capture of intent, being able to mumble to myself at a volume only my device can hear. The hardware needs to be little more than something that gets out of the way and acts as an input device with a battery.
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.
That's really the point of the article. As long as the phone is the (or at least a significant) conduit for our use of AI technology, Apple is in a good spot, and it's the same spot where they have historically done very well.
I think the vision of pocket assistant versus discrete apps is very much Apple. Remember the original iPhone had no app store. The app store is kind of a pain to deal with. If I had to bet, this starts with Apple pivoting Swift Playground into Playground releasing it across all devices. The programming language becomes invisible. The live canvas is the document.
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.
Really enjoyed that article, thanks for the link. I agree there can be a bubble and a genuine paradigm shift at the same time. We're going through our first wave of attempts, more or less wrong, but the general direction is right, that the future will never be the same.
Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations.
Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.
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.
> [...] broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds [...]
It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.
I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to competently represent my interests.
That said, that's a big if, i.e., whether commercial LLMs or agents will be able to do that, given the overwhelming pressure to just take money from both sides of the transaction and skew the decision.
But if it does happen, I actually see this as a huge potential factor strengthening smaller suppliers directly competing with large platforms. If my agent can independently figure out if a given supplier is trustworthy, whether their terms and conditions are reasonable etc., I'd be much more willing to engage with them outside of a large platform.
> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.
I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of ride (e.g. UberX, Premier, etc.) It defaulted to UberX, which was the cheapest option except for the "Wait and Save" option that was further down. I tapped the "Choose UberX" button and the ride was on its way.
So, OK, maybe it took literally 15 seconds. I'm not denying Uber may use dark patterns elsewhere, but from the end user experience of hailing a ride I don't see how it could be any simpler or more straightforward.
Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs? That's very common when you travel. Agent would be godsend, and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back to the phone. Anywhere.
What if the agent can also communicate with the car's agent? They may even negotiate the meeting spot. Agent is superior.
Yes I have traveled to places where I don’t speak the language, need to get an Uber at a specific place, and need to read the signs. You can get surprisingly far if you know a few words in the local language, and in your hypothetical future, even if you and the driver have an agent, what are you going to do if you need to communicate with someone in person that’s not that driver? Ask your agent to? I don’t see how that’s a feasible idea.
That's just the experience any executive with a secretary or personal assistant is used to having.
If AI allows more people to have such a premium experience, that's a use of technology that makes a lot more sense than all the "AI will take over your job" scaremongering.
Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber? There’s more complex things (the floor I think is booking a flight that doesn’t conflict with activities I have to do), but by time you summon your assistant you could’ve had the car on its way.
I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two.
That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on any major technological leaps beyond continued maturation and scaling of Waymo/alternatives.
I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work too.
lol, I mean I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think I was describing anything fundamentally different in principle from what Uber/Lyft/taxis already do. Like when you walk out of an airport or a super busy bar/club and there's already a line of cabs waiting for any'one who needs one to get in.
> Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable?
Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work.
If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
The “agent knows where you’re going and calls a car for you” sounds dystopian as hell if done totally autonomously. But you could also imagine that an agent pops up a message on your watch “hey, you’ve been at dinner for an hour, if you’re winding down I can call you a car in 15 minutes” and suddenly it’s not that absurd.
> and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
That feels a little bit of muddling the waters. At least on Android with which I'm familiar, (a) you can turn off the "OK Google" detection in settings so that it's not always listening (and I'm not sure what the setup is now but originally I had to opt it to OK Google detection) and (b) the path for OK Google detection runs on a lower power, on device chip that only has capacity to store like the last few seconds of ambient noise to look for the assistant key phrase.
"Better how"? If you're going to dismiss a comment, you better address the points they are making, like:
> 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.
Better how?! It's obvious how doing less work to figure out your transportation is a better user experience. And again, that's just a trivial example. If people like making grocery lists, that's fine, but I bet there's other things they might consider drudgery that could be automated.
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'.
I've been using Siri (via homekit) to turn all my lights on and off for about 3 years now. It's steadily getting worse and worse as somehow, Siri is becoming less accurate and Apple is failing to adopt this new technology in a timely fashion.
I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light".
Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.
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.
...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.
your argument assumes that “fully integrated and in-my-face” == best form factor.
Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown..
Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech
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.
Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.
A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.
In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.
But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.
> What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life?
Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.
Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before? Using a LLM instead of a template seems like ridiculous overkill imho but thanks for the anecdote.
> Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before?
Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.
I don’t see how a llm solves this. It’s not like a llm hosts the website. Sites like squarespace and Wordpress let you modify your site without ever seeing code. They have graphical editors that you can stay in if you wish. I agree llms help, though if you use a product.
I know how to set up a static HTML site in about 15 minutes. Building a website to host there usually takes me the better part of a weekend, and usually ends up looking absolutely terrible.
I think this really gets at it: people are so terrified of not knowing what to do, of not knowing whether their solution is "good," that they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok, ironically bypassing human judgment in the end. Drudgery or judgery, those are the two task contexts in which AI products* excel.
* It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing smacks of politics" HN commentariat, pulled daily between "it's just a tool, like a hammer, which also kills people, stay with me here" and "AI puts an expert in your pocket; soon, the expert will live in your eyes"
You can't easily articulate the way in which mRNA vaccines were possible by internet. But internet definitely played an important part.
Internet
- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet
- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet
- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet
Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.
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.
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.
Gruber is a monstrous person. He's also written many different pieces that are more or less content-free anti-Korean racist screeds. The world would be much better if he'd retire and never speak in public again.
I totally agree! Also his writings on China. He's used quite strong language when discussing China, and at the time I thought this is just his brutal opinions, but when his own country does things, he's a lot more forgiving.
Agreed.
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.
Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users.
This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users
>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users.
They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?
Like many new things, or newly marketed things, the natural acceptance factor is lower than the proponents would need in order to fulfill their dreams.
Beyond that though is the dream that highly persuasive efforts will be effective at overcoming hesitation and converting it into new desires and preferences. Like the way it has worked under so many situations. But with survivor bias firmly in mind, those are the orgs where no miracle was actually required before it could lead to a windfall.
> When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products.
Please elaborate
Fuzzy search
Reverse dictionary
Stack Overflow clone, except you're guaranteed to get an unreliable answer promptly instead of waiting for a human to give it
OCR, with new and exciting failure modes
Machine translation, with new and exciting failure modes
Endless possibilities for exploiting the stupid and ignorant while destroying the web in the process
Note that only the first two are unalloyed good, and they can be done with embeddings without generative AI.
Replace search for one.
Proper search is far more powerful. I can set the weights for the results to various parameters, focusing on certain metadata in particular. Sad to see popular search tools have gone stupid in recent years. But search is still very powerful and Imo ai is no replacement for good search. An example of a powerful search engine is pubmed and the logic you can craft in your queries.
Right. It's deterministic, and determinism should be the goal. It's not metaphysical. Some users know what they want while others do not. The software we create (by any means) should give users who know what they want the tools to find it, and guide those who don't until they do. Software exists to help us create our fate. It surprises me how many people are willing to relinquish that control or never wanted it, even within our ranks, by using AI to simplify experiences. IMHO, the optimization for most, but not perhaps not all, tools is to introduce AI internally to refine, create and expose more parameters, not less. Search is a perfect example of this.
> 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?
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a car, you win.
If the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a trebuchet, you lose, no matter how fast the trebuchet would technically get them to their destination.
Also, some people just want a faster horse
Others really want the trebuchet…
Yes, don't forget if the user asks for a faster horse and you sell them a faster horse you still win.
And you may be able to sell them what they are already asking for a lot faster than what they are not.
Now if you are trying to sell them something that they would rather not even have at all, that's another story too.
A car is still a faster horse in the sense that you decide where to go with it. It doesn’t outsource decisions to somewhere else.
(Arguably the car affords you better control than an unruly horse. Self-driving cars are moving us closer to the horse again. ;))
>Self-driving cars are moving us closer to the horse again.
Maybe there is some parallel to the way that AI is moving "cutting edge" programming closer to the mainframe/dumb-terminal paradigm.
No, it's asking for my two-legged horse to have four legs
Nothing wrong with a faster horse when AI isn't reliable enough yet to produce the car. Don't leave me with my aging horse while you cross your fingers that something better might come along someday.
The whole point of AI is that if something different happens, it's not you doing it.
Not only that, but to many users the whole point of a computer is that it can do the same exact thing every time.
Exactly as a UX person who watched the movie H.E.R. A few times i feel something like is the next UX internet evolution… talking and texting to AI where all visuals need to be seen appear your iPhones lock screen. Siri would in the background communicate with AI agents of businesses to govt organizations to organizations to your friends and family to get things done for you. Lessen the need to unlock your phone and Apples creating AI AirPods just use the iPhones lock screen to create/show the appropriate visuals and text.
As UX / UI professional of 17 years I think design is a dying field the above would kill digital UI design quicker. Yet the UX would be less steps / friction to complete tasks which is the harbinger of UX design…less is more.
On a side note I’m just in medical school studying a mid level Concentration. I don’t foresee a LONG term future in digital design and development much anymore.
Now I’m picturing a dystopia movie. No one knows how to plan any events anymore, some event appears in their calendar and they show up and find some people there matched to their profile. People get silenced from certain events and can’t get back in. Like a personalized music playlist but it’s your entire life. People forget how to organize and create original ideas, and any prospect of revolution becomes as likely as expecting a farmers cattle to rise up.
Could be where things go…UX is all about less is more ..less steps. Time will tell.
That’s the simplistic view of UX thats commonly sold.
Less steps isn’t always better. Friction has its place.
A basic example is an “Are you sure?” confirmation before a destructive action.
I wish there wasn’t so much focus on “less clicks.” It’s often to the company’s benefit at the detriment of the user
That’s a common UX pattern that would need to be carried over ( could just give a thumbs up & ur AI understands it as you accept lol) into the new UX internet paradigm I mentioned above ..which I don’t think is that far fetched. What I propose is really just chatGPT on ur phones lock screen one that connects to Ai agents I mentioned (not present day thing but surely will be).
>The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work.
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.
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.
> ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work
Wouldn't the simplest solution be to auction off Siri's back end the way Apple does Safari's search bar in iOS?
They're reportedly already doing that, AI services will be able to publish "Extensions" that Siri will use and then those services can compete amongst themselves to power it.
But this is contingent on the same services not being able to replace Siri and being able to reserve its APIs for Apple's exclusive use, and they have a pretty tenuous grasp on that these days.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/05/05/ios-27-will-let-you-choose-be...
No, because what Siri does needs to be tightly integrated in ways that search does not.
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.
> Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things
Agreed. But it is a good UI for some things, and which things is probably situation and user specific. Many people’s frustration with Siri is that many of the things it should be good at based on their decision to try, Siri cannot do.
Voice is only good in the context of something that is high priority(e.g talking to a customer service agent) / highly satisfactory (e.g talking to a friend in real time).
Otherwise humans hate that interface.
Setting aside the blind and others with challenges for whom voice has the potential to be (if it isn’t already) a magical interface, I find it great for my HomePod for very narrow use cases. Wake me at 7am. Tell me the weather forecast for the weekend. Have I received any new messages?
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.
The thing which kills me is a lot of this was working back in the Newton days.
Can you expand on this? Having used two different Newton models, even squinting, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.
On my Newton MessagePad, one could write things such as "Lunch <name> Friday" interact with it using a stylus to activate "Newton Intelligence" and it would create a calendar event for the next Friday, and attach the contact as a link.
I have a grander vision for an ideal Apple “AI”: anti-AI.
I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.
In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.
Shortcuts already lets you set up custom workflows you can trigger by voice.
I know. I actually use it a lot. But the way you assemble shortcuts leaves a lot to be desired for anything nontrivial.
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.
In an ideal world in which LLMs behave as advertised, the idea is that you'd be delegating to the agent what you might otherwise be doing yourself. And just like when delegating to an intern who called you collect from a payphone, you may need to spell out "one-five" when you say 15 to make sure they don't hear 50.
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.
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.
Steve already gave away the secret [1] (must watch) a long time ago:
"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
"Working backwards" is also, famously, Amazon's philosophy. It's one of my most cherished takeaways from working there.
Once I extracted the medicine from the poison I am very glad that Amazon was my first corporate work experience. Many of the leadership principles and cultural norms there are actually very good ideas when not taken to extremes.
I remember my first meeting I went to at another company that was just a guy talking with a PowerPoint. I couldn’t believe we didn’t have the data or time to ask probing questions. We’re just supposed to take this guy for his word? Crazy
Please go on. You mean at Amazon you would be grilled with questions if you were the presenter?
Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was:
- no PowerPoint
- 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen
- meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts.
- presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections
- intellectual bloodbath as all participants try to poke holes and see around corners not foreseen by the presenter
- follow up next week, until the group/manager is satisfied about the direction of the project
This is great when everyone is smart, aligned in the purpose, has no politics, dog in the fight, but awful everywhere else.
It's the difference between peer review by leaders in the field trying to make your paper better, and juniors wanting to be heard or insecure academics trying to get an ego boost by nit picking and wasting time.
Intellectual bloodbath sounds like so much of the latter with point scoring being the goal.
We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.
Asking the grandparent:
The what is the idea behind the "ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence" part?
The fact that people that have already read it have nothing to do and waste time sitting around bored sounds like an obvious flaw, are we missing something?
It's almost like working with a coding agent.
AWS had great culture when I worked there, maybe they still do. The leadership principles are universal and I don't know of any other company that took their principles so seriously.
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."
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.
> "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.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You want iPhones to be able to differentiate and find clean bathrooms on the fly?
No I want iPhones to solve real problems users have rather than pretend my entire life happens inside a 7" screen.
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
So you want your phone to transform into a toilet??
Wouldn't there just be signs pointing to a public bathroom if you're abroad in a city? This is an utterly bizarre contrivance.
"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."
answer... ditch phone/screen, just have an earpod you talk to.
“Take the flexible, rich method of conveying information, and replace it with a slower, jankier, more limited and more rigid form!”
Sounds heinous, please never design the UX for a product I’ve got to use.
I mean, one of the last big things Jobs did was buy Siri and he reportedly saw it as the next big interaction model. Apple just messed it up by letting it get progressively worse ever since.
Who wants to talk to an earpod in 95%+ of real world situations? I remember the original Siri ads where a guy was configuring his schedule via Siri on a run. 15 years later and most of the world still thinks you're a doofus if you're running and talking to your voice assistant. Some things will never change.
I've always thought they would come out with subvocal microphones that I though you could use diving or whatever.
(I don't know if they exist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
What was Siri?
A product built on government funded technology (CALO) [1].
SRI -> SiRI Inc.
[1] https://www.sri.com/75-years-of-innovation/75-years-of-innov...
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.
[1] https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/
and the differentiating factor on hardware will be the seamlessness of the interface, in software. the combination of voice, eye tracking, swiping, capture of intent, being able to mumble to myself at a volume only my device can hear. The hardware needs to be little more than something that gets out of the way and acts as an input device with a battery.
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.
> the phone as a form factor is not going away
It's not going away in the next few years. Which means Apple doesn't have to rush to release an AI product for the sake of it à la Giannandrea.
That's really the point of the article. As long as the phone is the (or at least a significant) conduit for our use of AI technology, Apple is in a good spot, and it's the same spot where they have historically done very well.
I think the vision of pocket assistant versus discrete apps is very much Apple. Remember the original iPhone had no app store. The app store is kind of a pain to deal with. If I had to bet, this starts with Apple pivoting Swift Playground into Playground releasing it across all devices. The programming language becomes invisible. The live canvas is the document.
> Apple doesn’t have a social network business.
They don't have a social network business because they tried that and failed. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping
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.
google models have horrible personalities. i feel like i am talking to a disinterested dmv worker.
The answer as always in these situations is to zoom out.
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...
Really enjoyed that article, thanks for the link. I agree there can be a bubble and a genuine paradigm shift at the same time. We're going through our first wave of attempts, more or less wrong, but the general direction is right, that the future will never be the same.
Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations.
Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.
> Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia
No chance. Currently Nvidia’s market cap is higher by about 1T.
Turns out NVidia and Apple are direct competitors. Would have never guessed a few years ago.
AI seems to be a product if you're Anthropic (the seller) and any enterprise with a software team (the buyer).
I agree with Gruber's take, if the seller is Apple.
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.
> [...] broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds [...]
It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.
I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to competently represent my interests.
That said, that's a big if, i.e., whether commercial LLMs or agents will be able to do that, given the overwhelming pressure to just take money from both sides of the transaction and skew the decision.
But if it does happen, I actually see this as a huge potential factor strengthening smaller suppliers directly competing with large platforms. If my agent can independently figure out if a given supplier is trustworthy, whether their terms and conditions are reasonable etc., I'd be much more willing to engage with them outside of a large platform.
> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right.
I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of ride (e.g. UberX, Premier, etc.) It defaulted to UberX, which was the cheapest option except for the "Wait and Save" option that was further down. I tapped the "Choose UberX" button and the ride was on its way.
So, OK, maybe it took literally 15 seconds. I'm not denying Uber may use dark patterns elsewhere, but from the end user experience of hailing a ride I don't see how it could be any simpler or more straightforward.
Did you ever take Uber in a unfamiliar place? When you're supposed to be at a particular spot but you don't know where that is? When the driver doesn't speak English very well? When both your hands is busy with luggages? When you need glasses to read signs? That's very common when you travel. Agent would be godsend, and once you're used to it, you don't want to go back to the phone. Anywhere.
What if the agent can also communicate with the car's agent? They may even negotiate the meeting spot. Agent is superior.
Yes I have traveled to places where I don’t speak the language, need to get an Uber at a specific place, and need to read the signs. You can get surprisingly far if you know a few words in the local language, and in your hypothetical future, even if you and the driver have an agent, what are you going to do if you need to communicate with someone in person that’s not that driver? Ask your agent to? I don’t see how that’s a feasible idea.
That's just the experience any executive with a secretary or personal assistant is used to having.
If AI allows more people to have such a premium experience, that's a use of technology that makes a lot more sense than all the "AI will take over your job" scaremongering.
Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber? There’s more complex things (the floor I think is booking a flight that doesn’t conflict with activities I have to do), but by time you summon your assistant you could’ve had the car on its way.
> Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber?
They're in the habit of their admin telling them the Uber has arrived to take them to their 3 o'clock yes.
I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two.
That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on any major technological leaps beyond continued maturation and scaling of Waymo/alternatives.
I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.
Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work too.
So robo taxis are going to stalk us?
lol, I mean I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't think I was describing anything fundamentally different in principle from what Uber/Lyft/taxis already do. Like when you walk out of an airport or a super busy bar/club and there's already a line of cabs waiting for any'one who needs one to get in.
> Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable?
Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work.
If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
The “agent knows where you’re going and calls a car for you” sounds dystopian as hell if done totally autonomously. But you could also imagine that an agent pops up a message on your watch “hey, you’ve been at dinner for an hour, if you’re winding down I can call you a car in 15 minutes” and suddenly it’s not that absurd.
> and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.
That feels a little bit of muddling the waters. At least on Android with which I'm familiar, (a) you can turn off the "OK Google" detection in settings so that it's not always listening (and I'm not sure what the setup is now but originally I had to opt it to OK Google detection) and (b) the path for OK Google detection runs on a lower power, on device chip that only has capacity to store like the last few seconds of ambient noise to look for the assistant key phrase.
Agreed, plus it ignores all the commentary making a fuss about phones listening, even here on HN.
Just because it's a losing battle doesn't mean nobody cares.
Why are you crashing out about this? It's just an example of how AI agents can be a better user experience.
"Better how"? If you're going to dismiss a comment, you better address the points they are making, like:
> 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.
Better how?! It's obvious how doing less work to figure out your transportation is a better user experience. And again, that's just a trivial example. If people like making grocery lists, that's fine, but I bet there's other things they might consider drudgery that could be automated.
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'.
I've been using Siri (via homekit) to turn all my lights on and off for about 3 years now. It's steadily getting worse and worse as somehow, Siri is becoming less accurate and Apple is failing to adopt this new technology in a timely fashion.
I would like to tell it to turn off certain light in a certain room, but unless I get the exact string name of those light correct when I speak, Siri doesn't know what I'm talking about. And it can't do multiple things in a command. I can't say "turn off all the lights in XYZ room" or turn of "this light and this light".
Meanwhile, I can vaguely tell a computer behind my tv to do very complicated things (build me an service that ...) and it can execute on it fairly well. But in apple's "product vision" which I am apparently too dumb to decide for myself what I want, I can't ask for two lights to be turned off at the same time.
Agreed.
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.
Anything is a product if you can sell it.
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.
Really depends on the company and who you're selling to. For a car company a tire is a feature, for other companies it's their product.
...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.
your argument assumes that “fully integrated and in-my-face” == best form factor.
Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.
But a watch isn't in your face. That's the other advantage over glasses (in addition to the "it's not really possible" part).
> 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.
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.
> Apple doesn’t have a social network business
Um iMessage?
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.
In that case the robot as a whole is the product and the model is just a part of the technology making it possible.
That’s the thing; the LLM itself - the chat window - can’t be the whole product for an industry. It’s a technology that you build things with.
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.
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.
Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown..
Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech
Are you asking for a use case or the net benefit? Because it sure sounds like you're moving the goalpost.
Considering that ChatGPT has 900 million users I suspect the average person finds value in the technology.
100% I would be happier to have a small model that can run locally capable of searching the web than a stand-alone frontier model
can you not just do this with most local models nowadays? the qwen series is quite capable
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.
Apple's problem might be they were right too early which is sometimes worse than being wrong. The original vision of Siri was substantively correct in how AI would supercharge our phones but huge parts of the vision got forgotten when Siri was acquired by Apple and the original founders left. The original technical choices around Siri constrained it from evolving into something useful.
A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.
In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.
But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.
> What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life?
Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.
Classic example of a bozo talking out his arse.
"Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to."
You ever heard of squarespace?
Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before? Using a LLM instead of a template seems like ridiculous overkill imho but thanks for the anecdote.
> Was it really that difficult to build a generic website with a template before?
Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.
I don’t see how a llm solves this. It’s not like a llm hosts the website. Sites like squarespace and Wordpress let you modify your site without ever seeing code. They have graphical editors that you can stay in if you wish. I agree llms help, though if you use a product.
I know how to set up a static HTML site in about 15 minutes. Building a website to host there usually takes me the better part of a weekend, and usually ends up looking absolutely terrible.
I think this really gets at it: people are so terrified of not knowing what to do, of not knowing whether their solution is "good," that they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok, ironically bypassing human judgment in the end. Drudgery or judgery, those are the two task contexts in which AI products* excel.
* It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing smacks of politics" HN commentariat, pulled daily between "it's just a tool, like a hammer, which also kills people, stay with me here" and "AI puts an expert in your pocket; soon, the expert will live in your eyes"
Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels.
But you specified America, so I guess no.
Translation existed before llms tho in hundreds of languages. Google translate came out in 2006
And? Coding existed before LLMs too.
LLMs aren't even useful for coding, the one thing they are supposedly great for. It's a technology without any real use cases yet.
You can't easily articulate the way in which mRNA vaccines were possible by internet. But internet definitely played an important part.
Internet
- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet
- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet
- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet
Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.
all technologies are also products
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.
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.
Gruber is a monstrous person. He's also written many different pieces that are more or less content-free anti-Korean racist screeds. The world would be much better if he'd retire and never speak in public again.
I totally agree! Also his writings on China. He's used quite strong language when discussing China, and at the time I thought this is just his brutal opinions, but when his own country does things, he's a lot more forgiving.
Looking back, it just reads as sinophobic.