I think this is much more on a botched rollout and a lack of vision. Apple should have been working on this for years and have some pretty big advantages. A deeply integrated version of the best o1 chat and vision models with context from all various apps and ability to do complex app interactions could be amazing. They could even have the ability to have AI basically create on demand personalized new applications for specific use cases. They could integrate it to be a proactive AI agent regularly interacting with you regarding various goals (instead of just answering questions). Instead so far we get the most barebones largely unimpressive features like basic text summaries and toy things like image gen and they fail to have even the modest features announced in June ready for latest iPhone launch earlier this year.
This wouldn't align with what Apple is going for though. Their selling point in this category is first and foremost that your data stays private. They're looking to do as much as possible on-device, not in the cloud. This rules out models akin to o1 because they're just too large in every respect. I agree that Apple has the chance to do amazing things here, but I think it will take a while until small models are as capable as they need them to be.
The problem is they compromised on both fronts (privacy, compute) and produced something that is ultimately a useless joke.
They could have produced something that was good and required accepting a privacy disclaimer to use. Or they could have waited until they managed to catch up with the rest of the industry wrt good 3B parameter models (the one they're using is incredibly terrible.)
Instead we got this half-assed compromise.
The execs in charge of Siri are demonstrably terrible at their job and should feel bad. It's incredible they get paid the millions they do while doing such a horrible job.
I agree. This feels like the norm now a days though. An initial soft launch, iterative improvements from there. If something catches on, great! If it doesnt, less money/time spent upfront investing in it.
I agree, but based on their software track record over the last couple of years, I have little hope that we’ll get much beyond a disparate collection of mostly half-baked features.
> I have little hope that we’ll get much beyond a disparate collection of mostly half-baked features.
Really? AI has driven most of the interesting features they've released in the last decade. Notably, organization of the photos app and indexing of people, pets, places, etc. (Nb I have not yet updated to ios 18 and I understand the photos app is somewhat controversial.)
The GP comment was calling for complex context-aware cross-app functionality. The new Photos app features do have their use, but they are limited to the particular compartmentalized use cases envisaged by Apple. For example, they support cats and dogs specifically, but not pets in general.
There’s also the tendency that once a feature has shipped, it’s apparently considered “done”, and the lead developers likely move on to other things. It doesn’t feel like there is a continuous ownership and coherent vision behind the features and apps, or behind the overall OS trajectory.
