Image: Dall-E/Petter Ahrnstedt
According to the latest Apple tea, Siri is a four-letter word that shan’t pass Apple’s lips.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Siri will not be discussed much at next month’s WWDC. That makes sense. The Macalope never wants to talk about things he’s not good at, either. Coding. Rollerskating. Integrals. Flossing. Both the dental regimen and the dance.
Seven years after [Apple SVP of AI John] Giannandrea arrived, the optimism he brought with him is gone. Apple’s AI has only fallen further behind.
This is sort of true and sort of not true. Part of the problem for Apple is that AI has been redefined out from under it. For most, AI is now a user-facing chatbot. That’s it. Sure, there are other, more visual implementations of AI, but the most common implementation is a text-based or verbal chatbot that gives you answers you can’t really trust, but allows CEOs to lay some people off because who cares if our customers are getting good information?
Apple continued to chug away at the good parts of AI, the parts that would make your phone operate better or let you get rid of unattractive people or exes or unattractive exes from your photos.
The problem is really not that Apple has “fallen behind.” It’s definitely behind on the chatty parts of AI, but that’s not really what most customers want. People do want a Siri that has persistent memory or can just do more things and do them consistently. No one, however, wants a Siri that can write a novel or come up with great recipes culled from Reddit threads where people are jokingly telling each other to eat things humans should not consume.
That does seem to be what it’s trying to rush to market, though.
According to employees, the chatbot the company has been testing internally has made significant strides over the past six months, to the point that some executives see it as on par with recent versions of ChatGPT. It can get things wrong, but insist that they’re true with the best of them. Excellent. So why hasn’t the company shipped this already?
Colleagues say Giannandrea has told them that consumers don’t want tools like ChatGPT and that one of the most common requests from customers is to disable it.
You don’t say.
So, if the problem isn’t that Apple’s behind ChatGPT, what is the problem?
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IDG
Let’s go back to the summer of 2009. The Black Eyed Peas were singing “I Gotta Feeling,” the iPhone 3GS was the latest iPhone, and the hot technology industry trend was… netbooks.
Remember netbooks? They were small, cheap, underpowered, and poorly made, but boy, were they cheap. Apple, you might be surprised to learn, was “behind” on netbooks. Netbooks were going to eat the company’s lunch because it didn’t have one. All it had was the over-priced MacBook Air that was only for fancy-pants executives. But Apple didn’t want to make a low-margin piece of junk even if the entire industry was falling over each other to do just that. Despite all the cries, it was out of its mind, it simply made the MacBook Air a demonstrably better product, cheaper and cheaper, and soon enough, the tech industry was chasing something else and had forgotten all about netbooks.
The parallels here are not exact but they’re also not that different. AI is “the thing you have to have” because investors–not customers–say so, even though so far no one has really figured out how to make a lot of money off of LLMs. Well, except for the individuals running AI companies who are probably making really good money despite their companies not making any profit.
Apple stuck to its guns with netbooks. It didn’t with AI. If Apple had said, “Oh, you kids go ahead and have fun!” it might well have been able to let other companies pop this bubble instead of joining the chase for the latest industry unicorn. One of its long-time strengths was not listening to industry groupthink and instead figuring out what customers really want. This time, it fell victim to the pressure of investors, pundits, and venture capitalists.
Time will tell, but the Macalope thinks Giannandrea might have been right.
Author: The Macalope, Contributor, Macworld
The Macalope is a longtime observer of the tech industry and Apple. In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.
