The only bit of excitement I’ve experienced about this, was when they announced it will be force-disabled in Europe, so I didn’t have to turn it off myself
They need to release Apple Strength and Apple Dexterity to make the experience more complete
I feel like this can be generalized to AI in general for most people. I still don’t see much usefulness or quality in output in the scenarios where I’ve been exposed to AI LLMs.
I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.
Real talk though, I’m seeing more and more of my peers in university ask AI first, then spending time debugging code they don’t understand.
I’ve yet to have chat gpt or copilot solve an actual problem for me. Simple, simple things are good, but any problem solving i find them more effort than just doing the thing.
I asked for instructions on making a KDE Widget to get weather canada information, and it sent me an api that doesn’t exist and python packages that don’t exist. By the time I fixed the instructions, very little of the original output remained.
AI has absolutely wasted more of my time than it’s saved while programming. Occasionally it’s helpful for doing some repetitive refactor, but for actually solving any novel problems it’s hopeless. It doesn’t help that English is a terrible language for describing programming logic and constraints. That’s why we have programming languages…
The only things AI is competent with are common example problems that are everywhere on the Internet. You may as well just copy paste from StackOverflow. It might even be more reliable.
Even with other forms of generative AI, there are very few notable uses for it that isn’t just a gimmick/having fun with it, and not in a way achievable via other means.
Being able to add a thing to a photo is neat, but also questionably useful, when it is also doable with a few minutes of Photoshop.
I’ve a friend who claims it can be useful for scripts and quick data processing, but I’ve personally not had that experience when giving it a spin.
It’s a nice way to search for content or answers without all the ads that websites have nowadays. Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the AI/LLM responses are surrounded by (or embedded with) ads as well.
Or it much prefers to give you answers from “partners.” For example:
Me: How can I find a good set of headphones?
AI: A lot of people look for guides and reviews to find a good set of headphones. The important features to look for are… <insert overcomplicated nonsense here>. This can be overwhelming, so consider narrowing the search to a reliable product line like those by Beats (or whatever advertiser). Do you want some links to well-reviewed products?
Ick…
Lol, that reminded me that i saw a pair of “Beats x Kim Kardashian” y’know, audio engineer/designer KK finally giving the public a taste of real performance combined with chic luxury aesthetic 🥴
I still can’t wrap my head around the “Beats” craze. It’s like headphones didn’t already exist, lol!
Yup. Photo cleanup was cool to try once, but I’ll never use it again. Removing stuff from photos with a single tap also bugs me a bit in general, I’m not sure it’s something we should make so easy. Message summaries are absolute shit and have already caused confusion for me. I’m not even talking about the proper notification summaries, just the auto-summaries in the preview lines of the whole iMessage list. A number of them have really fucked with me. For example, a friend asked me to FaceTime her in a few days, and the summary just said “FaceTime request.” And I was like “shit, did I miss a call?” As far as I can tell I can’t turn that off without disabling the entire AI setting.
I’m also not sure how to feel about all of Apple’s privacy talk when it comes to their AI features. They say certain features will stay on device, which is great, but for everything else, as far as I’ve noticed there is no mention of what goes to OpenAI’s servers, since their AI is still primarily powered by OpenAI. There’s actually no mention of OpenAI in any of the disclaimers or warnings I read when I first enabled it.
Apple Intelligence isn’t “powered by OpenAI” at all. It’s not even based on it.
The only time OpenAI servers are contacted is when you ask Siri something it can’t compute with Apple Intelligence, but even then it clearly asks the user first if they want to send the request to ChatGPT.
Everything else regarding Apple Intelligence runs either on-device or on their “Private Cloud Compute” infrastructure, which apparently uses M2 Ultra chips. You then have to trust Apple that their claims regarding privacy are true, but you kind of do that when choosing an iPhone in the first place. There’s some pretty interesting tech behind this actually.
You can turn off (specifically) Message summaries in settings > Apps > messages > Summarize Messages
Well shit, thank you. I swear I searched for that setting before, but there it is!
iOS settings are like mirages I swear. Whoever designed the UI should be declared criminally insane
There’s no way OpenAI is letting Apple use them for free. So where is the money coming from? AI is the hot new thing and expensive to operate so I imagine Apple is paying quite a lot. There needs to be a new form of income or this wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective. I image there is data harvesting from the AI service.
I’d actually be surprised if Apple pays anything to OpenAI at the moment. Obviously running some Siri requests through ChatGPT (after the user confirms that’s what they want to do) is quite expensive for OpenAI, but Apple Intelligence doesn’t touch OpenAI servers at all (just Siri has ChatGPT integration).
Even then, there’ll obviously still be a lot of requests, but the problem OpenAI has is that they aren’t really in a negotiating position. Google owns Android and so most phones default to Gemini, instantly giving them a huge advantage in marketshare. OpenAI doesn’t have its own platform, so Apple having the second largest install base of all smartphone operating systems is OpenAI’s best chance.
Apple might benefit from OpenAI but OpenAI needs Apple way more than the other way around. Apple Intelligence runs perfectly fine (I mean, as “perfectly fine” as it currently does) without OpenAI, the only functionality users would lose is the option to redirect “complex” Siri requests to ChatGPT.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI actually pays Apple for the integration, just like Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine for Safari.
Yeah, you nailed it. The latest reporting on this says that Apple isn’t paying them yet, because they think OpenAI will get more benefit out of just having their product in everyone’s faces:
Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said. Source.
I went into settings on my phone and disabled it immediately
