I have been using GPT-3 in a shortcut on my Apple Watch and can't but wonder what Apple is doing to catch up. I now ask my questions from my own GPT personal assistant instead of Siri and it works much much better.
I feel like if Apple doesn't say anything about LLMs in WWDC, it will be officially its biggest loss after the death of Steve Jobs.
This is a bit silly. What will they have lost, exactly?
I think they’re likely scrambling right now like every company with a speech-to-text or AI-type product. And they’ll be angling to do it in an Apple way — released when they feel confident they have a great product.
I wouldn’t put it past them to discuss it before they launch, however — they’ve been looser-lipped in the last years (ie abt their headset), I would guess to keep mindshare, basically.
I think apple is well positioned to either buy an AI startup or integrate open source projects into their ecosystem and create a “Her” like product. Where a context aware assistant is consistent across your various operating systems. I don’t think any of the other vendors have quite the ecosystem to pull it off.
Hopefully Apple will rearchitect Siri at some point.
Other then that, I’ll wait and see which “AI products” from the past months will actually still be relevant in 6 months from now.
That being said, Apple is rarely the first adopter of new tech. So, this seems to be in line with their default strategy.
Apple did fine after the death of Steve Jobs, so I don't think that analogy is valid either.
Right now, Apple being a consumer/fashion/tech company, LLMs are not an existential threat to their business.
For example, imagine the huge PR nightmare if Siri explains to you how to make a bomb at home or how to hijack a plane.
Also, GPT4 does not hook into iOS, macOS, iPadOS APIs.
I think a company like Apple will be very careful. Their brand, which they're extremely careful with, would be on the line and they can't risk it on a chat bot that is sometimes very creepy, sometimes makes up answers.
That said, I'm sure Apple is scrambling internally to create an equivalent.
So if Siri gets a lift, wether it will be progressive or as a new persona, it's likely to come out reasonably strong, after everyone.
Alexa is also to follow.
Home integration of things still sucks, so really the big move forward for Siri/Alexa will be AGI - the future is proactively taking care of things, rather than assist you with your next resume.
Why would “so and so” be willing to talk to your bot? Chances are they won’t get “so and so”, but so and so’s bot on the line.
With the current state of the art, that bot, guided by the question “when will x happen”, may make up that it will happen and make up a date and time, even though it was cancelled last week. Next, your bot might inform the bots of a few friends that the thing is on, book a flight for you to go there, etc.
That won’t always happen, of course, but even if it’s a 1:10,000 chance, I wouldn’t take it, as it could be a costly mishap.
Once we have assistants that can actually do something useful and specific to your life instead of just setting timers, and looking up what the capital of France is, there would be more demand. I know I'd pay for one, especially if it was open-source and self-hostable.