[TechnicolorByte]

Have to say, I was thoroughly impressed by what Apple showed today with all this Personal AI stuff. And it proves that the real power of consumer AI will be in the hands of the platform owners where you have most of your digital life in already (Apple or Google for messaging, mail, photos, apps; Microsoft for work and/or life).

The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations or asking about someone’s flight is so useful (can’t tell you how many times my brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup!).

I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.

Nevermind all the thought put into private cloud, integration with ChatGPT, the image generation playground, and Genmoji. I can genuinely see all this being useful for “the rest of us,” to quote Craig. As someone who’s taken a pessimistic view of Apple software innovation the last several years, I’m amazed.

One caveat: the image generation of real people was super uncanny and made me uncomfortable. I would not be happy to receive one of those cold and impersonal, low-effort images as a birthday wish.

[ethbr1]

> I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly. Benefit of drawing people into their ecosystem.

It's the benefit of how Apple does product ownership. In contrast to Google and Microsoft.

I hadn't considered it, but AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't.

Nobody wants a GenAI feature that works in Gmail, a different one that works in Messages, etc. -- they want a platform capability that works anywhere they use text.

I'm not sure either Google or Microsoft are organizationally-capable of delivering that, at this point.

[TreetopPlace]

"AI convergence is going to lay bare organizational deficiencies in a way previous revolutions didn't`'

Your quote really hit me. I trust Apple to respect my privacy when doing AI, but the thought of Microsoft or Google slurping up all my data to do remote-server AI is abhorrent. I can't see how Microsoft or Google can undo the last 10 years to fix this.

[highwaylights]

Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so much of what they showed today I just felt was actively pushing me out of the ecosystem.

I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years. We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us just fine.

Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those when they finally stop getting patches.

I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth given the price of those things.

[ManuelKiessling]

It’s ironic how the one company that is WAY over the top wrt secrecy — not only to the public, but also and especially internally (they’ve even walled the hardware team from the software team while developing the iPhone!) — is at the same time the one company that really nails integration.

[bbor]

Well tbf I’m not sure Google does project ownership… I was shocked how many seemingly important conversations ended with “well, I guess these days that functionality is owned by the community of relevant stakeholders…” (aka: owned by nobody at all). I think they’re only able to do what they’ve done through the sheer concentration of brilliant overpaid engineers, in spite of such “innovation”.

Totally agree on the AI points. Google may have incredible research, but Apple clearly is playing to their strengths here.

[vjulian]

Could you please explain ‘lay bare organisational deficiencies’? I ask without skepticism.

[epolanski]

Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major concerns to me at least.

[tstrimple]

Microsoft is trying and I feel they are in a much stronger position than Google. The same advantage that Apple has for personal docs and images Microsoft has across business content. Seamless AI integration across teams and outlook and sharepoint and other office products offer huge platform benefits.

[jerieljan]

For Google in particular, this was honestly something they could've done far earlier. They had the Pixel phones, they had the Tensor stuff, and then Gemini came along.

But for some reason, they decided to just stick to feature tidbits here and there and chose not to roll out quality-of-life UI features to make Gemini use easier on normal apps and not just select Google apps. And then it's also limited by various factors. They were obviously testing the waters and were just as cautious, but imho it was a damn shame. Even summarization and key points would've been nice if I could invoke it on any text field.

But yeah, this is truly the ecosystem benefit in full force here for Apple, and they're making good use of it.

[dwighttk]

How long until the EU decides that making this a platform capability is a fineable offense?

[ants_everywhere]

That's actually exactly what you want. No one company should know what you do on all apps.

[tempestn]

Neither is Apple unless one buys wholly into the Apple ecosystem. I want open ai tools that I can truly use with all my text. But I'm not holding my breath.

[WheatMillington]

>I always saw this level of personal intelligence to come about at some point, but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly

That's a little premature, let's try not to be so suckered by marketing.

[theshrike79]

Apple is again going where Google (the world's largest ad company) cannot follow: 100% user privacy.

They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private.

There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want it.

[Damogran6]

It's the potential for the model. Everyone else is hoovering the internet to model everything and Apple is sticking with their privacy message and saying 'how can I model your stuff to help you.'

That's tangibly different.

[dereg]

Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.

I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.

Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end?

There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.

[wayeq]

> allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.

Are we sure there is a Siri team in Apple? What have they been doing since 2012?

[cyberpunk]

I don't get this at all, how does integrating siri with a llm mean you get an interpreter and allowing development?

[constantcrying]

I do believe much of what they showed was impressive. It actually seems to realize the "personal digital secretary" promise that personal computing devices throughout the decades were sold on.

The most important question to me is how reliable it is. Does it work every time or is there some chance that it horribly misinterprets the content and even embarrasses the user who trusted it.

[dom96]

Yeah, reliability is the crucial bit. Like that example he showed where it checked whether he can make an appointment (by checking driving times), a lot can go wrong there and if the assistant tells you "Yes, you can" but you cannot then I can see lots of people getting angry and not trusting it for anything.

[discordance]

In the context of off-device processing, it's worth keeping in mind that US surveillance laws have recently expanded in their scope and reach:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/house-fisa-g...

[ENGNR]

For this reason, I really hope we can self-host our "private cloud" for use with apple devices. That would truly, properly allow end to end privacy. I don't trust Apple given the legislation you've just linked to, both claims obviously can't be correct.

[richardw]

I’ve been waiting for Apple to arrive. They bring so much polish and taste.

Two features I really want:

“Position the cursor at the beginning of the word ‘usability’”

“Stop auto suggesting that word. I never use it, ever”

[teh_infallible]

Apple auto suggest can be ducking annoying

[RheingoldRiver]

legitimately good voice recognition would probably be the "killer feature" to get me to switch from android to iOS after all this time. I'm so frustrated with the current state of voice recognition in android keyboards, but ChatGPT's recent update is amazing at voice recognition. I type primarily by voice transcribing and I would be so happy if I could go from 70% voice 30% I need to type to 95% voice 5% I need to type.

[deepGem]

One really powerful use case they demoed was that of meeting conflicts.

"Can you meet tonight at 7?" Me "oh yes" Siri "No you can't, your daughter's recital is at 7"

It's these integrations which will make life easier for those who deal with multiple personas all through their day.

But why partner with an outside company ? Even though it's optional on the device etc, people are miffed about the partnership than being excited by all that Apple has to offer.

[tonyabracadabra]

The image generation is dalle 2.5 level and feels really greasy to me, beyond that I think the overall launch is pretty good! I also congratulate rabbit r1 for their timely release months before WWDC https://heymusic.ai/music/apple-intel-fEoSb

[thomasahle]

The generated image of two dice (https://x.com/thomasahle/status/1800258720074490245) was dalle 1 level.

Just randomly sprinkled eyes on the sides. I wonder why they chose to showcase that.

[wwalexander]

Yeah, the image generation felt really…cheap?…tasteless? but everything else was really impressive.

[pmarreck]

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context

Given that this will apparently drop... next year at the earliest?... I think it's simply quite a tease, for now.

I literally had to install a keyboard extension to my iPhone just to get Whisper speech to text, which is thousands of times better at dictation than Siri at this point, which seems about 10 years behind the curve

[QuinnyPig]

Ooh, which keyboard extension is this?

[gavmor]

> the platform owners where you have most of your digital life

Yup! The hardest part of operationalizing GenAI has been, for me, dragging the "ring" of my context under the light cast by "streetlamp" of the model. Just writing this analogy out makes me think I might be putting the cart before the horse.

[zer00eyz]

The UI design part? The integration part? The iteration part?

Apple products tend to feel thoughtful. It might not be a thought you agree with, but it's there.

With other companies I feel like im starving, and all they are serving is their version of grule... Here is your helping be sure to eat all of it.

[rootveg]

Whenever I read that expression I have to think about the Porsche commercial from a few years back. I guess it’s not always a bad idea :)

https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/dw...

[paganel]

> but I didn’t expect Apple to hit it out of the park so strongly.

No-one is hitting anything out of the park, this is just Apple the company realising that they're falling behind and trying to desperately attach themselves to the AI train. Doesn't matter if in so doing they're validating a company run by basically a swindler (I'm talking about the current OpenAI and Sam Altman), the Apple shareholders must be kept happy.

[kcplate]

> No-one is hitting anything out of the park

I kind of feel like their walled garden and ecosystem might just have created the perfect environment for an AI integrated directly to the platform to be really useful.

I’m encouraged, but I am already a fan of the ecosystem…

[nox101]

I have no confidence this will work as intended. The last MacOS upgrade had the horrible UX of guessing which emoji you want and being wrong 95% of the time. I don't expect this to be any better. Demos are scripted.

I also expect it to fail miserably on names (places, restaurants, train stations, people), people that are bilingual, non-English, people with strong accents from English not being their first language, etc.

[everdrive]

Do you think Apple could develop an AI so powerful that it would allow me to uninstall Siri from my iPhone?

[citizen_friend]

You can turn it off in settings

[MetaWhirledPeas]

>The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails

I did not see the announcement. Can Siri also send emails? If so then won't this (like Gemini) be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks?

Edit: Supposedly Gemini does not actually send the emails; maybe Apple is doing the same thing?

[dudus]

It doesn't look like it does. It seems to only write the email for you but not send. At least yet.

[theshrike79]

It just writes the content, it doesn't actually send anything.

We'll find out later if there's an API to do something like that at all or are external communications always behind some hard limit that requires explicit user interaction.

[Loveaway]

Some of it will undoubtly be super useful. Things like:

- Proofread button in mail.

- ChatGPT will be available in Apple’s systemwide Writing Tools in macOS

I expect once you'll get used to it, it'll be hard to go without it.

[iLoveOncall]

> The way Siri can now perform actions based on context from emails and messages like setting calendar and reservations

I can't think of something less exciting than a feature that Gmail has supported for a decade.

Overall there's not a single feature in the article that I find exciting (I don't use Siri at all, so maybe it's just me), but I actually see that as a good thing. The least they add GenAI the better.

[theshrike79]

The difference is that this is on-device and private. Gmail just feeds your emails to Google's servers and they do the crunching. And in the meanwhile train their systems to be better using your content.

[PaulHoule]

It is really “the app” that has to die in order for AI to show its potential in user interfaces. If you want to, say, order from a restaurant, your personal agent should order it for you, any attempt for the restaurant to “own” the consumer by putting an app in his face has to end.

[l1tany11]

I don’t think I am understanding what you mean, but isn’t one of the potential use cases of AI to say: “Siri order me the thing I always get from _restaurant_ and it navigates the app for you in the background? Potentially this can be done without API integration; the AI synthetically operates the app. Maybe it “watches” how you used the app before (which options you choose, which you dismiss, etc) to learn your preferences and execute the order with minimal interaction with the user. This way annoying, bad, UI can be avoided. AI “solves” UI in this way?

Are you saying this type of scenario kills the app, or are you saying the app needs to die, replaced by an API that AIs can interact with, thus homogenizing the user experience, and avoiding the bad parts of Apps?

[brundolf]

An interesting consequence: I started to think about how I'll be incentivized to take more pictures of useful information, and might even try setting up a Proton Mail proxy so I can use the iOS Email app and give Siri more context

[krrrh]

I’m curious if simply running the proton mail bridge on a Mac at home would allow the native mail app feed “semantic” context across devices to iOS.

[Jayakumark]

Google is doing this as well but they are doing it on single app like gmail assuming all info is there and also across websites with agents but not cross apps like apple is doing across mails, messages, maps etc.

[ethbr1]

100%. Based on what I've seen so far, unified context is king.

Which at the backend means unifying necessary data from different product silos, into organized and usable sources.

[cchance]

Not to mention tied into their underlying SDK API that basically the whole system is based on, and seems they are using those same API's for the internal integrations so they can feel whats missing themselves as well.

[tomcam]

I’ll be thoroughly impressed when Siri learns my wife’s name for good. Yes, I trained it, but somehow the lesson was forgotten.

[eppsilon]

You can set a relationship type in her contact card. I think Siri uses that data.

[BoringTimesGang]

Ah, you mean my good friend 'heart emoji wife heart emoji'

[dgellow]

We will see, in practice Siri has been pretty much useless even if hyped in demos. I keep pretty low expectations

[uhtred]

The willingness you seem to have to sacrifice all your privacy for a few gimmicks is astounding

[imabotbeep2937]

"brother didn’t bother to check the flight code I sent him via message when he asks me when I’m landing for pickup"

Yeah but what about people going to the wrong airport, or getting scammed by taking fake information uncritically? "Well it worked for me and anyway AI will get better.". Amen.

[lancesells]

Even moreso why does brother take the time to bring up Siri if he can't read the flight code? It's the same thing correct?

[b33j0r]

I will believe it when siri isn’t the stupidest decade old idea ever. I’m sorry if I sound anything but snarky, but they have had Star Trek abilities this whole time, nerfed for “safety” and platform product integrity —from my iPhone

[baby]

I just wanted a folding iPhone

[Hippocrates]

The AI/Cartoony person being sent as a birthday wish was super cringey, like something my boomer father would send me. I'm a fan of genmoji. That looks fun. Less a fan of generated clip art and "images for the sake of having an image here", and way, way less into this "here, I made a cornball image of you from other images of you that I have" feature. It's as lame as Animoji but as creepy as deepfakes.

[jnaina]

Aimed at a different demographics. Peepaw and Meemaw are absolutely going to love it.

[wwalexander]

Yeah, the genmoji feel like a proper Apple feature, but the full images feel cheap and pointless.

[insane_dreamer]

> AKA there would be a way to choose backends.

I think the percentage of iPhone users for who this would matter is very small. It's similar to how many people care about using a different browser than Safari on iOS (or Chrome on Google): in the US at least, those two browsers have ~95% market share.

[crooked-v]

To me, everything about how it's been presented so far says the point of how it's set up is that they don't want to use backends. They want everything to happen on device. Even having ChatGPT for expanded queries is an unfortunate necessity driven by the hardware not being powerful enough yet.

How much is run entirely on device so far is unclear, but the sessions later in the day should expand on that.

[skhunted]

I don’t follow your second to last paragraph. It’s called Apple Intelligence. If you want to use something else do so but don’t expect Apple to build its own product and let you use whatever you want for it. Clearly the goal for Apple is to eventually use its own models and be an entirely in house product.

[amelius]

What do you mean into hands of platform owners? The point of having an Apple device is that you can run stuff on your device. The user is in control, not any platforms.

[dialup_sounds]

I think what they're getting at is that the platform owners have power because they can actually leverage the data that users give them to be useful tools to those users.

I would contrast this with the trend over the last year of just adding a chatbot to every app, or Recall being just a spicy History function. It's AI without doing anything useful.

[verdverm]

I take it as 3rd party alternatives will have a much harder time because they have to ask the user to share their data with them. Apple / Google already have that established relationship and 3rd parties will unlikely have the level of integration and simplicity that the platformers can deliver.

[Tagbert]

Apple owns the platform. The user owns the device that embodies the platform.

[gowld]

Apple owns the software platform. Can I run my non-Apple Intelligence software on the data in "my" iPhone?

[croes]

>Private Cloud Compute

But it runs in their cloud.