[throwaway202020]

That's not true at all. AI is everywhere. When Gmail completes your sentence, auto-playlist gets created, camera detects a pet, you take night shot of a city, grammar suggestions are shown, wrong keystrokes auto-corrects, voice mail is transcribed, phone call is responded by quick text, your sleep is analysed, heart rate is monitored on runs, news articles gets recommended, spam email gets filtered, device idle detected... I can go on.

Most of these problems cannot be simply solved by just throwing in best engineers. No amount of classical algorithms you learned as CS major is going to help you implement the best solutions for these problems. The state of art solutions to these problems requires intense narrowly focused researchers who have studied these problems for many years, knows which 10% of the papers even worth looking at and pro/cons of different techniques. Something as benign as running neural net on phone hardware is intensely researched subject and your implementation can be literally 10X to 100X better at speed and power consumption if you have kept up with the field.

[sassypotato]

None of those things was solved in the last 3-4 years though.

Some might now be done via AI, but is it done any noteceably better than 3-4 years ago? I certainly don't trust my camera to adjust itself, or the sleep analysis to be any good, or the article recommendation to not recommend based on outrage, or the spam filter to work at all.

[throwaway202020]

That's the whole point. If you are still using classical solutions for these things that are years old, you are far behind best experience and the competition. As an example, noise removal in low light images has advanced tremendously each year with stunning gains. Same goes for grammar correction and auto-correct. You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude. Siri even has trouble doing proper voice recognition and as Apple does not even know how to do search, its question answering skills shines only for highly curated tasks. First thing I've always done on my iPhones is to turn it off. However, Google had been amazingly improving these stuff every year. The end result is that while I do use iPhone, I tend to use mostly Google services and when something is only available on Android I get a tremendous itch to switch.

[calf]

It sounds like you are just advocating the corporate tech transfer model of advanced research in a nascent field, but maybe Apple is philosophically opposed to doing that. Indeed, it's not that they don't have funds for scientific research. It's easy to say Siri is inferior or whatever but that contains such hidden assumptions about what really is valuable for consumer tech.

[dwighttk]

> You can see the difference in Siri and Google Assistant that is literally an order of magnitude.

How is this measured?

[IanCal]

To compare that list to apple, my Mac often (but not predictably) complains that things like "the" isn't a word. Literally worse than a lookup against /use/dict.