[pc_edwin]

The interesting thing is they have the bankroll to actually make this work and it actually makes a lot of sense.

I remember watching a Google I/O presentation back in 2016 when voice assistants were trending. There was all sorts of ideas like APIs to access google assistant, voice/chat being the new interface etc.

The future presented there made so much intuitive sense to me and now the tech has finally caught up. The current static state off affairs has clearly outlived its usefulness.

Its not all sunshine and roses, Apple is an order of magnitude better position to take this leap then OpenAI. I know this may be a little out there but I think Apple made the right move by not jumping the gun with LLMs, IMO it makes more to let the dust settle and either partner with one of the winners or pick up the open standard (Llama 5?)

[icyfox]

There was an Information article a few weeks ago on Apple increasing its daily spend to millions of dollars in ML training costs per day. With their historic desire for control over the whole stack, I'd put money on them rolling their own architecture.

[pc_edwin]

Thats a start but if they were really going for it, it would look more like a multi-billion dollar investment with M&A, head hunting, training infra, partnerships etc

Atm its looks more like getting they lay of the land, which IMO is the smart move.

[adhocmobility]

Apple has invested a lot in making sure that they STAY in "an order of magnitude better position". They know that the ultimate winner in personalized AIs will be whoever has the best edge hardware. That is why they have been investing so heavily in special purpose on-device chips for running neural networks.

[Karunamon]

If they take that leap. Apple was pretty early to the voice assistant game but they have been content to never actually do anything interesting with it. Siri is easily the worst mainstream product in its category, it has always baffled me how long they let this be the case.

[lancesells]

Some of that makes sense. The three companies with the biggest voice assistants are Apple, Amazon, and Google. What are they all getting out of it? Google gets more data which is what they want. Amazon gets something, maybe knowing more about you, maybe some small margin of orders. Apple does things on-device so they get?

I'm not saying I like that Siri is terrible. I'm a Siri/Homepod user and somehow it seems worse each year, but possibly Apple sees little upside to Siri compared to adding a programmable button to the iPhone.