[bangaroo]

Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate.

It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase names that are also english-language words into related concepts and blend them into sentences that make no sense.

The only thing it seems to do accurately is describe images that have been sent to me, though I don't really see the value in a 2 sentence summary of an image being sent (folks with limited visibility will probably feel differently.)

I have never received a summary that gave me any idea of what the hell the messages it was summarizing was about. It's impressively bad. I'm shocked apple shipped this.

[reilly3000]

It’s bad because they are using very small local models on device, like on the order of 3 billion parameters as opposed to the trillion+ param models available in the cloud. They could keep the security model and have larger, slower models for summaries (what’s the urgency of a summary?) but that would be a battery killer. It’s clear they need to train on messaging content, but they have promised not to use their users content.

It seems to me they should let the local models train on local content while charging and do reinforcement learning on their summaries as judged by a larger (private cloud) LLM.

[xvector]

There are ≤3B models far better than the absolute garbage Apple is running on the iPhone.

[ryantgtg]

When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these bizarre things.

[reilly3000]

There is no icon or anything to indicate it’s “AI”? What a miss.

[bangaroo]

there is a little icon that is like... three lines next to an arrow in an L shape, but it's honestly unclear what it means visually (it doesn't read as AI, and I feel like "little sparkles" is the de facto AI icon) and it's also not super visible or distinct, so it's not always immediately apparent at a glance.

[kjkjadksj]

I’m not shocked they shipped. This is their mo now. Same as the apple maps rollout. Big fanfare about some feature competitors already had that apple would clone and do it better because apple. Apple releases it and its laughably worse. Apple wins the long game for some users because they privilege their app in the os relative to the third party option. And repeat for next feature.

[nunez]

Apple Maps in particular frustrates me. It's integrated extremely deeply into the OS in ways that Google Maps can't take advantage of. Navigation on lock screen and built-in guidance on Apple Watch (versus having to use notifications).

As a result, users are "forced" to use Apple Maps if they want these very useful integrations. While I think Apple Maps is much better designed than Google Maps, this advantage is anti-competitive as hell.

It's a smaller version of the IE problem that got Microsoft in hot water, and yet it persists unabated.

[nunez]

This happened to me!

We were discussing a book that I didn't like in a book club Slack thread. I mentioned how I'm against AI in general. Someone in the channel showed me an Apple Intelligence summary of the notifications from that thread, and it concluded that I disliked the entire book club channel, which wasn't true!

[xvector]

Agree, I'm hugely bullish on AI but this implementation is just so fucking bad. The Apple execs involved should feel a deep sense of shame and incompetence. What a joke. The Siri org leaders have proven to the world, time and time again, that they can't get anything right.

[kjkjadksj]

Years after siris release I can’t believe I am still getting 50 minute timers when I ask for 15. “Its only useful for setting timers” and not even that!