[lurking_swe]

i guess the big difference is normal people are using LLM’s now in the form of google search AI overview, chatgpt, etc. Do you know “normal” people that use crypto for buying and selling goods?

I know 0. And i work in tech lol.

[DiabloD3]

That's not the "big difference" you're looking for, though. I'm the tech person in the lives of many normal people, and they ask me, "Hey, why does Google search suck now? How do I turn off this AI thing that keeps giving wrong information?", as if I know some magic secret switch to turn that off (adding udm=14 to the query URL is too difficult for normal people).

I don't hear anything from people I actually know who are exposed to this stuff being like, "Oh my God, this has massively improved my life and I can't live without it!" No its stuff like, "How do I uninstall Siri off my iPhone? It doesn't work right anymore and can't understand me, and keeps turning itself back on when there is an iOS update."

I don't think any amount of marketing is going to change the fact that the service doesn't work and isn't up to user expectations.

It's undercooked and now its too late to put it back in the oven, so to speak.

[lurking_swe]

Google search has sucked for years, even before the AI stuff was added. To be brutally honest. My personal complaint with google search is that the AI overview is pushed prominently. The overview itself is not bad, especially if you’re just trying to look up something quickly that’s not that important. For example “which two colors make purple?” or “how far is NY from SF?” Expecting it to be 100% factually correct is an issue, and should not be relied on. But google doesn’t prominently point out that AI can make mistakes. Hence the user expectation problem…

And siri has been junk for years too. Not sure what LLM’s have to do with that. Siri activates via a machine learning model that runs on device, which listens for a “wake word”, and that tech has been around for 10 years at this point. It’s possible apple messed up their machine learning model in a recent update? Idk :) But that’s unrelated to LLM’s.

I agree hype has gone out of control! the tech companies are over-promising. Expectations are too high, like you said. That doesn’t mean LLM’s are useless like crypto though. It’s early days still. Crypto is not useful to _any_ normal person, unless you live in a handful of countries with crazy inflation, or you’re a crypto nerd, or you’re trying to move dirty money around.

But all of this is useful to almost anyone:

- quickly summarize a recipe online, removing all the junk ads from the website.

- Brainstorming a quick travel itinerary (as a starting point) in 5 seconds.

- Getting a quick layman’s understanding of a topic you’re unfamiliar in.

- teens can brainstorm career paths. (tell an llm what they are good at, what they enjoy, and what they dislike)

- need to find a product online (tool, part, etc), but don’t know what it’s called? Describe it to an LLM! Then start your google search journey.

All of that is genuinely useful i think? IMO you’re conflating the _tech_, with how it’s being pushed onto the masses by the tech giants (siri, google search, etc).

[DiabloD3]

Apple recently removed the old Siri backend service and replaced it with "Apple Intelligence", which farms the requests out to whoever Apple is partnering with to provide inference. When this switch happened, it basically broke every user's phone if they relied on Siri.

I'm glad I'm on Android. I can just uninstall Google Assistant, which did the same transformation into a Gemini frontend. I wasn't using Assistant at all, so it isn't a meaningful loss for me.

[lurking_swe]

I read somewhere that they are using tiny models on device for some queries, and then sending requests to apple servers for “complex” things. But i doubt that’s the case tbh. Why? Because even some open source models that i run locally on my mac (deepseek r1) produce better responses than what siri is providing lol. So im very skeptical.

If they truly are processing some siri requests in the cloud, im shocked at how incompetent their implementation is.

i haven’t kept up with siri to be honest. All i know is siri is still working for me, but it’s a degraded experience.