[ACCount37]

Not by much.

ChatGPT alone is among the most popular apps ever made, and it's available both inside and outside Apple's walled garden. Letting it reach audience in countries where Apple doesn't have much of a foothold.

I do wonder if new Siri is any good though. Apple used to be a genuine AI leader, but they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution, and Siri's response quality was a sad joke for a while now. Did they bring it up to modern standard?

[chasd00]

> they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution

I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.

I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.

[ACCount37]

They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.

They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.

They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.

[FireBeyond]

Let's be very real about Siri... it is a sad implementation of what has a lot of potential.

Talking to my HomeKit, turning on and off lights, sometimes, other times, "I don't know what lights you are talking about", "I can't find those lights" even though they're visible and reachable and controllable about the app.

"Do X" "Okay", "Do [very very similar synonym for X]" "I don't know what you're talking about."

CarPlay and Siri, unless you make sure permissions match, with CarPlay giving you navigation, press the Speech button, "Find me the nearest Starbucks." "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".

It has nothing to do with "not being in the LLM laboratory business". I get, and agree with that. But Siri has been around for 14 years at this point and is barely more than a simple voice control for alarm clocks and timers and "play music", at this point.

[leptons]

I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?

[Cider9986]

People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.

Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.

[leptons]

You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".

My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".

[dmd]

> I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.

I mean, they said it was.

[chasd00]

sorry, i only watched a subset of the presentation

[ihumanable]

Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.

Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.

[Schiendelman]

Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.

[ACCount37]

Because Siri defaults to dumb search much more often. While ChatGPT sucks up the search results and gives its own answer.

Which either terminates the session, or goads the user into asking a follow-up question, improving retention - the user doesn't leave the app either way.

[jimbokun]

> Apple used to be a genuine AI leader

when?

[ACCount37]

iPhone 8 shipped an NPU in 2017 - among the first consumer electronics vendors to put dedicated AI acceleration into something. iPhone X then took advantage of that with TrueDepth and the infrastructure around it.

There was a real push from Apple at the time to enter the AI game - mainly for image processing purposes, which was the mainstream flavor of AI at the time.