[fullshark]

Their strategy to let Siri stagnate for 15 years and let everyone else take that market? Their strategy to put a bunch of not ready for consumer use AI features on their devices and then roll them back?

They just have such a strong hardware + os ecosystem that they can sit on the sidelines. They'll be able to negotiate with some LLM provider at a good discount when the time is right and put harnesses around it for actual useful features.

[BeetleB]

> Their strategy to let Siri stagnate for 15 years and let everyone else take that market?

What have they lost by doing this? Did anyone switch from iPhones to something else?

Google's Assistant was and is better than Siri's. How many switched to Android because of it?

[epistasis]

I was talking more about massive investments in compute and model development. Voice assistants are barely AI, but real AI might help make better ones in the future. Similarly, I think Apple's failed attempts to add AI to macOS and iOS are a huge justification of avoiding capital investments in compute and AI frontier models.

There's two separate things here: 1) the underlying models, and 2) how they are applied to real world tasks. Both are changing at tremendous speed. The underlying models, 1), can be purchased as a component, so there's little advantage to vertical integration, as long as there's a robust competitive market, and boy is there ever. And Apple was never going to be the big B2B provider for LLM compute and models, such sales are just not in their corporate DNA.

For 2), application of AI in Apple's products, nobody knows how to do that correctly yet, and it's going to a wild few years of people trying things and failing before something comes to pass. Waiting to see where to actually find a competitive edge totally makes sense. Microsoft's Copilot bungling was far worse than Apple AI's bungling, for example. I can't even get access to Microsoft Office anymore, it seems, I'm instead confronted with a dumb chat interface that doesn't even know how to launch a new document or open existing ones. At least Apple never destroyed their brand like that...

[HolyLampshade]

I think that's precisely what the previous commenter is saying. Sit on the side lines, and let other people bloody themselves up.

Similar in a way to dot com. It's not to say ML won't have practical application in the future, but the likelihood that it will have specifically this form is low and worth waiting until the dust settles and a more commonly accepted utility presents itself.

If AI/ML were monstrously useful in its current form the companies pushing it would not need to be hawking products; people would be bashing their doors down. I think that's why in areas where it's more directly applied to a known problem set (like Pharma research, and I'm hoping someone with Pharma expertise can pipe up here) there has been more natural pickup.

Coming from trading and markets, ML has been a part of the mix in quantitative strategies for...well, nearly 20 years (by definition I suppose). Spaces with obvious utility will see rapid adoption. Worth waiting that out, honestly.

[dundarious]

The point was that one rational approach is that it's OK to not be top ranked in a market that has significant medium-term profitability issues. Apple has no problem creating new markets, but not if being top ranked requires years and years and years without return on investment after launch, and large subsidies. Not to say Apple hasn't failed at creating new markets either, or anything like that.

[insane_dreamer]

Claude is a far superior _model_ to whatever Siri uses, but in terms of the Claude app correctly transcribing speech, in my experience it's as bad or worse than Siri (which is already bad). Doesn't matter how good the model is if it misinterprets what you say.

[baal80spam]

> They just have such a strong hardware

"just" doing a very heavy lifting here