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Mint
2 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Apple Greets Developers at WWDC as an AI Spoilsport
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- You know, it could just be a coincidence. On the eve of Apple Inc.'s World Wide Developers' Conference, a new paper from the company's own researchers poured some cold water over some of the artificial-intelligence hype. The study argues that the advanced reasoning models, heralded by some as a new frontier for how AI 'thinks,' fall well short of expectations. When a problem becomes sufficiently complex, the team of six researchers wrote, the models suffered a 'complete accuracy collapse.' It examined top efforts from OpenAI, Google and and Anthropic — three AI makers considered several furlongs ahead of Apple in the AI race. You may be interested in As I say — perhaps it's just a coincidence. And the debate around the paper's conclusions are only just starting. But it's certainly useful that it arrived just as the iPhone maker's perceived failing to build competitive AI capabilities comes back into sharp focus as third-party Apple developers descend on San Jose on Monday for the annual pilgrimage, with many more joining remotely. WWDC isn't typically the venue for Apple's biggest product launches. But it is a chance for Apple to get developers hyped on some experimental ideas. The Vision Pro mixed-reality headset was unveiled at WWDC in 2023, and last year's event was about the long-awaited reveal of Apple's answer to ChatGPT and the rest: Apple Intelligence. The tone of this year's WWDC will be markedly different for one obvious reason: Apple has embarrassed itself. Many of the Apple Intelligence upgrades the company outlined in 2024 have yet to materialize on users' devices, with the company forced to quietly stop running ads that suggested the features were imminent. The bells and whistles that did get released were underwhelming, buggy or both. Backed into a corner, by Wall Street or just competitive instincts against its peers, Apple looked to be in a bit of a scramble. But it's yesterday's news to say that Apple is behind on AI. Investors know that, and the shortcomings have already been priced in; just one of several factors contributing to Apple's share price drop of 19% so far this year. (That would have made it the worst performer in the Magnificent Seven were it not for the Trump-Musk feud's fallout on Tesla Inc. last week.) Today's story is instead about whether Apple can convincingly talk its way around its glaring deficit. That job will fall on the shoulders of Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who could be forgiven for being distracted as Apple contends with the continued unpredictabilities of the continuing trade war. Instead of any significant AI announcements, according to Bloomberg News' chief Apple whisperer, Mark Gurman, attendees will be walked through a revised visual language for its apps, an upgrade to its Mac OS operating system, a new games offering and a smattering of other tweaks. There could, of course, be a 'one more thing' surprise, but it seems highly unlikely. More so than any significant Apple event in recent memory, this year's WWDC keynote seems set to be a snoozefest, a placeholder for more significant progress to come next year. Apple's muted WWDC will stand in stark contrast to the buzz created around the recent announcement that ex-Apple design guru Jony Ive was working on a device with OpenAI. That will take time to materialize, if it ever does. More urgent is the threat from Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Inc., which all seem closer to creating the breakthrough AI personal assistant that science fiction has promised us for so long. So it serves a useful purpose, then, to put out a research paper diminishing others' AI progress. Apple doesn't seem able to speed up, so it might as well take a shot at slowing others down. And indeed, we might look back in five or 10 years and concede Apple was entirely correct in its reservations. Taking that thought a step further, one way to spin the situation to its benefit, as discussed by analysts at Evercore ISI recently, might be for Apple executives to make more of the fact that while Apple hasn't produced any groundbreaking AI achievements compared with its peers, it hasn't thrown tens of billions of dollars at the pursuit either. More From Bloomberg Opinion: This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion's US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News. More stories like this are available on
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- The Guardian
Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri?
After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all – Apple – was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology. Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers' Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, 'AI' would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated – something called 'Apple Intelligence'. It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but 'a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services'. Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel. And, of course, it also made it easier for Apple to say that users who wanted to have all of these fancy features would have to buy an iPhone 15 Pro, because older devices wouldn't be up to the task. Needless to say, this columnist fell for it and upgraded. (Verily, one sucker is born every minute.) As a piece of kit, the new phone was impressive: the powerful new processor chips, neural engine etc worked a treat. And the camera turned out to be astonishingly good. But the Apple Intelligence features enabled by the upgrade seemed trivial and sometimes irritating. It immediately started messing with my photo collection, for example, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted and annoying. And there was a new pre-installed app called Image Playground that apparently 'makes communication and self-expression even more fun' – which might possibly be true if one were a four-year-old with a short attention span, but is otherwise a turkey from central casting and should have been strangled at birth. There was one feature, though, that looked interesting and possibly useful – a serious enhancement of Siri, Apple's attempt at a virtual personal assistant. Henceforth, the company announced: 'Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that's tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, 'Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,' and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, 'When is Mom's flight landing?' and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.' On closer inspection, though, Siri – even running on my expensive new phone – could do none of these useful things. In fact, it mostly seemed as banal as ever. And then, on 7 March, came an announcement from Apple: 'We've also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.' For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that 'what Apple showed regarding the upcoming 'personalized Siri' at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis'. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called 'Knowledge Navigator' video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history. Until – says Gruber – now. Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn't in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook's stewardship of the company. If there's one thing Jobs' Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It's clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter's Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. A million monkeys…ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving is a marvellous essay by John Warner on AI and writing. Machines of loving grace?AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? Read Stephen Fry's unmissable inaugural lecture to King's College London's Digital Futures Institute on the obsession du jour. It's written in the cardsJillian Hess's account on her Substack of Carl Linnaeus's groundbreaking note-taking practice is illuminating.
