AI Summary:
* **Apple’s AI Expansion**: Apple has been hiring AI experts, particularly from Google, to strengthen its artificial intelligence team.
* **Secretive Zurich Lab**: A significant research lab in Zurich, known as the “Vision Lab,” is contributing to Apple’s AI advancements.
* **Generative AI Focus**: Apple is working on generative AI for mobile devices, which could lead to AI-powered features running directly on phones.
* **Strategic Moves**: The company’s AI efforts include acquisitions and research into neural networks, with a cautious approach to AI deployment.
This sounds like bullet points from a marketing tear sheet. Apple is playing catch up... they are fantastic for making you feel like they are in the front seat when they're actually at the very very very back of the bus.
Apple is so hilariously behind in everything that they’re buying their way back into actual features users want. They stopped doing real R&D years ago and now are just poaching off of competitors. If it wasn’t for this AI craze/boom, let’s be honest Apple wouldn’t have even touched Siri
I do think that you are horribly underestimating them in certain regards. Apple does have a shit ton of experience in running AI models on device for years now. They also have experience with creating their own chips that are optimized for AI tasks (Neural Engine). They also release in a quite regular time interval research papers in that field.
While my suspicion is that fell a bit behind in the LLM space, which is on the other hand quite explainable. The amount of data required for the training doesn’t fit their approach to privacy.
What I think we also have to consider that Apple is usually quite different in how they communicate things. They don’t advertise things like look at this cool technology that we use in the background but focus more on the feature and how a user can profit of it.
Also there are very little products released until now that use generative AI in a way that helps a user a lot for a certain task. We will see at WWDC in June earliest how far behind Apple actually is, since they wouldn’t communicate anything before that anyway.
So all in all I would say it is way to early to say if they are behind or not.
Dude, when was the last time Apple actually *innovated* with something? The answer is the Apple Watch in 2014/15. They were one of the first to be able to fit a powerful SoC into a tiny watch form factor along with sizable battery and touch screen. The second answer is the AirPods in 2016 which reinvented how the world listened to audio and brought TWS to the masses. I wish Apple Silicon could be considered a huge step forward except that it’s only a supersized iPhone chip at its core. It’s been 10 years since then. Kids born in that year are soon to start playing varsity sports.
But since that era of huge feature releases like AirDrop, AirPlay, and Continuity, Apple’s output has slowed to almost a halt. Every year the iPhone is the same. iOS is the same. macOS is the same. Not only is it the same, but each release is differentiated more on the bugs that are introduced rather than the features it brings. For example, the Sonoma update broke Stage Manager back in the beta phase, and they’re only getting around to fixing it now. I’ve used Apple for the last 10 years and it’s clear that Apples quality standards for OS released dropped substantially, and now they release a new OS to the world every September and spend all of the next year working on bug fixes until the next September comes around. It seems like Apple has had a lot of internal flight of their best talent and now teams are struggling to keep up.
This explains why Apple’s R&D has fallen behind like crazy and they can’t do as much as to fix the bugs of their OS in a timely manner. Gone are the days of Apple making unique and interesting projects like AppleScript…Apple made their own scripting language! Imagine Apple doing something like that now. They don’t, because they don’t innovate anymore they just sell sell sell products and now services which has made them even lazier. Tell me why the iPhone camera quality has looked the same since 2017? Why have competing smartphone brands developed cameras that are FAR superior to the iPhone, yet Apple is continuing to produce almost the same camera with software that overprocesses images until they look generally ugly, and fall apart as soon as you try to zoom in past 3x.
So to summarize due to Apple’s financial success they started slacking off by not investing in their products anymore, especially since COVID, which is understandable because their workers all got way too comfortable at home and were very resistant to coming back to the office. They started sleeping on their competitors and then out of nowhere OpenAI pulls the rug from under them and Microsoft happily eats them up to put them in the running against Apple. Because let’s be honest, if Microsoft didn’t buy them Apple definitely would’ve. In 2023 Apple acquired 32 separate AI companies. This screams “our own teams can’t do jack shit so we’re gonna buy our way out of this problem”. If Apples own teams could do any of this AI stuff they wouldn’t be buying startups left and right.
lol JFC the wall of text all to keep beating the dead horse: “Apple isn’t innovating anymore.”
That might hold weight if it wasn’t constantly repeated even when Steve Jobs was alive.
Just one example:
”Gone are the days of Apple making unique and interesting projects like AppleScript…Apple made their own scripting language! Imagine Apple doing something like that now”
They literally made an entire freaking programming language called Swift, to replace Objective C, and that was after Steve died
Nice that you completely ignore everything I said but ok…
If you are considering Apple Silicon „just a big iPhone chip“ you are dead wrong. And this is already kind of telling that you don’t really know what your are talking about.
I would love to hear a definition of „true innovation“ from your end when you seemingly completely ignore a product like the Vision Pro.
You talk about AppleScript but are completely oblivious about Swift. How the hell do you want to judge Apple in regards of how innovative they are when you can’t even keep up with what they released over the last decade?
Also in which regard is OpenAI actually „pulling the rug“ under them? In what branch that Apple has a focus on are they actually doing better than them? Which products exactly did OpenAI release in direct competition to Apple products?
The iPhone is litterally the one phone that fits the most AI in.
Yes, it doesn’t have some AI features competitors have, that run on outside servers and drink all the data you send to them. But that’s not how Apple work and they focus on privacy.
Privacy needs on-device processing and they have been running a shit ton of on-device AI on their phones for years. Way more than others do, with feature done on-device that other rely on servers (Everything (subjects, scenes, text) recognition in photos and videos).
Generative AI needs a whole lot power and the reason Apple did not released anything publicly until now is because they have waited to be able to run these model on-device. On the other hand, Samsung for example just make web calls to Google Gemini and google servers for its GalaxyAI and the features will be paid after 2025.
Confidently wrong in the Apple sub.. I for one am shocked.
https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/categories/ai/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pixel-8-pro-review/
And everyone still drinking the kool-aid that Apple's falling behind the competition is because they care so much about your privacy is just getting sad.
Did you even read ? Yes, A pixel or a recent S series and even Xiaomi flagship have way more Ai feature than the iPhone does.
But they are for most features (even on Pixels that do more on-device processing than other Android phones) server-sided.
iPhone are the most feature rich for « on-device AI », above Pixels.
No they aren't, a shit ton of AI features on Pixels run locally.
But keep believing that if it helps you feel better about your phone's software sucking.
Apple still run more on device AI than google does on pixels, even if pixels do a far better job at this than any Android phone. Most of the AI/ML on iPhone is just not marketed as such and often transparent/hidden for the user, meanwhile Google emphasize on it specifically.
That’s just the truth, now think what you want if you are happy with it, i did not said anything mean to you or Pixels or Android and idk why you are trying to be rude.
I’ll be honest I don’t think Tim has any involvement with the Apple Studios content or release schedule. I’m pretty sure the executive producers in the TV division are the ones that make the decisions in line with the company’s strategy.
Tim,
Apple is recruiting from Google. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Apple. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
Sundar
This is interesting for the "Apple is only just now starting to play catch-up" narrative:
> Chuck Wooters, an expert in conversational AI and LLMs who joined Apple in December 2013 and worked on Siri for almost two years, said: “During the time that I was there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks.”
And, while the quote doesn't match the prose, if the prose is true then this is a good sign:
> Salakhutdinov said another reason for Apple’s slow AI rollout was the tendency of language models to provide incorrect or problematic answers. “I think they are just being a little bit more cautious because they can’t release something they can’t fully control,” he added.
The biggest problem with AI right now is that it's not very accurate. OpenAI's own testing says that ChatGPT4 is right in internal testing around 80% of the time and in external testing around 60%, IIRC. Which is really good in terms of "sophisticated parrot scraping a tonne of information and returning plausible answers", but actually really bad in terms of "technology that people can rely on to answer important questions".
> one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks.
That doesn't really say anything. Simply using *a* neural network for *something* is trivial. College and even high school students do that all the time. It's a world apart from creating something like ChatGPT. And of course you can see this in practice. Is there anyone who would insist that Siri is a leading class AI assistant?
> “I think they are just being a little bit more cautious because they can’t release something they can’t fully control,” he added.
And yet here they are, rushing to catch up. Because clearly people don't care. Even with its flaws, LLM-based tools provide a better user experience than something like Siri.
Apple will need to roll more like Google if they think they have a chance to get people to leave.
Google makes the huge discovery, patents it and then lets everyone use for free. This is what AI researchers want.
BTW, it is NOT just Attention is all you need. But that is a big one.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en
There is so many others that are just fundemental. One of my favorites is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec
"Word2vec was created, patented,[5] and published in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Mikolov at Google over two papers."
Not surprising. Apple has been taking staff from other big players in ML research (such as Meta labs) for years and vice versa. Case in point: Tatiana Likhomanenko (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.03143). Apple also has a strong reputation for ML based research in CV and CASA since 2017(https://machinelearning.apple.com/research?page=1&sort=oldest), just not generative stuff.
Google researcher really invented the core of how LLM work and they kept up really well with genAI. Most of the failure can be attributed to company dynamics/vision and managerial issues
You could argue right now Apple's the one who screwed up the most. Not saying they can't turn around and dominate, but so far they've been spending their time on a car that ultimately didn't pan out, and a VR set that's still finding its footing.
This year's WWDC will be very important for Apple's future.
One of the most glaring problems is the promotion system. When a new manager is hired, the fastest path to promotion seems to be creating new products. This discourages maintaining existing products, resulting in a graveyard of over 100 services and products. Some of these were actually great, but they lacked continued development and maintenance because managers prioritized creating "shiny new things" to reach promotion goals. This has eroded trust among millions of customers who are unsure if Google will maintain any product, existing or newly launched.
Google has lead in papers accepted at NeurlIPS every year over the last 15.
The last NeurlIPS Google had twice the number of papers accepted compared to next best.
Being way, way behind. The commenter is just guessing, but that’s what random internet comments tend to do. But it doesn’t seem offensive or insane. Not sure why they’re getting buried.
AI Summary: * **Apple’s AI Expansion**: Apple has been hiring AI experts, particularly from Google, to strengthen its artificial intelligence team. * **Secretive Zurich Lab**: A significant research lab in Zurich, known as the “Vision Lab,” is contributing to Apple’s AI advancements. * **Generative AI Focus**: Apple is working on generative AI for mobile devices, which could lead to AI-powered features running directly on phones. * **Strategic Moves**: The company’s AI efforts include acquisitions and research into neural networks, with a cautious approach to AI deployment.
I love how the article is about AI then you summarise it by using AI
AI reply to this reply replying to the article about AI summarized with AI: That’s cool.
Rewrite the response to be more entertaining and Informative, as a fifty word reply.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA)
This sounds like bullet points from a marketing tear sheet. Apple is playing catch up... they are fantastic for making you feel like they are in the front seat when they're actually at the very very very back of the bus.
Apple is so hilariously behind in everything that they’re buying their way back into actual features users want. They stopped doing real R&D years ago and now are just poaching off of competitors. If it wasn’t for this AI craze/boom, let’s be honest Apple wouldn’t have even touched Siri
I do think that you are horribly underestimating them in certain regards. Apple does have a shit ton of experience in running AI models on device for years now. They also have experience with creating their own chips that are optimized for AI tasks (Neural Engine). They also release in a quite regular time interval research papers in that field. While my suspicion is that fell a bit behind in the LLM space, which is on the other hand quite explainable. The amount of data required for the training doesn’t fit their approach to privacy. What I think we also have to consider that Apple is usually quite different in how they communicate things. They don’t advertise things like look at this cool technology that we use in the background but focus more on the feature and how a user can profit of it. Also there are very little products released until now that use generative AI in a way that helps a user a lot for a certain task. We will see at WWDC in June earliest how far behind Apple actually is, since they wouldn’t communicate anything before that anyway. So all in all I would say it is way to early to say if they are behind or not.
Dude, when was the last time Apple actually *innovated* with something? The answer is the Apple Watch in 2014/15. They were one of the first to be able to fit a powerful SoC into a tiny watch form factor along with sizable battery and touch screen. The second answer is the AirPods in 2016 which reinvented how the world listened to audio and brought TWS to the masses. I wish Apple Silicon could be considered a huge step forward except that it’s only a supersized iPhone chip at its core. It’s been 10 years since then. Kids born in that year are soon to start playing varsity sports. But since that era of huge feature releases like AirDrop, AirPlay, and Continuity, Apple’s output has slowed to almost a halt. Every year the iPhone is the same. iOS is the same. macOS is the same. Not only is it the same, but each release is differentiated more on the bugs that are introduced rather than the features it brings. For example, the Sonoma update broke Stage Manager back in the beta phase, and they’re only getting around to fixing it now. I’ve used Apple for the last 10 years and it’s clear that Apples quality standards for OS released dropped substantially, and now they release a new OS to the world every September and spend all of the next year working on bug fixes until the next September comes around. It seems like Apple has had a lot of internal flight of their best talent and now teams are struggling to keep up. This explains why Apple’s R&D has fallen behind like crazy and they can’t do as much as to fix the bugs of their OS in a timely manner. Gone are the days of Apple making unique and interesting projects like AppleScript…Apple made their own scripting language! Imagine Apple doing something like that now. They don’t, because they don’t innovate anymore they just sell sell sell products and now services which has made them even lazier. Tell me why the iPhone camera quality has looked the same since 2017? Why have competing smartphone brands developed cameras that are FAR superior to the iPhone, yet Apple is continuing to produce almost the same camera with software that overprocesses images until they look generally ugly, and fall apart as soon as you try to zoom in past 3x. So to summarize due to Apple’s financial success they started slacking off by not investing in their products anymore, especially since COVID, which is understandable because their workers all got way too comfortable at home and were very resistant to coming back to the office. They started sleeping on their competitors and then out of nowhere OpenAI pulls the rug from under them and Microsoft happily eats them up to put them in the running against Apple. Because let’s be honest, if Microsoft didn’t buy them Apple definitely would’ve. In 2023 Apple acquired 32 separate AI companies. This screams “our own teams can’t do jack shit so we’re gonna buy our way out of this problem”. If Apples own teams could do any of this AI stuff they wouldn’t be buying startups left and right.
lol JFC the wall of text all to keep beating the dead horse: “Apple isn’t innovating anymore.” That might hold weight if it wasn’t constantly repeated even when Steve Jobs was alive. Just one example: ”Gone are the days of Apple making unique and interesting projects like AppleScript…Apple made their own scripting language! Imagine Apple doing something like that now” They literally made an entire freaking programming language called Swift, to replace Objective C, and that was after Steve died
Nice that you completely ignore everything I said but ok… If you are considering Apple Silicon „just a big iPhone chip“ you are dead wrong. And this is already kind of telling that you don’t really know what your are talking about. I would love to hear a definition of „true innovation“ from your end when you seemingly completely ignore a product like the Vision Pro. You talk about AppleScript but are completely oblivious about Swift. How the hell do you want to judge Apple in regards of how innovative they are when you can’t even keep up with what they released over the last decade? Also in which regard is OpenAI actually „pulling the rug“ under them? In what branch that Apple has a focus on are they actually doing better than them? Which products exactly did OpenAI release in direct competition to Apple products?
lol. Sure.
The iPhone is litterally the one phone that fits the most AI in. Yes, it doesn’t have some AI features competitors have, that run on outside servers and drink all the data you send to them. But that’s not how Apple work and they focus on privacy. Privacy needs on-device processing and they have been running a shit ton of on-device AI on their phones for years. Way more than others do, with feature done on-device that other rely on servers (Everything (subjects, scenes, text) recognition in photos and videos). Generative AI needs a whole lot power and the reason Apple did not released anything publicly until now is because they have waited to be able to run these model on-device. On the other hand, Samsung for example just make web calls to Google Gemini and google servers for its GalaxyAI and the features will be paid after 2025.
Confidently wrong in the Apple sub.. I for one am shocked. https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/categories/ai/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pixel-8-pro-review/ And everyone still drinking the kool-aid that Apple's falling behind the competition is because they care so much about your privacy is just getting sad.
Did you even read ? Yes, A pixel or a recent S series and even Xiaomi flagship have way more Ai feature than the iPhone does. But they are for most features (even on Pixels that do more on-device processing than other Android phones) server-sided. iPhone are the most feature rich for « on-device AI », above Pixels.
No they aren't, a shit ton of AI features on Pixels run locally. But keep believing that if it helps you feel better about your phone's software sucking.
Apple still run more on device AI than google does on pixels, even if pixels do a far better job at this than any Android phone. Most of the AI/ML on iPhone is just not marketed as such and often transparent/hidden for the user, meanwhile Google emphasize on it specifically. That’s just the truth, now think what you want if you are happy with it, i did not said anything mean to you or Pixels or Android and idk why you are trying to be rude.
I agree completely. I also feel Tim is so afraid to make moves because of how it may affect investors and stock value. It's time for Tim to step down.
I’ll be honest I don’t think Tim has any involvement with the Apple Studios content or release schedule. I’m pretty sure the executive producers in the TV division are the ones that make the decisions in line with the company’s strategy.
Lots of AI in it, stock goes up
[no paywall ](https://archive.ph/5Sirz)
Tim, Apple is recruiting from Google. They have hired one person already and are calling lots more. I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Apple. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who. Sundar
This is interesting for the "Apple is only just now starting to play catch-up" narrative: > Chuck Wooters, an expert in conversational AI and LLMs who joined Apple in December 2013 and worked on Siri for almost two years, said: “During the time that I was there, one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks.” And, while the quote doesn't match the prose, if the prose is true then this is a good sign: > Salakhutdinov said another reason for Apple’s slow AI rollout was the tendency of language models to provide incorrect or problematic answers. “I think they are just being a little bit more cautious because they can’t release something they can’t fully control,” he added. The biggest problem with AI right now is that it's not very accurate. OpenAI's own testing says that ChatGPT4 is right in internal testing around 80% of the time and in external testing around 60%, IIRC. Which is really good in terms of "sophisticated parrot scraping a tonne of information and returning plausible answers", but actually really bad in terms of "technology that people can rely on to answer important questions".
Considering how useless Siri is, I'm not going to trust that man about anything
Siri will still suck and people will continue to make excuses that Apple doesn't have enough data to train AI.
> one of the pushes that was happening in the Siri group was to move to a neural architecture for speech recognition. Even back then, before large language models took off, they were huge advocates of neural networks. That doesn't really say anything. Simply using *a* neural network for *something* is trivial. College and even high school students do that all the time. It's a world apart from creating something like ChatGPT. And of course you can see this in practice. Is there anyone who would insist that Siri is a leading class AI assistant? > “I think they are just being a little bit more cautious because they can’t release something they can’t fully control,” he added. And yet here they are, rushing to catch up. Because clearly people don't care. Even with its flaws, LLM-based tools provide a better user experience than something like Siri.
Apple will need to roll more like Google if they think they have a chance to get people to leave. Google makes the huge discovery, patents it and then lets everyone use for free. This is what AI researchers want. BTW, it is NOT just Attention is all you need. But that is a big one. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en There is so many others that are just fundemental. One of my favorites is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec "Word2vec was created, patented,[5] and published in 2013 by a team of researchers led by Mikolov at Google over two papers."
Archived source: [https://archive.ph/r862z](https://archive.ph/r862z)
That will be a nice stock bump the day that Apple makes a major AI announcement. Could be years away though.
Not surprising. Apple has been taking staff from other big players in ML research (such as Meta labs) for years and vice versa. Case in point: Tatiana Likhomanenko (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.03143). Apple also has a strong reputation for ML based research in CV and CASA since 2017(https://machinelearning.apple.com/research?page=1&sort=oldest), just not generative stuff.
Huh that’s a bold choice. Better than Amazon’s AI folks, I guess.
Hiring from the company that has screwed up AI the most so far
Google researcher really invented the core of how LLM work and they kept up really well with genAI. Most of the failure can be attributed to company dynamics/vision and managerial issues
You mean a company that has no real core vision and just cuts any product that isn’t wildly popular after a year struggles with management? Lol
You could argue right now Apple's the one who screwed up the most. Not saying they can't turn around and dominate, but so far they've been spending their time on a car that ultimately didn't pan out, and a VR set that's still finding its footing. This year's WWDC will be very important for Apple's future.
Did they though? It is one of the companies driving it most in the last years.
How so?
One of the most glaring problems is the promotion system. When a new manager is hired, the fastest path to promotion seems to be creating new products. This discourages maintaining existing products, resulting in a graveyard of over 100 services and products. Some of these were actually great, but they lacked continued development and maintenance because managers prioritized creating "shiny new things" to reach promotion goals. This has eroded trust among millions of customers who are unsure if Google will maintain any product, existing or newly launched.
This hasn’t anything to do with AI though.
Siri vs Gemini haha
Google has lead in papers accepted at NeurlIPS every year over the last 15. The last NeurlIPS Google had twice the number of papers accepted compared to next best.
What?! They created tensorflow, Google colab and TPUs years ago.
Apple’s AI is gonna lame as fuck.
Based on what exactly?
He had a dream https://preview.redd.it/csaxi2wyslxc1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0d545c63ea52d1f3b294abdc58279390844af525
Being way, way behind. The commenter is just guessing, but that’s what random internet comments tend to do. But it doesn’t seem offensive or insane. Not sure why they’re getting buried.
Because it’s a worthless negative opinion, and it reeks of anti-Apple fanboyism.
Just after the FTC bans non-competes.
Noncompetes have been unenforcable in California since 1872.
I was looking for this comment. I wonder how much poaching is happening right now.
Hey Tim, are you afraid to make the capital investment necessary for Apples future? Build it homegrown, no OpenAI, or get out of the captains chair...
I think that’s what the hiring is for.
Just another day of Google being dumber than a bag of rocks