This video was brought to you by Brilliant Hi, welcome
to another episode of Coldfusion.
You've been working hard all day and just arrive home
totally exhausted.
Just when you sink into the couch, you receive a
text from your wife who's still at work.
She's excited about plans for Valentine's Day tonight.
You panic as you completely forgot.
You pick up your iPhone and ask Siri to directly
plan a date night that starts at 6:00 PM and
finishes at 12.
Siri recommends a great lookout spot to watch the sunset.
It books your wife's favorite restaurant and then recommends an
art gallery nearby afterwards.
Of course, as we all know, this scenario is purely
fictional.
There's no way Siri could execute such a series of
tasks automatically.
But what if it could?
With today's generative AI breakthroughs, this scenario is technically possible.
In fact, in the last episode we saw how a
little orange device called the Rabbit R1 set out to
do just that.
The idea goes, ask the Rabbit what you want and
it will interface with your apps to complete the task
on your behalf.
Essentially, it's the voice first AI powered device.
As I highlighted in the second part of that episode,
there's a fatal flaw with the Rabbit.
All of this functionality could just be integrated into a
phone, although nothing like the Rabbit's functionality exists yet in
a smartphone.
It'll be coming soon enough.
We've seen Google integrate AI into their Pixel phones, and
Samsung do the same with the introduction of the Galaxy
S24.
So the question has to be asked, where is Apple
in all of this?
Although Siri is next to useless today, as you might
have guessed, Apple is secretly cooking something up in the
background.
In this episode, we'll take a look at what they've
been up to, and I'll explain exactly why Siri sucks.
There's actually an internal staff revolt in the Siri department,
so it's a juicier story than you think.
You are watching tool Fusion TV Microsoft and Google have
been shouting the loudest about AI, but Apple has been
quiet.
The California company barely mentioned AI in any of their
product launches, but behind the scenes, they've actually bought the
most AI companies of all.
Since 2017, Apple has bought 21 AI startups, while Microsoft
has bought 12, Meta 11, and Google slash Alphabet just
8.
Apple's been spending about $1 billion in AI ventures while
remaining silent.
From self driving technology to voice design, music generation, and
image recognition, these are just some of the specialties of
these AI companies that Apple's been purchasing.
There may even be more behind the scenes.
This silence is typical behaviour from Apple.
They move last, but move decisively.
They didn't invent the computer mouse, graphical interface, smartphone, tablet,
or smartwatch, but they revolutionized all of these categories by
doing it better than was done before.
So what do we know about Apple's AI efforts?
In August of 2023, Tim Cook revealed that Apple had
been researching generative AI for years.
On a call with investors, he said, quote, we tend
to announce things as they come to market and that's
our MO and I'd like to stick to that.
End Quote.
While everyone was losing their minds over ChatGPT, Apple had
been tinkering with similar concepts way before it's release.
Since 2020, the company assembled a foundational models team.
The goal was to develop conversational AI similar to that
of ChatGPT, but with a focus on on device machine
learning and privacy.
The team consists of 16 people, including former Google engineers,
and the head of the team, John Janandrea, was previously
head of machine intelligence research and search at Google.
Bloomberg reported in mid 2023 that Apple has created a
large language model called Ajax GPT.
It's similar to ChatGPT or Google's Lambda, but is said
to outperform GPT 3.5.
There's even chatter about Apple working on an AI powered
chat bot dubbed Apple GPT that's based on Ajax.
Although there's a rumoured release date of mid 2024 right
now, it's still tightly controlled within the company.
Apple has also quietly released frameworks and model libraries designed
to run on its chipsets and may even bring a
generative AI apps to Macbooks.
According to the Information, multiple teams are working on various
AI projects within Apple.
So it's quite evident that there's been a lot of
activity from Apple on AI behind the scenes.
So what is going to be the best use of
it?
Well, Siri.
Siri itself was an Apple acquisition back in 2010.
Just one year later, the system was incorporated into the
iPhone, and it's been frustrating users ever since.
It's ironic because back then, Apple was way ahead of
the pack when it came to voice assistance.
But now?
Well, I don't need to say much more.
We'll talk about how Apple aims to improve Siri.
But first, what is the deal with Siri?
Why does it leave so much to be desired?
In April 2023, a bombshell report came to light that
explained everything you see.
Over the past five years or so, the Siri team
within Apple has devolved into a dumpster fire.
Employees and management would bitterly argue about the direction of
the assistant, and in the end, no meaningful progress was
made.
Here's a summary of all the problems within the Siri
team.
Siri engineers weren't given tools to see how many users
were using Siri and how often they were using it.
Engineers would beg for more data to improve Siri, but
leadership wouldn't hear any of it.
Apple executives wanted to keep future developments of Siri on
device.
Having no network connection to a massive AI model run
on a server put Apple's efforts at a disadvantage.
Apple executives dismissed back and forth responses to Siri because
it would be too difficult to control.
Tim Cook himself as well as other senior executives refused
to have Siri responses AI generated.
Instead they opted for a team of 20 writers to
come up with canned pre written responses.
And I guess that explains a lot.
Apples obsession with strict control over the user experience is
at direct odds with the freedoms of generative AI responses.
In 2019, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected a feature where
users could report a concern or issue with a Siri
answer.
The machine learning engineers were essentially working blind and couldn't
improve the system.
So what was the reasoning for this decision?
Upper management wanted Siri to appear quote all knowing.
Eventually, frustrations began building and employees began to leave Apple
because they were too slow to make decisions about AI
and were just scared of making mistakes.
Tim Cook personally pleaded for disgruntled engineers to stay at
the company, but they would eventually leave to work on
large language models at Google.
There was even an attempt to rebuild Siri from the
ground up with a project called Blackbird.
The project aimed to make Siri faster, lighter, and more
modular.
However, it was axed by two senior leaders on the
Siri team, who championed their own project, Siri X.
This only focused on moving Siri's processing to on device,
and the rest of the Blackbird project was abandoned.
And just when he thought things couldn't get any worse,
the group working on Apple's mixed reality headset, the Vision
Pro, were reportedly so unimpressed with Siri's capabilities that they
considered creating their own voice system.
And that's how you know it's bad.
So all of these issues explain why Siri isn't doing
too hot, and it's not for a lack of trying.
There was just too much friction within the team.
And to add insult to injury, it seems that Siri
is only getting more dull.
One of its most common phrases today is sorry, I
don't understand.
Or here are some results I found on the web.
So what is the future of Siri then?
Let's move on to how Apple can turn things around.
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Now back to the episode.
According to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter, the upcoming iOS
18 might introduce significant updates to the iPhone.
According to Gurman, Apple's generative AI technology could significantly improve
Siri.
But that's not all.
As per a report by The Information, Apple plans to
use large language models to make Siri smarter.
So ideally, Siri should be able to perform complex task
from a simple voice command.
If this becomes a reality, would be a significant leap
forward for Siri.
But it also means that the Rabbit R1's days are
numbered even sooner than I first predicted.
Even the AI companies purchased by Apple on their shopping
spree indicate a big Siri push.
So far, we know that Apple bought Inductive to improve
Siri's data, Voices to help Siri understand natural language, and
pull String to make Siri features easier to implement for
iOS developers.
After the conflicts within the Siri team, these advancements could
be a welcome change for Apple and Siri users worldwide.
Speaking of which, one incredible advantage that Apple has over
its competitors is that they already have devices in the
hands of over a billion users.
With that in mind, Apple can finally leverage on device
or edge AI.
Unlike cloud computing for large language models, edge AI runs
on the device, eliminating the need for cloud servers or
an Internet connection.
This can offer faster, more secure and more reliable performance
for AI computing.
Apple has splashed $200 million to acquire X nor AI.
This was to improve it's on device processing capabilities.
As we know, Apple now has ARM based chips with
custom neural processing units built for their laptops, watches, phones
and tablets.
Being in complete control of both hardware and software components
gives a tighter integration and efficiency than the competition.
It's a great position for Apple to be in for
on device AI systems.
This aligns with the visionary and pioneer in computer science,
Alan Kay's philosophy.
He once said, quote, people who are serious about software
should make their own hardware.
Now on device large language models have been done before,
but they perform sluggishly and aren't ready for the prime
time.
Though Apple researchers may have cracked the code, they've managed
to squeeze a large language model into a MacBook.
But not only this, it runs 4 to 25 times
faster than standard models, depending on if it's GPU or
CPU focused.
The Apple researchers released a paper on it.
They managed to do this by using a few clever
techniques, including storing the model in the device's flash memory
instead of RAM.
The Apple researchers also claim that they can run models
that are two times larger than the computer's physical memory.
It sounds impossible, but I'll leave a link to the
paper below so you can see how they did it.
Siri has been stagnant on function wise for many years
and this could be a major breakthrough that provide much
better iOS or across Apple device user experience.
Our view is that if you have a tool like
open AI, that's hardly a point of differentiation in a
couple of years everyone will have a its own large
language model similar to check BT.
So Apple's advantage is very unique comparing to other model
builders.
They have devices in the consumer's hands, billion plus consumers,
and once they have features embedded in iOS, for example,
you have that feature pushed out to billions of devices
and you know well over hundreds of millions of users
overnight.
And that is a market access advantage no one else
has.
Going behind the scenes, it's clear that Apple is not
sleeping, but this is the furthest behind I've seen them
in living memory.
AI does move fast, so it'll be interesting to see
how they deal with that, along with the internal conflicts
within their Siri department.
So what do you think?
Is Apple too late or do you think they'll surprise
everyone with a polished take on AI?
Could their version of AI be smarter and faster?
Let me know what you think in the comments section
below.
Anyway, that's about it from me.
If you want to see anything on science, technology, or
business, feel free to subscribe to Coldfusion.
My name is Dagogo and you've been watching Coldfusion and
I'll catch you again soon for the next episode.
Cheers guys, have a good one.
It's me thinking.