Apple Barely Talked About AI at Its Big Iphone 17 Event

I have a similar philosophy about home automation. Every few years I geek out and set up a bunch of crap and spend a bunch of money and waste a lot of time, and then it tends to fall apart fairly quickly and I repent of everything...

...except for the motion-activated lighting in our foyer and laundry room. $15, 15 minutes to install, no additional charges, no external services, no security issues, and just works year after year with 100% reliability.

And I want it turned the fuck off, quietly not doing anything with my personal shit.

I want to reach for my tools when I want to use them.

Actually if Siri ever worked when I really need it, they could finally catch up with their promises made in 2011.

Indeed, a good AI Snitch runs in background on your phone. The era of intelligent spyware.

I think it is just generally the correct approach. It was not that long ago that ML (outside of research) was often talked about but it being ML was not the focus. The focus was on the actual benefits and what it did.

Of course this is going to be spun and turned into a negative, but I basically want ML to be invisible again. The benefits being clear, but the underlying tech no longer mattering.

I think it's more because they're way behind on AI and they literally have nothing to actually tell us.

> That's because people don't trust AI that much

ChatGPT being the number one app is a weird way for people to express they don't trust AI: https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone

Actually people trust AI too much!

They talk about "Apple Intelligence models" running on the phone. They dropped that name for their AI stuff in a few other spots, too.

If Apple had an insanely great AI feature that truly differentiated itself from their competition, we all know they'd take a lot of time focusing on how their hardware enabled or enhanced that functionality.

The expectation is that Apple will eventually launch a revolutionary new product, service or feature based around AI. This is the company that envisioned the Knowledge Navigator in the 80s after all. The story is simply that it hasn't happened yet. That doesn't make it a non-story, simply an obvious one.

> This was a hardware event.

So was last year’s, technically, but that didn’t stop apple from making it all about AI.

I'd disagree: his obsession was with watching everyone fail to create the products of the future, learning from their mistakes, and only then committing to a product strategy (e.g: iPod, iPhone, iPad).

How did they get burned with AVP?

I agree completely, it's really unfortunate how AI on apple devices has been going. The message summarization is borderline useless and widely mocked, meanwhile their giant billboard ads for it are largely stupid and uncompelling. Let me choose to give it access to my data if I want to do really useful stuff with on device processing. They've been leaning into the privacy thing, do the stuff that would be creepy if it left my device, generate push notification reminders for stuff I forgot to put in the calendar, or track my location and tell me I'm going to the wrong airport. Suggest birthday gifts for my friends and family, idk.

Edit: And add strong controls to limit what it can and cannot access, especially for the creepy stuff.

> In the same way a browser can give the AI the accessibility DOM, Apple could give AIs an easier representation to read and manipulate.

Apps already have such an accessibility tree; it's used for VoiceOver and you can use it to write UI unit tests. (If you haven't tested your own app with VoiceOver, you should.)

> iPhones already have specialized hardware for AI acceleration.

This really is the problem. Why do I spend hundreds of dollars more for specialized hardware that’s better than last years specialized hardware if all the AI features are going to be an API call to chatGPT? I am pretty sure I don’t need all of that hardware to watch YouTube videos or scroll Instagram/web, which is what 95% of the users do.

I think on-device AI will show up more front and center but in a few more years.

A big issue to solve is battery life. Right now there's already a lot that goes on at night while the user sleeps with their phone plugged in. This helps to preserve battery life because you can run intensive tasks while hooked up to a power source.

If apps are doing a lot of AI stuff in the course of regular interaction, that could drain the battery fairly quickly.

Amazingly, I think the memory footprint of the phones will also need to get quite a bit larger to really support the big uses cases and workflows. (I do feel somewhat crazy that it is already possible to purchase an iPhone with 1TB of storage and 8GB of RAM).

> Apple needs on-device AI to do chores for me with the apps I have installed

Nevermind that—iOS just needs to reliably be able to play the song I’m telling it to without complaining “sorry, something went wrong with the connection…”

Apple is generally anti market hype. It is a smart PR move to avoid mentioning AI after the Apple Intelligence fiasco, their researchers leaving, and the bubble sentiment at the moment.

They've being doing some research on this: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/ferretui-mobile

This is all possible, but an absolutely terrible idea from a security point of view, while prompt injection attacks are still a thing, and there's little evidence they will stop being a thing soon.