alt Hacker NewsI genuinely never understood why there was a narrative that Apple is "falling behind" when it comes to AI. They make phones, computers and an ecosystem of services to lock you in. None of this stuff is threatened by AI; with the right integration, it would enhance them!
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The falling behind was shipping a low quality integration.
As someone who buys Apple-everything and has thought about switching to Android just so I can have Gemini as an assistant, my opinion is their selling of phones is threatened by AI.
I know it's fashionable to shit-talk AI and Google, and lord knows I dislike the latter, but Gemini works and is day-to-day useful.
You said you don't understand it while explaining it in the second sentence. They don't have a decent integration, hence the vulnerability. Devices that do have a good to great AI experience will win in the long run imho.
They delayed a new product category because of poor AI performance (the iPad/HomePod fusion device)
And they also got slapped with class action lawsuits for failing to meet promised AI capabilities in products they launched
It’s easy to understand from evidence like this why they are falling behind, even if you believe they will pull ahead later
That's not all, my macbook (48 GM VRAM) can run better local LLMs at a workable speed than my RTX 5090 rig can, plus Apple has MLX and neural engines.
The reason there was such a narrative is because Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both narrative machines with little regard for veracity, and they are also not that smart (at least according to people who successfully beat their system, such as Buffett).
"Warren, if people weren't so often wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." – the late great Charlie Munger.
I do think Siri is particularly behind, but they were behind long before the AI craze. I also understand you cannot simply make Siri “be smart” with an LLM without all kinds of consequences and edge cases to deal with.
It’s not the same, but PMs and VPs at my company think we can vibe code our way out of migrating a 1.6 million line codebase to a newer language / technology. Or that our problems can be solved by acquiring an AI startup, whose front end looks exactly the same as every other AI startup’s front page, and slapping a new CSS file that looks like that startup on top of our existing SPA because their product doesn’t actually do anything. It’s an absurd world out there.