I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
I am probably suffering confirmation bias. But that said, this LLM smartness continues to be impressively shit. There's a level of "yea that's cool" but it's outweighed by "that'd be wrong, and suggests you understand nothing about me or my data"
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
> Apple’s AI tools were built with responsible AI principles to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and systemic biases.
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
I want to sympathize, but also isn't that what you sign up for when you use AI products? Or is OP saying that iPhones have AI features you don't opt into? (I don't have an iPhone)
AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?
I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".
> If you still have problems with it, turn it off... Have I done that? No, of course not. He may be messy and lack common sense, but that’s no reason for me to kill my husband!
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.
I hate this specific journalist because on many occasions she gets things wrong. The author also frequently engages in needlessly gendered debates, including this one. The only reason she's in the industry in the first place is because she's well connected. Another thing is that she has spread so much AI doomerism and yet this article is clearly assisted by AI. I also wish the author wouldn't insert pro Israel and pro Netanyahu statements randomly in her articles.
A notification for you, Apple: There is no husband
(techthings.cmail20.com)139 points by zdw 18 January 2025 | 167 comments
Comments
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
It's a little (ok a lot) like targeted ads. I'll believe it's targeted when it tries to sell me ancillary, related goods for e.g. that fridge freezer I bought, not show me ads for fridge freezer I now don't need.
This is either a straight up lie or an extreme stretching of the truth.
This is from the Danish models but literally this is what it puts as autocomplete for “woman are …”
> woman we not worth as much as men
And it’s not a one off. It’s been going around social media that autocomplete for a long range of other initial phrases are just as stereotypically chauvinistic or racist. It’s pretty clear that no effort was taken at all to sanitize the models.
And no, it’s not using your chat history, though it used to do this. Which just makes things worse as there things are being spread because everyone who draws attention to it on things like Facebook are immediately accused of being a racists or chauvinist.
AI is not perfect (and I personally think it's all BS) but why would you use AI features and then complain that you get hallucinations? The state of the art isn't error-proof, petitioning Apple to do better than state-of-the-art seems kind of meaningless?
I know this is probably a joke but it reminds me of the moral questions that appear in the Apple TV+ show Severance. The idea of turning off a feature being compared to "killing" someone reminds me of the innie/outtie moral quandaries.