I guess summarizing notifications is mildly useful. Other than that, it seems like they’re just embracing the current zeitgeist (or really, meme). I can’t believe the whole industry has become so head-over-heels enamored with LLMs. What a waste of talent, time and energy for so many people.
Is this something I can dodge entirely by never buying a newer iPhone then?
install Arch Linux on your phone now
They want AI because apple tells them they do.
They also don’t want AI because their experiences say the opposite.
This headline should be “most computer users see little or no value in LLM and other technologies that are being branded as “AI” and never will”
Outside of Gemini, Google has done a decent job at packaging AI features that have a tangible benefit to users. However, they seem to be more purpose built instead of LLM’s.
I find Gemini “somewhat useful”, on a smartphone. It’s not a game changer, but it can often answer the thing I want even when it misheard it, much better than Google Assistant.
A single command made me switch back to Google Assistant.
Every now and then, I’ll leave the TV on while I fall asleep and for a few years now, I’ve just asked GA to turn off the specific tv in 2 hours. Whenever I tried to get Gemini to do the same, it would just turn off my tv immediately, no matter how I phrased the prompt.
Depending on when you tried that, it might’ve been fixed already.
I’m using GA on a Nest Mini, and Gemini on a smartphone. It started being unable to do pretty much anything; right now (Dec 2024) it can do all I ask it for, but still claims to be unable to fully replace GA.
Also have Samsung’s Bixby, which has better integration with phone apps, and returning search results, but fails more than Gemini at summarizing them, or answering general questions… so yeah, YMMV.
Same is true of many other AI assistants. They’re really neat as a technical exercise, or for a bit of fun for 10-20 minutes. But when it comes to folding them into workflows, the utility is harder to grasp.
Couple that with the extreme energy requirements of these systems, the worries about where the training data comes from, plus the fact that it feels like every single corporation is just flailing around “AI” because they see dollar signs… I’m pretty over it.
Training GPT-3 (a model from 3 years ago) from scratch requires as much energy as is spent to raise two cows for meat.
So far Apple Intelligence can help with writing, making pictures/emojis, and summarizing notifications, websites, emails, Messages, etc. I just don’t see a need for AI to do any of those tasks though. The picture one maybe
Why would you need to summarize notifications? Usually each notification is just a short sentence, so there’s hardly anything you can do to shorten them further. Summarizing websites is far more useful though.
It’s the same for Samsung’s AI stuff, the only really useful one is it’s smart selecting features - cropping photos, taking out specific images for stickers/collaging.
Everything else though is just the creativity I want to do being done for me.
Thankfully both it and Siri can be completely disabled or just not even installed in the former’s case.
We tried the iPhone 16 recently, upgrading from a 14. Apple’s AI seemed basically useless. That combined with the dynamic island not respecting reduced motion settings lead us to return the phone instead and keep the 14. The old phone worked fine, but we wanted to try to get ahead of the incoming administration just in case.
Maybe the 17 will be better?
I found that Siri is a little more useful for answering questions with ChatGPT, but outside of that I don’t think I’ve come across another situation where I’ve needed Apple Intelligence.
