TL;DW: Apple Intelligence is Apple training their models locally on your personal Apple product data (aka anything you do on an iPhone, Mac, iPad or your Apple ID) using their Apple Silicon chips as well as building a Apple Siri voice assistant client for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The features seem gatekept to newer Apple products and they claim it’s opt-in.
It looks like “AI” is here to stay as capitalists have placed it in most supply chains and industries. Goes without saying, but don’t buy Apple, you’re just buying yourself a one-way trip to a digital jail where the walls are made out of “seamless apple ecosystem” and “shiny metal devices that are cold to the touch.”
Especially don’t buy anything from the Apple Store because that’s trashy Global North treat brain behavior.
Is apple just coasting on former glory? From what I’ve seen we are back to the days of the early 2000’s where apple is just releasing the same shit as the rest of the industry only a year later and somehow worse. But I’m not a huge tech guy.
Many people are saying this. You need a fuckin’ recognition guide to tell the most recent iPhone releases apart and I can’t think of the last time anyone seriously claimed apple had a killer software feature.
Their chips are pretty good when it comes to power and efficiency, so that and their closed ecosystem that allows them to fine tune everything are their main advantages on a technical level. Other than that, they’re being held up by marketing and social clout, which works better in some markets than others.
Apple are doing a lot better than other FAANG companies in my opinion as of late but it is mostly because of the Silicon chips in their newer hardware. It is one of the rare actual innovations in consumer computing in recent times and with Apple’s monopoly they have forced the software ecosystem to adapt to the ARM architecture. The shit that Google and Microsoft have put out in comparison constitute crimes against humanity with how shit and hollow they have been.
From an article I read recently:
I think AI tech in general has uses as the excerpt suggests but now Apple is betting more heavily on AI. From what I have read, it is specifically LLMs they are targeting. The newer hardware will able to run smaller models on device. They are also setting up their own datacentres that are run on Apple hardware. So the strategy is that if you are a user, you can run lighter AI workloads on the device and heavier workloads on Apple’s cloud infrastructure that they have dubbed to be “private”. In doing this, they are derisking from prominent AI companies like "Open"AI and also against Nvidia (since they use their own hardware). So it is a really big commitment. I’m not sure how it will pan out. I hope it fails though.
Interesting. So they’re really good at chips, which makes a lot of sense given their trajectory. Most of this stuff is nerd shit though that I don’t think you would care about unless you are a heavy user of computing or just really into tech. For your average smooth brain like me it becomes “pay 3x for the ability to have your phone behave like we are warehousing pictures of your kids even though we aren’t warehousing pictures of your kids” which is not a super compelling value proposition
I’m really sorry if this is a stupid question, but
My two-year-old Motorola does all this, and I’m pretty sure my last one did as well.
Are the iphones just doing it that much better than my shitty android phone?
No idea tbh. OCR is not big deal but the author there is focusing on the translation aspect of the experience. If your Motorola phone is an Android, it is highly likely that the translation is done on a server somewhere. Your phone sends the text it wants to translate to a server and the server, being a more powerful computer than your phone, sends back to your phone the translated text. The difference with Apple’s newer stuff is that the translation is done on the phone/macbook/ipad itself.
Oh so everything happens locally? Does it even require an internet connection?!? That’s super cool
I just tested this on a 14 in airplane mode. Yes ocr translation works offline without the ai software (this phone won’t be supported by the package).
You gotta download the language packs to be able to translate though.
Thank you for checking! That’s really neat, I’m legitimately jealous.
It’s better at “practical” stuff than random “donde esta la biblioteka” snippets out of a textbook, there’s only a bout 20 languages you can use offline and it does legit work better when you let it connect up, but yeah, it’s cool.
It should work without internet. The models and software needed to use those models are part of the OS itself. But with tech companies you never know. Apple is marketing their AI features as more “private” than what the market has to offer right now so it would be stupid if they make you require an internet connection for it.
Thank you for helping me understand! That is a really cool feature.
Sure they used their trillions in net value to engineer an ARM chip to get one up on the x86 tyrants and their industry connections to make it all work, but at the end of the day, they have the audacity to sell you a shiny heap of metal whose RAM and SSD are both soldered in and whose right to repair stance would be better stated as a huge middle finger right to your face.
People buy Apple because in the Global North, people are conditioned to see technology as a status tool rather than something that solves problems for you and that you can control. It is an apathy built into the education system by the ruling class to slowly convince people that it’s alright not to own anything and to relinquish more and more of their freedoms to the capitalists charging thousands of dollars for machines that they rigged to blow in 5 years. Once you’re outside of the imperial core, Android dominates because of economic necessity (unless you’re some Shanghai liberal who sees western products as a status symbol or rich). You buy Apple because you are conditioned to or born into it.
Apple is always the good cop to Microsoft’s bad cop. They’re still jailing you in the end.
Hmm, how is Apple able to identify all my family members? I don’t know!
, sorry I just found that part funny.
Yeah I didn’t mean to suggest that Apple is a force for good even in any convoluted way. Just that the computing capbility of the new hardware is improved while other tech companies are doing the equivalent of eating glue.