The Siri team has spent weeks testing large language models, hoping to imbue its struggling virtual assistant with ChatGPT-like AI intelligence.
- What’s happening? Following the advent of ChatGPT, Apple reportedly encouraged its Siri team to explore generative AI concepts to improve the virtual assistant.
- Why care? Siri is unable to pay off its huge technical debt, making even the most basic changes difficult to implement. A new approach is required.
- What to do? Download the MacGPT app to find out why Siri is dumb as a rock.
The Siri team is exploring generative AI like ChatGPT.
Apple’s annual Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit briefed employees on how the company is handling large language models and other AI developments.
The New York Times reports that many engineers, including members of the Siri team, “test language-generating concepts every week.”
The article doesn’t go into details, so it’s not clear if Apple could have tasked the Siri team to implement generative AI into the virtual assistant, or if the team is just looking into adding ChatGPT-like capabilities to Siri.
Siri was a short-lived App Store app based on a DARPA-funded SRI International Center for Artificial Intelligence spin-off project that Apple acquired in 2010.
The report explains how Siri has squandered its lead since its introduction on the iPhone 4s in 2011. To put it mildly, Siri’s codebase wasn’t perfect, and the team soon realized that every minor change to the AI would take weeks of work.
Hey Siri, what went wrong?
Basically, Siri ran into technological hurdles, according to former Apple engineer John Burke, who worked on the digital assistant. According to him, his “clunky code”required “weeks to update”only the core features. The assistant also suffered from a “clunky design”that made it time-consuming to add new features.
The Siri database contains a gigantic list of words, including music artists and places like restaurants, in almost two dozen languages. So seemingly simple updates, such as adding new phrases to the data set, would require a rebuild of the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr Berkey said. Adding more advanced features, such as new search tools, could take almost a year.
Reading about this, it’s no surprise that Apple lost its early lead in the AI race, accumulating technical debt that the Siri team couldn’t pay off.
Instead of rewriting the Siri codebase from scratch after acquiring the app, Apple decided it was more important to release the feature, so now we have a virtual assistant that is “stupid as a rock.”
Microsoft boss calls digital assistants stupid
Not my words – Microsoft boss Satya Nadella, in a recent interview with The Financial Times, called a virtual assistant like Apple’s Siri “stupid as a rock.”
Of course, Nadella would have turned down virtual assistants because his company has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT. The investment allowed the Windows maker to combine OpenAI ChatGPT technology and the Prometheus language model to bring AI intelligence to its Skype, Edge and Bing applications.
At the same time, Google announced that Google Workspace users will soon be able to use Bard, their ChatGPT-like bot, to generate text such as sales emails. Microsoft will provide similar capabilities to Word and other Office applications.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has launched GPT-4, its next-generation artificial intelligence engine, and announced partnerships with apps Duolingo and Be My Eyes.