Not there yet: The frustrations of the pocket AI

Apple rushed to join the crowd on AI and forgot how to “think different,” said John Naughton in The Guardian. The biggest tech giant of all kept investors and consumers waiting for its “own world-beating take on the technology.” But the so-called Apple Intelligence features it launched are “trivial and sometimes irritating.” Like many, I “fell for it and upgraded” to the iPhone 16 last fall. Apple’s AI “immediately started messing with my photo collection, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted, and annoying.” Other AI features like Image Playground, which makes pictures from prompts, may be fun “for a 4-year-old with a short attention span.” And its most useful update, an “enhanced Siri,” never really came to be. Last week, Apple replaced the head of its AI strategy, and it now says the truly enhanced Siri won’t be ready until 2026.

It’s one thing when media organizations gripe about “misconstrued summaries” of articles, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. It’s entirely another thing, however, when regular consumers are angered by Apple’s AI mistakes after being falsely nudged “to buy a smartphone that costs $1,000” and does not deliver as advertised. Chief executive Tim Cook has put himself “in uncharted territory.” His fear of missing out on AI was driven “by the whims of Wall Street.” As AI mania took hold, Cook “gave his company a deadline it wasn’t sure it could meet, and now it hasn’t.” I don’t think his predecessor, Steve Jobs, “would have ever allowed himself to be rushed.”

Making a truly intelligent iPhone conflicts with Apple’s privacy goals, said Andrew Williams in Wired. Apple’s on-iPhone AI system “is tiny by the standards of any chatbots you may have tried.” Beefing up Siri, however, would likely mean “reverting to a server-based, OpenAI-powered interaction—much like those of Microsoft Copilot or Amazon Alexa+.” But it’s not clear how Apple feels about sharing all those queries with another company. Buyers trust Apple because of how it safeguards their data and privacy.

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We seem to have reached a fork in the road for AI-powered gadgets, said David Pierce in The Verge. Not long ago, “start-ups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered devices,” and big companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon were touting how AI would transform the things consumers already love. There was just one problem: “The tech still doesn’t work.” Truly game-changing virtual assistants “are nowhere near close to ready” to deliver much value. Devices like the Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1 were predictable flops. With all we’ve heard about the AI revolution, “it’s hard not to feel bait-and-switched.”