I think many inside and outside Apple hoped that the ways that they scoped their features in the Apple Intelligence announcement would help them pull off something duly reliable and practical, but it's not that surprising that even those ambitions might have bought too deeply into the hype.
It's very well-known that Apple is perfectionistic. I'm not meaning to say that perfectionism is a negative quality or a bad thing, just that it takes a while.
Apple's development process is a marketing pitch-driven hallucination - project management by buzzword and individual career status progression.
It's almost entirely inward-looking. The connection to Rest of World is increasingly mythical and remote.
Some good work gets done in spite of this. But senior management doesn't understand quality - either in the internal sense of having bug-free robust product, or the design sense, where products meet real user needs in a satisfying, creative, and delightful way.
Nice graphic design though. Apple is still the leader there. Processor dev has also been exceptional.
IMO it's time for most of the C-suite to step down and let much younger talent take over and shake things up.
My guy, Apple is autistic as shit. Just look at how in-house everything is. Every time Apple runs into someone doing it wrong, they do it themselves. You know the saying; if you want something done right...
Sure, they're performative as well, but that doesn't change that they are still in the process of doing absolutely everything from scratch because the existing solutions are not good enough for them.
I don't know if you've used the new Apple Silicon MacBooks, but I have a 128GB/8TB one lined up for me to pick up from the Apple Store in about an hour. It's certainly not the best that Apple offers (that would be the new 512GB/16TB Mac Studio) but it practically wipes the floor with every other laptop on the planet. Because Apple made their own chips, because everyone else was doing it wrong.
I can put words into Steve Jobs' mouth as well!
Steve Jobs would reframe LLMs (and other ML-based solution) as creative assistants, insisting that their job is not to get the right answer, but to help you get your creative juice running. To get this to happen, he would have personally convinced engineers that have made cool AI demos to work for Apple to turns these demos into features that form a new Apple creative suite.
If Apple released OpenAI's voice mode, without calling it "AI," referring to a "GPT" or a "model" -- if it was just integrated into the iPhone with a wake word, that absolutely would satisfy Jobs.
The problem with these companies is that they can't visualize how a product works for non-technical customers any more. Because everyone they know lives and breathes Silicon Valley. They see billboards for vector databases on their commute, so they think it's perfectly normal to name a product "GPT."
A product containing a language model should never, ever be called "AI" or "GPT" or even "Intelligence." 10 years ago, the only people who knew what the term "AI" even was were the nerdy readers of pulp scifi novels. I'm half joking but the whole town of silicon valley needs their glasses smashed and to be shoved into a locker.
I guess not... there is a reason Apple is still in business, they are great at deception.
It just seems so silly to believe a blackbox company that was outed by Snowden in PRISM would actually be privacy focused. Or that a company that touts security has been hacked so easily by Pegaus that anyone even buys into the marketing.
But hey, people are religious, so I should be less surprised that people trust others.
Depends what you mean. Building an LLM seems to be easy enough that several companies have built one, and even Twitter was able to magic one out of the ether from pretty much a standing start given the resources.
Getting an LLM to do the right thing for you 99.999% of the time? Has anyone managed that yet? Frontier models still hallucinate the most basic shit, and consistency is very, very difficult.
Are you serious? Did you miss the headlines around their news and text message summary products?
Actually, riddle me this: Do you really think they would just ignore how that went?
Meta, OpenAI, and others out-compensate Apple for ML talent by a factor of 2-4x.
Especially after China has entered the game and DeepSeek disintegrating most of the moat that existed around those companies.
And Apple can simply use what others created instead of burning billions into R&D which might not come up with anything noteworthy.