I am not sure what to think about this. Does this seem credible?
Does what seem credible? The article’s headline or or Apple’s paper?
Better article that links to their paper:
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Well, you could ask ChatGPT! 
Or you could read the paper:
In the abstract of the paper the authors make the claim:
“We also bench- mark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance com- parable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it.”
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So it’s a research paper. Let me know when this makes it into a product…
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My idiot’s take on it is that this is just Apple letting everyone know they working on AI.
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My take on it is that as at least one of the pieces linked too is date 1 April I am not going to hold my breath for this “product” to appear in some future version of an Apple operating system/product.
I’m wondering how this UI labeling will be aided by their accessibility work, especially in VoiceOver, and possibly contribute back to accessibility. To be clear, I’m just talking about complete labels for the interface. VoiceOver navigation should be deterministic, netiher trying to incorporate context outside the current view nor transforming the content.
I think a lot of this research will pop up as features announced at WWDC in June. AI is different in a lot of ways Apple normally works. Publishing research is far more common in this area, which is why we’re seeing these papers before features are announced.
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Apple’s working on a lot of things. How about a robot that does dishes.
I already have one; it is called a dishwasher. 
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Does it not wash if the dishes were already washed. To get that feature Apple will charge 11999 for their AI Enabled Dishwasher.
Hey Siri can you wash the dishes.
Sorry the dishes were not taken out so they are clean.
Price: USD 11999.00
Yes my Dishwasher has a name and he’s 10 years old.
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My kids getting big enough to help with dishes and laundry was a glorious moment.
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It’s even better when they are old enough to mow the yard. But, in my case, I had all daughters so that was not an option. 
My 8th grade daughter mows! I didn’t let her until we switched to an electric mower.
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Yes, electric has been great for outsourcing that chore. I’d estimate it lets a kid safely start mowing 20lbs lighter.
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Electric mowers were not a good option for me at the time. Now, I have it even better—I hire a yard service. 
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I am skeptical because if this research is practical why is Siri not better than it is NOW. Why have there not been more incremental improvements.
Siri has gotten better over time, but very slowly. It is sad in that it started out in the lead and then Apple seemingly let it drift along. There was no evident “pedal to the metal”.
If you have a rickety train for ten years, it seems peculiar to be building a high-speed monorail showing advanced engineering skills and doing so little with your existing infrastructure.
Meanwhile we have the parallel rumor that they are negotiating with Google for their AI offering.
Both things could be true at the same time. AI is not one thing. Apple’s AI could be focused on one set of use cases, while it still making sense to use Google’s AI for other purposes.
While Apple has not focused on LLMs or text-to-image generation, they have given us a few neat tools. Automatic tagging of known faces in Photos, the ability to search for images using terms that has been automatically tagged, auto-OCR’ing of text in images, the whole amazing “Photonic Engine” that is simply magic…
At least I have had much more use of features like this in my daily life than being able to talk to Siri or have her present me with LLM-generated disinformation.
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Yes, exactly. This is a technique to structure on-screen information for consumption by an LLM. It wouldn’t help current Siri at all. Siri is going to be replaced by a mixture of LLMs, CNNs and expert systems (including the current knowledge base!) and then something like this technique will be used.
If the Google deal pans out it’ll be for off-device processing, kind of like how Apple pays cloud providers for compute and storage to back their services. Apple won’t want to regress on the amount of on-device computation they’re doing for Siri.
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