Perplexity can integrate with the iPhone and perform various tasks. Claude can work directly on your Mac via MCP, and Gemini’s growing integration with Google’s suite of products, all make me feel that Siri has nearly lost its presence in the AI space. I recognize that the audience here differs from the average user, but I’m interested in hearing others’ opinions. To me, Google appears to be the biggest threat due to its software and hardware strategy.
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No, it’s not too late for Siri. Apple isn’t competing with Google, Microsoft, and other leaders in AI. Apple is only competing with other consumer tech companies.
Right now it appears their Private Cloud Compute datacenter is being built to handle requests that cannot be run on-device. They may have bigger plans but, IMO, if they partnered with OpenAI, or Google, etc. to replace Siri with something that worked no one would care.
And they would continue to sell a ton of iPhones every year which is their top priority.
What is MCP? interested as I love perplexity.
@NiKoBeaR - Model Context Protocol (MCP) If you’re curious to how this works are there a number of videos on YouTube with demos. I’m personally using it with Claude Desktop to create, modify, and edit files in my Obsidian vault.
I would never want to be constantly using a LLM in the cloud. Having thousands of computers running in a cluster is about as damaging to the environment as you can get. Local LLMs and only selective use of cloud is the way forward, so I see Apple is on the right track. Just because you can use them for everything doesn’t mean you should.
As an environmental campaigner, I couldn’t live with myself using these products all the time. If everyone does this, our kids won’t have a future.
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Oversimplifying, it is a programmatic interface that allows application software to directly interface with AI engines and for AI engines to talk to other AI engines.
It’s the basis for “agentic AI” where AI tasks can perform requests (initiated by a person typing or talking to AI, or software apps creating task requests) and then executing them.
Thing of things like “Check my calendar and for all meetings that are not local, find and make hotel and airline reservations for me that match my travel profile, desired amenities, and preferences”.
An AI agent will have to search local/personal data, and then interact with multiple other systems (AI and non-AI) to perform the desired task(s).
Right now, MCP is a proposed standard that has not gotten industry wide acceptance yet.
I have not looked into the technical details, but definitely having one API standard is a good thing.
But standards also hold back innovation - how much of the problems we have with email is because of the old IMAP (and older POP) standards versus the innovation that Gmail and other email management systems have pioneered by using proprietary email technology?
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