FileMakerFeller

bloggerblog said:

I don't think Trump knows how to put 'America First', he's creating more enemies than friends.

American share markets first, then catastrophe on the world markets. "I'll be fine," thinks Trump. "My holdings are in real estate."

Marvin said:

Alex_V said:

Errors, misinformation, hallucinations, dubious results,, ill-advised stuff, you name it. So Apple pressed ‘pause.’ Because 50% reliable is not good enough if you’re Apple. 

50% reliable is fine for companies like ChatGPT, or any one of the dozens of other AI entrants. Never mind that their entire business model rests on plagiarising and circumventing copyright of the original creatives around the world. 

That's what pundits like Gruber are missing. Other products that Apple has made in the past had a deterministic outcome whether it was software or hardware. It doesn't matter how someone uses an iPhone or an OS, it will behave mostly as intended. AI, especially generative AI, is non-deterministic and unpredictable because the amount of inputs and outputs are so many that it can't be fully tested.

People like to rewrite history about Apple delivering timely products. There were promises about the G5 chip for years that never panned out, reaching certain clock speeds and making it into laptops. This was promised for multiple years by Steve Jobs and this was a deterministic product.

Attempting to sugar-coat Apple's history is just an excuse to complain about Apple. Apple's products reach over 1.5 billion people overnight, they have to work much harder to make sure they perform as expected.

As a practical matter, the functioning of personal computers has been non-deterministic for decades. Once the number of software packages grew into the hundreds there was no way a single entity could reliably test each and every possible combination for bugs before an upgrade was released and the whole process had to start again. The community of computer users was forced to accept that nothing was guaranteed, and that in the case of conflicts it was up to the individual user to convince the makers of the software (OS or otherwise) to fix the problem.

So I don't buy the argument that Apple should be given a pass for this situation. They have historically waited until they were confident they could deliver something world-shaking; this time they did not and so they have to eat the crow... unless or until, as with earlier mis-steps, they manage to deliver a new thing that is so good that people forgive/forget the bad stuff.

And Gruber isn't looking at Apple through rose-coloured glasses: he knows the history of the company more than most and has always tried to show the truth of any given matter. Sometimes this means he supports Apple when the media-bashing is in full swing, at other times he supports the criticism. Apple has earned its reputation as a company that, by and large, does the right thing and rarely does anything egregiously wrong. The approach they took with this AI debacle, however, has seriously damaged that reputation and John is kicking himself for ignoring the warning signs. He's not blaming Apple for failing to deliver, or for needing all the stars to align in order to ship on time(-ish) - certain people within the company KNEW they couldn't deliver in the expected timeframe, and they were overruled. Maybe it's just hubris, maybe there was fear about the "Apple is behind in AI" story, ... we'll never know. What we DO know is that Apple over-promised and has spectacularly under-delivered. Nobody's saying the features they promoted would have been easy to implement, but we have trusted the company's judgement in the past because of how many times Apple HAS fulfilled its promises. Now that trust is shaken.



Also, given the challenges AI as a technological approach faces, it's concerning that Apple has chosen to follow the industry rather than continuing to forge its own path. There are so many attack vectors available to a sophisticated actor that it's doubtful user privacy can be guarded once even minimally useful features are implemented. And if you don't have the features everyone else has, you're "behind"... even if those features open you up to having every scrap of data silently exfiltrated from your device and invisible monitoring tools installed to probe for any exploitable weakness in your life.

The current AI push is a massive bubble built on unbelievable hype and gullibility. Apple doesn't need to take the risk and I'm disappointed that they haven't come out more strongly in opposition to the nonsense being peddled by the get-rich-quick crowd.