Apple seems determined to improve the LLM Siri - an artificial intelligence-based assistant
Kyiv • UNN
Apple is working on a complete redesign of LLM Siri to catch up with competitors in the field of AI. The company is changing its approach and investing in a new architecture for a more plausible and informative assistant.
Apple is a bit behind in the development of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLM). The company is announcing endless updates. Currently, a significant part of the effort depends on rebuilding the Siri LLM, UNN reports with reference to The Verge and Bloomberg.
Details
A new major report by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg details the reasons for the imperfection of Apple Intelligence, criticisms from users and experts. At the same time, it is noted that Apple is working on "LLM Siri" - a redesigned, generative version of the company's digital assistant based on artificial intelligence. Apple's previous approach to combining the assistant with the existing Siri did not work.
Context
As Gurman explains, Apple "doesn't like investing in goals without a clear endpoint," and Apple software chief Craig Federighi "was reluctant to make big investments in AI."
As for AI, one unnamed Apple executive told him that "...you don't really know what the product is until you make the investment." This would mean expensive GPUs, which the company was in no hurry to buy, and later there were not enough of them to keep up with the competition.
Apple's head of artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, believed that people don't want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers usually want to be able to turn off tools like ChatGPT.
The old Siri didn't work with the new Siri
Apparently, Apple believed that adding generative AI features to the old Siri was the fastest way to catch up with Apple in the field of AI. But it didn't work.
It's like hitting a mole. You fix one problem and three more appear
A new Bloomberg report mentions that several top Apple executives want to limit Giannandrea's role in the company in anticipation of his possible retirement in the near future.
On the other hand, they say that he continues to attract talented engineers and researchers to Apple's artificial intelligence department. Against this background, the company is trying to change its approach.
Apple Intelligence is looking for its way
In part, this may be a complete overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work with the old Siri.
According to Bloomberg, Apple's artificial intelligence team in Zurich is working on a new architecture that will be "completely built on an LLM-based engine."
The idea is that this will make the assistant "more credible in communication and better at synthesizing information."
Another part of the solution is to use iPhone and differential privacy to improve Apple's synthesized data. That is, comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users' emails, but doing it on the device and sending only synthesized data back to Apple for AI training.
And one of the ways the company is discussing improving Siri is to release a version of the LLM to the Internet to "collect and synthesize data from multiple sources."
In essence, Siri is an AI-powered web search tool similar to Perplexity, one of the companies Apple approached about partnering for AI-powered search in Safari.
Summary
For users of Apple products, the current situation clearly means one thing:
Apple is working hard to make up for lost time.
While there have been challenges along the way, the future looks brighter as specific ambitions and resources are in place to improve the artificial intelligence experience across all products.
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