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Posted by retskrad 10/25/2024

Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life(www.cnet.com)
324 points | 331 comments
brianshaler 10/25/2024|
I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs
dageshi 10/25/2024||
I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.
ktosobcy 10/25/2024|||
Because the execution is usually borked... I was eyeig ZenFone 9 (or something around that) and what? It was reported that it had problem with overheating and build quality.

What's more, I would love something akin to my current Galaxy a52s 5G with a display around 5.2-5.5" (I first had LG G2, then OnePlus3 which was already a bit bulky and now a52 as compromise; https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5543&idPhone2...)...

I do have iPhone SE (2022) and it's the size of LG G2 and I find quite handy. Something of that size but with slightly bigger screen (better screen-to-body ratio). Specs doesn't have super-hiper-premium… and the price should be sane (usually compact phones are like 20-40% higher, sic)

williamdclt 10/25/2024||
iphone minis weren't particularly borked, and they didn't sell well enough, people apparently preferred the larger iphones (to my own dismay)
joshyeager 10/25/2024|||
In my case, they took so long to announce the iPhone 12 Mini that I gave up waiting and bought an SE even though it was slower than I wanted and had a poor camera. Four months later they announced the Mini, but I wasn't willing to replace a four-month-old phone. Then they discontinued the Mini line after 13.

When I was ready to buy a new phone, there were no iPhone Mini models for sale. It took more than a year, but I finally found an iPhone 13 Mini in stock on the Apple Refurbished store. Now I'm hoping to keep this phone alive until they finally release another small iPhone.

portpecos 10/25/2024||
I agree, I think the iPhone mini sales were deeply affected by the iPhone SE. I came back a few months ago looking for an iPhone mini and didn't see any either.
illiac786 10/26/2024||||
I think apple didn’t wait long enough.

In my friends circle, iPhone Minis are the most popular smartphone model, it’s even peculiar how pronounced it is.

But they all bought iPhone Minis 2 or 3 years after they came out.

I’d like to see iPhone sales numbers per generation, over multiple years. Like „how did iPhone 12 models (minis, normal, pro…) sell in 2020, 2021, 2022, etc.

SoftTalker 10/25/2024||||
I'm using an iPhone 12 mini, and it's bigger than I'd ideally like.
ktosobcy 10/25/2024||||
Are you sure they bought different flavours because of the screen size or because of naming marketing "pro is better than regular" and "mini obviously has to be worse"?
LtWorf 10/26/2024|||
iphones are extremely expensive
HumblyTossed 10/25/2024||||
> I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

The iPhone mini was a billion dollar device. Anyone other than Apple would have called that a success.

rqtwteye 10/25/2024||
That’s one of the big problems with these dominant trillion dollar corporations. For them it’s not worth to pursue something as small as a billion dollar market but they still have enough market power to suppress any competitor who wants to deliver such a product. That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000
tharant 10/26/2024||
> That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000

You think the pace of innovation has stalled and the tech industry is less diverse than it was 20-50 years ago? Really?

Having cut my teeth on the tech of the late-seventies, that’s not a perspective I share. I have long been impressed with how fast new tech makes it into our grubby little hands. From my perspective, if we were stuck at the pace of innovation present during my early days, well, I think it’s not unlikely we’d still be using feature-phones and WAP gateways so we could tinker with that new mobile-internet stuff everyone’s raving about.

wruza 10/25/2024||||
Don’t produce it in the same volumes then?

Did you know that factories make less big-sized and small-sized shoes than average-sized ones? Because (surprise) buyers size distribution is not uniform.

“We tried to make big shoes many times and it doesn’t sell well enough”. Oh, really. I guess I’ll just cut holes for my fingers then.

galdosdi 10/25/2024|||
Maybe the fixed costs of a shoe factory production line, in 2024, with centuries of production experience, are lower than those of a top of the line smartphone.
ethersteeds 10/25/2024||||
Well, speaking as someone with US 14 men's feet, a fair number of manufacturers do just refuse. Many shoes top out at 13, and many socks at 12!
nuancebydefault 10/25/2024|||
> fingers

Lol

wruza 10/26/2024|||
Ah, cringe. In my defense, https://www.reddit.com/r/LinguisticMaps/comments/pyrli2/whic...
ttonelli 10/25/2024|||
Don't know the op's language, but in Portuguese there's a single word for toes and fingers. So I did not notice the issue until you pointed out!
gen220 10/25/2024||||
Speaking for myself, I 100% would have bought an iPhone Mini, but I purchase new phones on a 5-6 year cycle. My iPhones were the 4S and the XS.

Now that I'm ready to buy a new iPhone, the Mini has been discontinued! I think the Mini would have been and in fact was successful, but it's not successful "enough" to justify a separate model – they must have observed that people "like me" would still buy a flagship iPhone, even though we aren't 100% satisfied with the form factor.

Apple would rather have us buying a higher-margin flagship model and have an NPS of 65+ than a lower-margin mini model with an NPS of 80+.

My friend with similar instincts as me recently got a refurbished 13 Mini instead of the latest flagship. I'll probably get the flagship, because I value the satcom a little bit more than the form factor.

iscrewyou 10/25/2024||||
It’s a package of devices Apple is selling. They sell under powered smaller screen macs. They sell iMacs. They sell small iPads. They sell smaller watches. Some of these just don’t sell as well as their other offerings.

They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones because Apple no longer makes new ones.

The idea that they don’t sell well is not a good enough reason when you are trying to capture the whole market for not just hardware but the lock in for services, apps, games, music, etc.

yreg 10/25/2024|||
How can you be confident in this when you don't even see their sales data?

Still, I would like to see a smaller regularly updated phone. Bonus points if there is a high-end version, because small shouldn't mean budget (like with iPhone SE).

hedora 10/25/2024||
The last small flagship (iPhone 13 mini) sold poorly, but it was much more expensive than the SE2. This was at the tail end of covid, but before faceid worked with masks, so the SE's touch id was a huge selling point.

Other than that and the camera, the only functional difference I can find are that the SE line is still missing the UWB antenna.

I'd happily upgrade to a newer small iPhone if they made one. As it is, it looks like the only option is repeatedly repairing my 13 mini (and dealing with the hilariously bad 5G battery drain forever) or downgrading to a newer SE3.

I know there are a lot of people in this boat. I predict they'll produce another small phone in a few years. It'll sell well due to pent up demand, and someone will be declared a genius for selling 100M's of extra phones that year.

vvladymyrov 10/25/2024||
> I predict they'll produce another small phone in a few years. It'll sell well due to pent up demand, and someone will be declared a genius for selling 100M's of extra phones that year.

I’d wish this too. I’m afraid that Apple over the next few year would become more risk averse then ever before. Also old Execs are leaving and retiring - so less people with hands on experience how to start new products VS keeping lights on.

rsynnott 10/25/2024|||
They have repeatedly attempted to sell small phones. They don't sell in significant numbers, unfortunately.
SirMaster 10/25/2024||||
Just because the sentiment is a minority doesn't mean it's not an honest sentiment.

I also would love a smaller flagship spec'd phone.

I know it wont be popular, but I still want it.

johnnyanmac 10/25/2024||
Its the worst of both worlds. Not popular and harder to engineer. So it makes it hard to pitch to business.
LtWorf 10/26/2024||||
By "it has been tried" you mean that they sold some crappy phone for almost the same price as a way better one?
dageshi 10/27/2024||
Well that's also an issue, the audience that wants a smaller phone is also spread across all the price points that the regular audience is. So it's even less viable for manufacturers to make small phones.
karaterobot 10/25/2024|||
"Well enough" is doing a lot of work here. It's not that they aren't successful, it's that they aren't immediate, runaway hits, so the manufacturers conclude: why bother trying to build this market, let's just go back to the playbook. That's how you get mediocre products, which is where we are now.
dageshi 10/25/2024||
I'm sorry to say this, but again just face the reality of the fact that not enough people truly want this size of phone.

There's a congregation of people on HN who do, I suspect they're also the type of people who'll run their phones for 5+ years where their bigger phone buying brethren are replacing every year or two at most.

The market for the "small" smartphone just isn't profitable enough to bother with for most manufacturers.

tra3 10/25/2024|||
I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini.

I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.

efficax 10/25/2024|||
there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead
tra3 10/25/2024||
I’ll upgrade the second a new mini comes out…but I’m keeping it for now.
diggan 10/25/2024||||
> I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini.

I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big.

My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the Pro Max. I don't understand how people are OK with that, but to each and their own...

auxreturn 10/25/2024|||
To each their own, except apple's not making new mini form-factor iphones anymore so us mini preferrers will at some point not have our own.
soco 10/28/2024|||
There still are people using tablets for calling, taking selfies and whatever else. I think it was a more common sight earlier (the times of the first iPads) but they are definitely still around. I can explain this even less...
shafyy 10/25/2024||||
I just replaced the battery in my iPhone SE 2nd gen last month. Somehow I didn't know that that was possible. Best 80 € spent ever.
jihadjihad 10/25/2024||||
I need a new battery in my 2020 SE as well, I wasn't aware that the last mini was a 13. Bring 'em back!
vvladymyrov 10/25/2024|||
Good luck. I’ve tried to replace battery in mine 12 mini last week - with no success. I had to leave my phone for 4 hours or several days (if they brake screen during battery replacement, they will wait for replacement phone to be shipped overnight). Also representative was convincing me to buy a new phone - saying that battery replacement won’t help much because new ios versions has features which high battery usages, while newer iphones has larger battery and hardware optimizations for these new features. I’m thinking about iPhone 16 now while keeping iPhone 12 mini as backup phone.
Syonyk 10/25/2024|||
So do the swap yourself.

Part and kit: https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-12-mini-replacement-b...

Steps: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+12+mini+Battery+Replacem...

vvladymyrov 10/25/2024||
I've successfully have replaced batteries and displays in older iphones (mainly iphone 6). But with newer iphones opening the phone is more complex.

I've read online and heard from Apple Store representative that iPhone 12 (all models) has tendency to crack the screen when phone is opened for repair or battery replacement and in that case Apple Store would replace the hole phone (this is were multi day repair process). So I would rather pay $90 to Apple that guarantees that I'll get a phone replacement in case when screen is broken during battery replacement. Without the phone I sill would be able to answer the cell calls from Apple Watch and with ipad over WiFi.

tra3 10/25/2024|||
Oh boy I hope that doesn’t happen to me. It took them a week to get iPhone 13 mini battery in.
hedora 10/25/2024|||
I recently brought an SE2 in for a screen + battery swap, which basically means they'd just give me a new SE2 at a steep discount.

They didn't try to upsell me at all, but I ended up getting an SE3 anyway (I didn't realize there even was a newer SE).

vvladymyrov 10/25/2024||
This is nice of them. I think this is because screen replacement was required and them not having SE2 in stock.
vvladymyrov 10/25/2024|||
They would tell you and you would notice if your phone was replaced - it would have new serial and 2FA apps won't work on a new phone without reregistration.

Most likely it took them a week to get a new battery for replacement shipped.

mmmore 10/25/2024|||
Unfortunately, people don't buy small phones as much.

https://youtu.be/iR9zBsKELVs?si=3o1qD-4R7lyezZwt

bluGill 10/25/2024||
There are a lot of different phones. People don't buy Sony as much as Samsung.
tharant 10/26/2024|||
I feel like many of the commenters in this thread are asking (sometimes demanding) that their devices offer a duality that can’t be met; do you want smaller phones or do you want longer battery life with more compute? At the moment, those are mutually exclusive goals. Thermodynamics can be a PITA but we’re doing (almost) the best we can.
knallfrosch 10/25/2024|||
Smaller components cost more than bigger ones and the mini users (me included) also want to spend less, not more.
dwayne_dibley 10/25/2024||
Same boat. 'upgraded' my iphone mini to a 15 and hate it. Far far to big.
nerdjon 10/25/2024||
My opinion is that most of the real uses of AI (like ML has always been) will be largely hidden things that are LLM based but not screaming at your face "AI". Particularly once the bubble pops and money stops being shoved into things just sticking an LLM in a pretty package with little to no value.

Some of the things coming in iOS like notification summaries and similar features are big examples. It's clearly LLM based but it's not a lot of the shoving AI needlessly into things that we are seeing now and provides a true improvement given the notification overload that we have right now.

slashdave 10/25/2024||
Photo manipulation is another example.

You can see the wisdom of how Apple is approaching this. In particular, to be on device whenever possible so as not to be dependent on network bandwidth, and to tie features to new hardware (to drive sales).

soco 10/28/2024||
How I wish this would actually work properly. One can have only so many sepia filters and cat ears before realizing photo manipulation still does the same it was doing ten years ago. I have yet to see an app actually improving the photo quality - and no, doubling the pixels is not that. Yes, you cannot create details where they are missing, but sometimes they should be obvious, like fixing the foliage (leaves in the distance always look like... leaves), trying to clarify the contours (not only by bumping the contrast) and I could go on. Yet no, every new AI-powered image processor only brings a new approach to sepia filters and adding cat ears.
KeytarHero 10/25/2024||
Exactly. Ask customers "do you want AI in your phone?" and their response will probably be "meh", as shown in the article. But ask "do you want notification summaries, a better camera in low light, Siri to be able to look up more things, searchable photos, etc?" - and they absolutely will.
effingwewt 10/25/2024||
Lol no one i know wants any of the things you mentioned.

Normies hate the AI hypetrain bullshit.

akho 10/26/2024|||
Okay let’s be fair, people do want better low-light photos. And text recognition in photos. And translation.

Or maybe they don’t, but I somehow see people using those features all the time.

xk_id 10/25/2024||||
I’m really curious to see if this VC wet dream will materialise or if reality will prevail. Currently I’m pretty sure that the only people who are still enthusiastic about the AI bullshit are the ones with some form of vested interest, so they’re trying to fabricate the demand.
soco 10/28/2024|||
Actually I like all those, but I don't care whether they are with AI or not. So slapping AI on them is a definite "meh" for me, show me results not trendy labels.
chankstein38 10/25/2024||
I can understand why. Most of the generative AI crap we're being force-fed these days is a solution looking for a problem. On my Samsung, the only really useful AI features they provide are erasing things in photos and upscaling. The generation is weak compared to even basic stable diffusion and otherwise they're all fluff features and sometimes give me the same vibes as the "Make Longer" feature on Notion. As far as apps go, I really don't need a chatbot in every app.
mondobe 10/25/2024||
I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before.

From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

ffsm8 10/25/2024||
The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving).

Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.

piyush_soni 10/25/2024||
Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)
TeMPOraL 10/25/2024|||
Isn't that obvious? They tried to switch back to Google Assistant, but each time they asked Gemini, it said it can't do that yet!
kyriakos 10/26/2024||||
My main use of Google assistant is to add things to my shopping list while I'm cooking. Switched to gemini, which I could have a human like conversation to get information about any topic but it just couldn't add items to the shopping list. I switched back. I didn't need a chatbot to keep me company I needed an assistant.
ffsm8 10/25/2024||||
> Then why are you using it?

I'm not, I pretty much just accepted that Google doesn't care about usability whatsoever and haven't prompted it in a very long time.

To be clear, the only time I've ever used it was via "ok Google" in contexts in which I'm unable to interface with the phone directly, i.e while driving. If it doesn't work you'll learn that you can't start driving before queueing the navigation anymore. The voice assistant was a nice feature, but not important enough to waste my time trying to figure out which feature they opted me into and how to get back out of it.

xur17 10/25/2024|||
In my case it just kinda.. switched over at some point, and frankly I didn't care enough to figure out how I might switch it back (if I even could). I had a similar frustration to GP that it stopped working for 100% of the queries I used to use it for.

That said, at some point it started working better, but there was a good 6-12 months where it was a tire fire.

swatcoder 10/25/2024|||
I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place.

Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all.

I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.

But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.

itsoktocry 10/25/2024|||
>I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.

Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).

swatcoder 10/25/2024|||
For a bit, and to a degree, yes. Last-decade image recognition and tagging teased what might be possible and is genuinely useful.

The new LLM-ish tools promise that users can be more vague and casual in what language they use and more elaborate in how specific they mean to be; and that the queries (and operations) can span more diverse data sources.

johnmaguire 10/25/2024||
Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?
conradev 10/25/2024|||
Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products:

https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...

gumby271 10/25/2024||
Wow they announced this back in May and it's still not available for me.
gsich 10/25/2024|||
Or better than Picasa almost 10 years ago.
lancesells 10/25/2024|||
iOS has been doing this for a bit too. I don't use it enough to really know how good it is but I can definitely look for cats or people I know. Haven't used Apple Intelligence yet so maybe that's better as well?
reportingsjr 10/25/2024||
Google photos is way, way, way better than apple photos at this. It’s not even a competition.

I have my sister’s dogs named in my google photos library. Every time I a take a picture of either dog, they are automatically tagged and added to a shared album I set up for my sister.

I have nieces and nephews with photos from newborn age to 10+ years old, and it has managed to organize them across their growth and ages. It’s incredible. I can search for “<niece name> <vacation area>” and get every photo of her on a certain vacation to make a family scrap book.

Apple photos search and tagging is pitiful in comparison.

WOTERMEON 10/25/2024||
But one of the two you can have on your device and do not have to pay rent
okasaki 10/25/2024||||
It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.
fao_ 10/25/2024||
I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork.

The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.

qup 10/25/2024||
He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.
fao_ 10/27/2024||
> Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

I'm not sure how a bunch of probably-correct keywords that miss a lot of the important aforementioned details in the image is more useful than the image itself, or it's metadata. Both of which would be lost. My point applies equally with respect to image classification, too.

dylan604 10/25/2024|||
Yeah, it seems based on the advertising from the various AI vendors, they are showing its use by summarizing emails/phone call/etc. Things like being able to search text messages for info blah blah. The only one I've seen pushing online searches is Google, but that seems like duh! for them to be pushing. Circle something in an image and take me to a listing of that something for sale. Of course that's Google's direction.

But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

itsoktocry 10/25/2024||
>But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

This is such a mundane use of AI, but unsurprising Apple would sell it as revolutionary.

cube2222 10/25/2024|||
Mundane or not, it’s actually useful, a meaningful improvement, and should work consistently well.

That is in contrast to a lot of fancy AI demos which are a great party trick, but fall apart in actual usage, with their reliability being “maybe it will work this time, maybe it won’t, just keep retrying :)”.

Apple is pretty well-recognized for usually being a bit late to the party, but at least delivering stuff that’s polished.

Just look at this thread of people sharing how Gemini broke all their commands and automations. The Apple Intelligence Siri on the other hand works just fine (even if new features are arriving slowly).

consteval 10/28/2024|||
It's not very mundane, it's quite difficult to search for things when you don't know exactly what the thing is. Computers are laughably bad at this. I can tell a friend to find something in my room and give a vague description of the object. But with a file on my computer, I need to know actual content in the file. And images or video? Forget about it, if you don't remember part of the filename or what subdirectory it's in then it's gone.
kredd 10/25/2024|||
The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.
paul7986 10/25/2024|||
Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search

Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use....

- Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away.

- I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches.

Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.

dragonwriter 10/25/2024|||
> Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search

I can't speak to your personal entertainment experience, but AI chatbots are generally a slower, less accurate way of getting information than a google search. (Though Google polluting search results with a big, often inaccurate, AI result at the top narrows this a bit.)

paul7986 10/25/2024||
If you use it for research where you have to do many google searches vs. just ask one question like hiking question it's much quicker asking one question vs. multiple google searches to get ur answer.
dragonwriter 10/25/2024||
The thing is it isn't reliable enough to rely on the answer from just one question for anything that matters.
williamcotton 10/25/2024||
I don't really understand why it is acceptable to speak for others on this topic. It is fine if it doesn't work well for you. It is also fine if it works well for others.

These blanket statements lead to flame wars.

dragonwriter 10/25/2024|||
I would suggest that that would make more sense as a response to the upthread comment: “Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search” than it does to someone explaining why they disagree that the only explanation for people not agreeing with the superiority of AI Chatbots is that they don't know how to use them or understand their innate superiority.
paul7986 10/25/2024||||
Sure it does for some...just how another perceives a reply. Im cool with their reply.

For me with the two research examples of using GPT I gave/use it for the information is accurate. My friend and I have driven an hour away (for both) a few times (different spots) and hiked. Same goes for calories GPT has in it's knowledge base for well known chains. If it wasnt a chain restaurant GPT might not have it in it's knowledgebase or possibly have it wrong.

shadowmanifold 10/26/2024|||
It is clear to me that people who make these comments, simple don't use the models much.

To say it is faster to get information from Google than the latest update to Sonnet is simply absurd to me.

I might have even agreed a few months ago but certainly not now.

reaperducer 10/25/2024||||
All of that sounds like the boring low-hanging life fruit that gets trotted out in videos by companies like Apple and Google as being "revolutionary." It's boring. It's staged. It's the easy stuff. It's well-off 20-somethings solving non-problems for other well-off 20-somethings.

Wake me up when I can say things like…

Hey, Google, are my custom license plates ready for pick up at the tax office?

Hey, Siri, ask my doctor to refill this medicine.

Hey, Alexa, how many charging stations are broken at the gas station on 16th street?

Hey, Google, why is this plant dying?

Hey, Siri, why are there so many people in my neighborhood today?

Hey, Alexa, did anything ever get done about that story in the newspaper from a couple of years ago about the Chinese slave labor being used to grow pot on illegal farms on the Navajo reservation?

"AI" just doesn't have access to the information required to do anything interesting or useful. And because so much of its information comes from the web, which is already so polluted on certain subject (gardening, travel) as to be useless, the AI becomes useless.

hifromwork 10/25/2024||
I see your point, but it's hilarious that I can ask AI "Write a python program that takes an URL parameter, connects over http to that URL, interprets the response as a CSV file and prints a sum of integers in the second column. Use argparse for command line parsing" - pure science fiction a few years ago - and you call this a "boring low-hanging fruit". Truly we humans get used to the good stuff quickly.
reaperducer 10/25/2024||
But still well within the described "well-off 20-somethings solving non-problems for other well-off 20-somethings."
kredd 10/26/2024|||
I definitely agree, but again, if you look at the app usage times across every single demographic, those type of use cases are such a minuscule portion that it's just some noise. In my opinion, GPT/AI will cause more changes in workplaces, than in casual consumer spaces.
mvdtnz 10/25/2024||||
No, the problem is that "AI" just isn't any good at almost anything.
kredd 10/26/2024||
You can argue that, but there are legitimate "AI" workflows that have already been adapted in workplaces where things function well enough. I'm sure 99% of it is just slop, most companies will fail, but some things will survive, become commoditized and taken for granted in about 5 years.
rbanffy 10/25/2024|||
> If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming

Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false.

For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.

bradyd 10/25/2024|||
Why would you trust AI, something that regularly makes stuff up, to be able to accurately determine that?
notatoad 10/25/2024|||
the fun thing about the chatbots regularly making stuff up is that they almost always know when they're making stuff up. the hallucination problem isn't a problem of not knowing the facts, it's a problem of not knowing whether you want an accurate answer or a creative answer.

try asking chatGPT to only give you true and accurate answers and not make anything up.

rbanffy 10/25/2024|||
I trust a defective AI a lot more than I trust Fox News ;-)

Now, more seriously, it'd need to put together a coherent argument and back it up with reputable sources, as just citing sources is very ineffective. The article I cited gives more details on possible approaches to that.

jajko 10/25/2024|||
People eternally hoping that some new trick will finally make the other people understand how their side of the story/argument is one and only truly truthful. I guess this is old as mankind.

With your argument, the problem happens when given person goes to Fox news in the first place. Selection of the source has already been made, with its biases. Not much you can do or expect after this point.

Also, who curates the curator? Again an age old problem with no real, long term working solution in sight. No, you should not expect some statistical model to hold your hand through vast internet, while giving up any form of critical thinking, reasoning, or I guess any cerebral process altogether. Ultimate laziness. Since we know how much money there is in diet fad business, its safe to say this above will find its non-tiny desperate crowd.

rbanffy 10/25/2024||
> their side of the story/argument is one and only truly truthful.

There are no sides in objective reality. You might offer competing hypotheses and evidence for those, but we don’t need to do that to know that climate change is real, that it’s caused by humans, and that vaccines work.

acdha 10/25/2024||||
That’d be useful but I’m pretty sure they’d get a massive backlash on Fox News and lawsuits filed alleging “being cancelled” within minutes of that shipping. It’s something we need but our current disinformation problem isn’t an accident but the result of decades of investment.

The less fraught one is warning users that they’re being scammed: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-wants-ai-to-l...

rurp 10/25/2024||||
I can't imagine that working, even if that AI were more reliable than currently possible. Someone who already disbelieves credible reporting and objective sources is not going to be swayed by an AI telling them to disregard their fantastical conspiracy theories. Especially not in a near-future world where everyone is inundated with AI fakery.

That's even without considering the efforts that would be made to undermine any system that showed any effectiveness. A lot of misinformation, probably most of the stuff that gets traction, isn't random, it's serving a purpose and being pushed for that reason.

ossobuco 10/25/2024||||
And who's going to teach the AI what's a conspiracy and what's not? Battles have been fought over what narrative certain Wikipedia pages should push; it's pretty hard to find information that can be objectively considered the truth.
hifromwork 10/25/2024|||
That sounds like an useful tool for willing users, but if forced that sounds genuinely dystopian. And I'm afraid the people who would benefit the most (conspiracy theorists) wouldn't opt into that.
rbanffy 10/26/2024||
> And I'm afraid the people who would benefit the most (conspiracy theorists) wouldn't opt into that.

It's an unfortunate fact that the people most sick will refuse treatment until it's too late. Seen from the inside, insanity looks like lucidity.

candiddevmike 10/25/2024|||
Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.
lolinder 10/25/2024|||
I've heard horror stories and have held off so far in 'upgrading'. In the end I don't really want the fully flexible responses people are leaning into with these llm tools. All I want is to be able to give a precise instruction with my voice and have the machine reliably perform the action that it performed the last time I gave that instruction.

Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as the product managers are concerned), I've been looking more and more seriously at setting up my own local voice assistant. My main barrier has been hardware—the mic arrays in the Home devices are surprisingly good and hard to beat with cheap off-the-shelf components, and you need a good mic for good STT.

lancesells 10/25/2024||
Yeah, I would like Siri to actually play the album I asked for and not something completely different phonetically from what I asked. Or even when I set an alarm and not be told "I can't connect to the internet right now" while I'm using my laptop connected to the internet. Or if my internet is down to actually use the speakers that I bought as speakers.

The hardware is really well done but the software is either over or under-engineered to a stupid degree.

crustaceansoup 10/25/2024||||
It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"
connicpu 10/25/2024||||
I've been thinking about trying the OpenAI integration for home assistant[1], because controlling things in my home is primarily what I use my assistant shortcut for. The normal assistant works well enough but can be frustrating if you don't remember the exact phrasing it wants to activate a certain command.

[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversati...

grahamj 10/25/2024|||
I have it set up with ollama. It’s… interesting. HA commands are provided to the model as tools so it works as well as the model is able to determine when and how to use tools. From experimenting with that and my own tool use code I’ve found that models vary greatly in their ability to wield tools and none that I’ve tried are exceptional.

It’s neat that you can intermix general chatting with HA commands but you’re probably going to find that the old assist is more reliable for commands. What I do like is that you can use a template as your system prompt so you can provide the state of a number of entities and then ask for them with natural language. That works well.

I have an Alexa/Echo voice announcement system set up and have recently tied that into assist so I can do automations like if the garage opens I prompt for “what is the state of the garage?” and announce the result. Makes it feel more humane than the same plain announcements all the time.

TeMPOraL 10/25/2024|||
Do try it. I've been running it ever since it got integrated into the core, mostly to control A/C units around our flat, and it's the best voice assistant experience I had to date.

I mean honestly, how is it possible Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft[0] all keep screwing this up for over a decade now? I literally spent 15 minutes hooking up GPT-4 to the Home Assistant integration, and I was able to semi-reliably[1] control actual devices[2] like air conditioners and smart lights, in a completely natural and ad-hoc way, by talking to my smartwatch on the go, or to a phone, whatever was more convenient at the moment.

It's a really magical experience, a step closer to Star Trek reality. And what makes it possible is not just LLMs being able to deal with natural language, but more importantly, "bring your own API key" model allowing to cut away all the bullshit that FAANG assistants are stuck in.

--

[0] - Ever since they dropped MS Speech API in Windows, and did the Cortana thing. Some 15 years passed, at this point, and I'd still prefer to work with the Speech API than to touch any of the FAANGs' voice assistant - it worked, and worked off-line!

[1] - Works ~90% of the time; some 5% of the time the voice model (from Home Assistant Cloud) misunderstands me, and 5% of the time the LLM gets confused. It's still worth it, because I can actually talk to it like to a person, without thinking of style or grammar or magic keywords.

[2] - Which, given the level of integration of Home Assistant companion app with the phone, can be easily turned into an equivalent of on-phone voice assistant that can do more than the one I got from Google. Critically, there are ways to couple Home Assistant app and Tasker, so it's not hard to make it do arbitrary things on your phone. And, if you don't like low-ish code Tasker experience, you can trivially shell out from Tasker to Termux, at which point sky is the limit. Point being, an enthusiastic non-developer with minimal tech aptitude can beat Google and Apple at the voice assistant game today.

add-sub-mul-div 10/25/2024|||
> Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

Teach a man to fish!

rbanffy 10/25/2024|||
AI’s appeal depends a lot on the features. Battery is important for me (more than being anorexically thin), but I would love an AI that could screen my calls like a smart voice mail that asks questions.

Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver.

Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.

est31 10/25/2024|||
Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.
artwr 10/25/2024|||
I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.
wlesieutre 10/25/2024|||
That’s the line of thinking behind Halide’s recent “process zero” feature on iOS

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-ap...

renegade-otter 10/25/2024|||
Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-c...
candiddevmike 10/25/2024||||
How do I disable that?

I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.

Terr_ 10/25/2024|||
> I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced.

I'd caution that judicious/proper post-processing is actually needed if you want that result, because of the differences between the sensors.

Your human experience comes from many small pictures taken by a set of lenses panning across multiple points in a scene with constantly adjusting exposure times and focal lengths, all biologically composited into what feels like a single moment.

Trying to fully replicate that with a single artificial picture is going to be deficient in certain ways.

---

Separately, a pet peeve of mine: Too many people have been subtly brainwashed into conflating the "like I was really there" with " like a Hollywood film camera was really there." Then the next thing you know your medieval fantasy game has lens flares in it for no good reason.

izzydata 10/25/2024||||
I recently bought a real camera partially for this reason. I don't even mind how inconvenient it can be at times because honestly taking photos with a full camera rather than your phone is fun. While on the phone it has become quite dull in my opinion.

But knowing that the phone does a lot of software tweaking to get a picture to look similar to how good a full camera is made me want to switch. I think this was around the time that article about Samsung basically replacing a photo of the moon.

jajko 10/25/2024||||
Get raw, and marvel at its imperfection and ugliness in many aspects. If given phone ain't giving up raw data, take any decent camera, raw sensor data has been part of it since its beginning.

But those pics will be probably further from perceived reality than those enhanced by software (lets not get retarded here and don't brand every data processing as 'AI'). Distortions not only of barrel type, waning brightness towards edges, moire, heavy vignetting, tons of noise, over/underexposition, maybe some dead pixels... thats not how I see my days go by.

idle_zealot 10/25/2024||||
What does this mean? Sure, if generative AI is filling in features that weren't present, anyone would call that doctored or fake. But computational photography is mostly about recognizing patterns and filling in assumed detail... which is also how your visual cortex works.
thrwaway1985882 10/25/2024|||
What makes a Polaroid any more "real" than an iPhone picture to you? Can any photo truly be real? (Deleuze has some interesting thoughts on the matter)
ARandomerDude 10/25/2024||||
Right but in street surveys nobody knows that. Most people just call it "better camera."
B1FF_PSUVM 10/25/2024||
... then one day the tentacles come out ... https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg
no_wizard 10/25/2024||||
Interpretation of this on its nose suggest the algorithms are the core feature not AI, as there is no artificial intelligence involved in these processes that I’m aware of.

If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement

dboreham 10/25/2024|||
That's what AI is. The weights are the clever part. Cameras have done this since the Nikon FA in 1983.
dylan604 10/25/2024|||
what about the infamous recognizing the moon in the background that is just an over exposed white fuzzy circle and replacing with a stock image with full surface details? clearly there's some sort of ML/recognition of content within the image
no_wizard 10/25/2024||
Yes that would be ML as far as I’m aware, but the thing in reference is software compensation for image quality. Effectively smartphones automatically upscale photos by default. I think the only exception is when you choose to shoot in raw
romwell 10/25/2024|||
>Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty

Nah.

Smartphone cameras stopped being shitty a while ago, long before AI and computational photography hacks.

What you mean to say is they without AI, you'd know sooner that the smartphone maker put a cheap, shitty camera in your "premium" phone.

>People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.

Yeah, it's also fake image generation featuring humans with a funny number of fingers.

What AI isn't is a camera.

addaon 10/25/2024|||
> 95% of everyday AI needs

This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it.

But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing.

95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.

njtransit 10/25/2024|||
You seriously assess "future AI features" when buying a phone? Have you heard the expression "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Also, what is the lifetime of a phone? How far in the future are these new features expected?
addaon 10/25/2024||
No, I assess current AI features when buying a phone, in the future. Any survey about what features customers value in phones they are considering buying inherently ask questions about future behavior, occurring in the future’s present.
HumblyTossed 10/25/2024|||
Apple will just tell you you need an iPhone 17 because it has a more special "you're gonna love it" neural thingy onboard, and so your purchase of a 16 is null.
grahamj 10/25/2024|||
> 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT

True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.

jefftk 10/25/2024|||
> the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders

Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.

xvector 10/25/2024|||
"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?
hn_throwaway_99 10/25/2024|||
I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.
michaelt 10/25/2024|||
If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google would produce such a thing.

shadowmanifold 10/26/2024|||
I think this is actually a deeper issue.

The CEO would trust the personal assistant to do this if they have a deep trust in the assistance competence. They would also need to know the assistant has a deep enough understanding of the their preferences to not do something they don't like. AI can mirror that.

More importantly though there will be consequences if the human assistant makes a big mistake and books the wrong flight. They would have to take responsibility for the mistake.

The LLM is always just going to write in text it is sorry if it makes a mistake. That is never going to be good enough for anything of consequence. The LLM would practically have to be omniscient in a way that is not going to be possible in a world filled with uncertainty.

So much of human activity is built around the network of trust that another human takes the blame if something goes wrong. So much activity involves coin flips and that someone takes the blame when the coin lands on heads but we bet on tails.

no_wizard 10/25/2024|||
>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?

Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”

Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.

I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.

This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all

bluGill 10/25/2024||
Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so they don't.

That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.

no_wizard 10/25/2024|||
I don’t even think you need machine learning for this, it’s an API problem mostly like I said.

Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.

For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably

ziml77 10/25/2024|||
Personalizing any automation like that is a privacy nightmare. The system needs to know a lot about your preferences and the decisions you'd normally make yourself as well as your current circumstances since those will also influence your choices. How do you feed that into any AI without being problematic for privacy?

Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.

bluGill 10/25/2024||
A personal assistant is also a privacy nightmare - to be effective they need to know a lot of personal data about you. But at least a human is one person to blame, automation means you have no idea where the data is or who can abuse it.
Perz1val 10/25/2024||||
If I were a somebody worth a personal assistant/secretary, I'd be pissed about them doing such things without notice too
bluGill 10/25/2024||
If you had such a person they would know if you wanted that service of not and act accordingly.
xvector 10/25/2024|||
Your problem isn't AI, it's shitty AI. Why wouldn't you trust an AI that was competent and understood what you wanted, like any good human personal assistant?
vineyardmike 10/25/2024||||
I worked on a (failed) system that was supposed to help with this in the pre-ChatGPT era. The obvious limitations is getting the data, and scaling that to everyone. Learning about your flights, staying up to date on them, etc is such a daunting privacy-busting task that everyone is scared to start. Either you go use-case by use-case (flights, restaurants, calendars… etc) and never get traction or you just start scanning emails and open up huge data risks.

Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.

literalAardvark 10/25/2024||||
That's agentic behaviour, and the first to offer it publicly are anthropic, who just opened a beta.

It's still pretty terrible though

no_wizard 10/25/2024||
I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means.

AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc.

If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out.

LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability.

Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware

revscat 10/25/2024||
> it’s not real intelligence

Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving.

Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.

no_wizard 10/25/2024||
None of these exhibit any accepted definitions of intelligence markers. The intelligence isn’t artificial, it doesn’t exist is my point. If you apply the commonly accepted definitions of what is considered display of intelligent behavior. One aspect of which is the ability to adapt to new circumstances that you haven’t experienced before.

There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill.

Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence.

It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system.

Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent.

I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.

xk_id 10/25/2024||
I’m more annoyed by the sheer amount of effort and time we’re spending now as a society to rationalise the AI bullshit and argue against it. For example everything you said is valid, but you were provoked into painstakingly writing this elaborate rebuttal, by a bunch of parasitic VCs, who have zero intellectual integrity and are simply trying to advertise their investment.
xvector 10/27/2024||
I dunno about that. Peter Norvig would disagree with both of you. He argues we reached AGI some time ago. It's a good read - https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
altdataseller 10/25/2024|||
1. How does it know how/when to reschedule that doctor's appointment that you need to call to reschedule? How do you know that receptionist won't hang up on your "AI agent" who tries to call them, b/c they think it's some sort of scam bot?

2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?

grahamj 10/25/2024||
I would say the problem there is the requirement to phone a human to change a record in their database.

If they had an app then an AI assistant should be able to tie things together. Where things seem to be going is apps provide an intent-based API wrapper plus UI widgets to interact with it. That way assistants can operate them too.

the_arun 10/25/2024|||
AI is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.
jeffbee 10/25/2024|||
I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
larntz 10/25/2024|||
I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder.

I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate.

But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.

kspacewalk2 10/25/2024||||
I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.
lupire 10/25/2024|||
Failing to set reminders/alarms is core Google technology, #2 only to PageRank itself.
jeffbee 10/25/2024|||
I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos.

ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.

bluGill 10/25/2024||||
I want the reminder not on my device, but on my work computer which I'll be staring at when I need the reminder. Or in the bananas case I want bananas sent to our shared family grocery app (which isn't a google service) so that if my wife happens to be going by a store tomorrow she knows to stop and get some along with flour or whatever else we need to stock up on.
blackoil 10/25/2024|||
I asked if to create task for Monday morning. It created one, Monday 12AM.
Terr_ 10/25/2024|||
Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit.

Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.

JohnClark1337 10/25/2024||
[dead]
aiono 10/25/2024||
AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.
GuB-42 10/25/2024||
Here, it is more like the smartphone market is stagnating and manufacturers need something to encourage people to buy new smartphones instead of keeping the one they already have.

They are already doing planned obsolescence, with hard to replace batteries, limited software support combined with closed systems, etc... But they can't abuse it, as regulatory agencies are already after them and customers are starting to notice. They had a go with cameras, as it is a significant differentiator, but nowadays, most smartphone cameras are as good as they can be for what they are used for.

And it turns out that AI is the big hype right now, so of course, they are using as a selling point.

The funny part is that "AI" (machine learning techniques) have been running in smartphones for a while (I'd say a decade), hidden in camera software. How do you think these tiny cameras can do pictures that look so good? But they mostly kept quiet about it, as it had implications of making "fakes". And yeah, stuff like Siri that works mostly on servers, you don't need a phone with "AI capabilities" for that, just internet access, but they are certainly going to put in in their ads.

aiono 10/27/2024||
For that "AI" this level of investment was not necessary though. What I mean is about companies that develops LLMs for general problem solving. They require huge investment yet their value yield is still very low.
Nicholas_C 10/25/2024|||
Sounds a little like crypto although there are actual use cases for AI. Just not as many as investors think.
changing1999 10/25/2024|||
It's very similar in regards to treating the increase in compute power consumption as a signal of "growth".
marcosdumay 10/25/2024|||
There are lots and lots of use cases for good AI.

Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.

chairmansteve 10/25/2024||
Like VR. Lots of niche uses will emerge. But not much main stream adoption.
bobro 10/25/2024|||
It’s been enough time now that we should really have a handful of very clear use cases, but we just don’t.
amateuring 10/25/2024||
bingo
agentultra 10/25/2024||
I actively don’t want AI, on-device or not. But with the near monopolies on these devices there isn’t a way to vote with your wallet. We’re getting whether we want it or not.
hkon 10/25/2024|
You can have a dumb phone. If you require one for 2fa. Just have one in addition for that purpose. But you can also sms 2fa on many services
goblinux 10/25/2024|||
The hard part with 2FA over SMS is that it's no longer considered secure [1]. I want a dumb phone too, but with all the security tools we need (password manager, 2FA apps/tokens, encrypted messaging, etc.) it's becoming less and less an option for me.

I wish there was a middle ground where I could have my phone be dumb enough to keep me from playing on it all the time, but secure enough that it makes sense for me.

[1] https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ I'm not affiliated with them, just the first article I found on the topic

meindnoch 10/25/2024||||
I don't want a dumb phone. I want a smartphone without AI crap.
m01 10/26/2024|||
For 2FA try a Yubikey or similar hardware U2F device.

(opinion my own)

brtkdotse 10/25/2024||
Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.
JohnMakin 10/25/2024||
It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to avert my attention from the road, disconnect my phone, then plug it back in and pull my map up again.

She can't do or understand the most astoundingly basic stuff. I guess maybe it "feels" worse now because most LLM's are pretty good at understanding your meaning/intention, but my god, it's so bad that if I were in charge of that product I'd rip it out entirely. There's no way anyone finds any real use out of it.

bluGill 10/25/2024|||
Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)
JohnMakin 10/25/2024||
I'm unsure of your point. Are you arguing that issuing a verbal command to my voice assistant is not paying attention to the road? No more than talking to a passenger, really.
bluGill 10/25/2024||
Yes. I'm arguing talking to a passenger is not something you should be doing either. You are in control of something deadly, not a video game or toy - act like it.
JohnMakin 10/25/2024||
This seems unnecessarily snarky and way off topic, not to mention a bit silly. I've piloted much, much larger things professionally than a car, thanks for your concern though.
immibis 10/25/2024||||
FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.
alt227 10/25/2024|||
When something is called CarPlay and actively marketed as a way to use your phone services whilst driving, you would expect it to have a good enough UX that doesnt detract from safe driving to use it.
immibis 10/27/2024||
The law doesn't care what marketing you received and neither does physics. Don't crash your car over a radio.
alt227 11/3/2024||
I didnt, I wont, and nor did the parent post. You seem to have conjured up a scenario just to be condescending. Dont do that. CarPlay or anything else designed to use while driving should never fail to the point of distracting the driver. If it does, its broken and not fit for market.

IMO in this instance, Sirri should have recognised that CarPlay was activated, that it had not got an answer it recognised multiple times in a row, and failed safe saying 'Pull over to continue' or something like that. Hiding the current navigation map and asking the same question over and over again to the point of distraction shows the system is not fit for pupose and shouldnt be used whilst driving.

JohnMakin 10/25/2024|||
I mean, sure. Or this could just work how it's marketed to work. Thanks for the helpful reminder!
ziml77 10/25/2024|||
You could have just given it a time and canceled it later when it was safe to. No need to endanger others on the road for this.
JohnMakin 10/25/2024||
Had I not been flustered and in insane traffic I probably would have been able to figure this out on the spot quickly enough. I did eventually try this after a few minutes and it still wasn’t working. Alternatively, the product could just work how it’s advertised.
jermaustin1 10/25/2024|||
I need better speech to text. I have to repeat my text message 5+ times sometimes when sending it through carplay. I'm not talking about anything long either. A handful of words that my accent just doesn't work with. More than once per day I get fed up enough to pull over and text it.
neither_color 10/25/2024|||
I have a bunch of "premium" smart outlets(eve energy, some are "THREAD" enabled, all the bells and whistles) all named and connected to things I want to toggle with voice: a small radiator, an air purifier, a humidifier, some accent lamps, a fan, an infrared therapy lamp etc. -Before anyone asks, I ordered the European version of their energy strip for higher wattage stuff-. I give each one a clear and unambiguous name, and still, at least one in ten times Siri will be confused about what I'm asking and turn off EVERY SINGLE OUTLET IN THE ROOM. It's endlessly frustrating. For what it's worth the outlets never de-sync or disconnect like the random amazon ones do so I blame it purely on Siri.
xp84 10/25/2024|||
Hey now, Siri’s speech-to-text quality is also worse quality than a vacuum cleaner’s too.
techbrovanguard 10/25/2024|||
siri’s speech recognition and intent handling is so comically bad. as of late, for some unknown reason, when i ask siri to favourite the current song while driving it curtly replies that it doesn’t know which speaker i’m referring to. this used to work.

another fun problem is siri not recognising my speech despite me not having a particularly strong accent, speaking slowly, and enunciating. i’ve gotten into the habit putting on a valley girl or bbc news anchor voice while using siri since that usually works.

whoever is in charge of siri needs a reality check, the feature is borderline unusable.

yellow_lead 10/25/2024|||
And the vacuum cleaner really sucks
binarymax 10/25/2024|||
It’s gotta be just barely holding on in some legacy environment right now. I’m surprised they don’t just start over using new tech. Maybe that’s the end goal with on-device inference to sunset cloud Siri.
grahamj 10/25/2024||
I think it’s at least partly cost reduction. Push everything to the phone so people have to pay more for phones and they pay less for infra. Win-win.

Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?

Benjaminsen 10/25/2024||
OpenAI whisper runs on iOS native on device, can't be just costs. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407
NotYourLawyer 10/25/2024||
That’s AI though…
tstrimple 10/25/2024||
The AI integration I'm looking for isn't to make chatgpt like queries or generate images or find one of my pictures, but to control my damn phone at a much more granular level. Settings are often getting removed or hidden or moved around to the point where controlling your device is a nightmare. Some examples of deeper configuration I'd love to see available:

  - "Hey siri, stop interrupting my audiobooks and music with Teams notifications." 

  - "Could you please tone down the number of audio GPS alerts you send me? I don't need to be told five times before an exit that my exit is coming up. You're interrupting my audiobook too much."

  - "Why are you interrupting my audiobook again?"

  - "I don't know why soundless gifs keep stopping my audiobook, will you cut that shit out?"

  - "Please let me use this audiobook app concurrently with this other app which has all sounds muted"
jonplackett 10/25/2024||
These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline

> A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful,

So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful?

> 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities

Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee?

>34% have privacy concerns.

66% have no privacy concerns?

devindotcom 10/25/2024||
This data is in the article

>So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful?

14% find it helpful

>Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee?

6% are willing to pay

>66% have no privacy concerns?

no stat on this but I think we can assume based on the others that it is not split evenly because that was not the methodology

WarOnPrivacy 10/25/2024|||
>>66% have no privacy concerns?

> no stat on this but...

I think we could presume an answer - if the respondents first received a full accounting of how their phones track and record their lives, along with a full list of who is getting that data.

jonplackett 10/25/2024|||
Thanks. That’s clearer!

Ok my next comeback - people are treating AI tools like a musical instrument.

It’s like picking up a guitar for the first time, twanging a few strings and saying ‘Nah, this sounds shit’. Guitars are useless. I’d never pay for a guitar.

Even chatGPT has a learning curve. I save myself hours or days per day using it for all sorts of things. Anyone who says they can’t find a use for AI is just lazy and hasn’t tried hard.

recursive 10/25/2024|||
Lazy? Is it a moral failing not to be interested in playing the guitar? I have no interest in guitar music, so why should I "try hard"?
jonplackett 10/25/2024||
I think you’re missing the point.

There are lots of people who could benefit massively from using AI. Who have no moral objection to it. But they just dismiss it so quickly because it doesn’t instantly, magically make beautiful things for them.

Anyone who cannot get something useful done by AI - who does want to do that - is lazy.

It’s like saying in the 19th century - oh this electricity isn’t really useful for anything much beyond lights. What’s the point?

recursive 10/25/2024||
> There are lots of people who could benefit massively from using AI

This might be the central point of the conflict. I believe there are a few people who can benefit a great deal. And I think lots of people could probably benefit a little. But I don't think lots of people could benefit massively. It just doesn't work that well.

scudsworth 10/25/2024|||
[flagged]
dang 10/25/2024||
Whoa, personal attacks like this will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
lolinder 10/25/2024|||
The poll is very weirdly constructed. It looks like they gave people a set of checkboxes to check rather than asking people to rank their opinions on a scale.

25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box.

45% are reluctant to pay, but only 6% said they were willing to. So again, 49% simply didn't say one way or the other.

12% straight-up didn't check any box at all.

grahamj 10/25/2024||
> 25% checked the box saying they don't find AI tools helpful, but only 14% said they do. Which means 61% checked neither box.

But why include people who didn’t pick anything? Surely they should be ignored and it ends up being 64/36.

lolinder 10/25/2024||
Yeah, it's bad. Excluding the people who checked neither is probably better, but it's still not perfect because it leaves out the people who read both options and would have said "undecided" if it were a choice.

It's just a bad poll.

II2II 10/25/2024|||
The article provides insufficent data to answer any of those questions, since "don't know" or "undecided" are frequently options in such surveys.

Yet they do provide sufficient information for the headline. AI integrations came in 7th place for considerations when upgrading a smartphone.

bluGill 10/25/2024|||
Those stats are wrong in another way - everything is about tradeoffs. If the AI is really good I can pay a price to use it - the price depends on how good it is. If the AI is really good I can ignore some privacy concerns - not all but some (indeed in order to work it probably must ignore some privacy concerns)
galleywest200 10/25/2024|||
The graph has multiple options for some of these.

45% unwilling to pay a monthly fee, 6% willing to pay a monthly fee.

Perz1val 10/25/2024||
You can't say that unless you've seen the test. Was it an Yes/No question, "check relevant to you", or "write how you feel about AI features"? It would change responses drastically
FireSquid2006 10/25/2024|
Man I really just want email, texting, and a web browser on my phone. More "stuff" to do is an anti feature for me.
hollandheese 10/25/2024||
Maybe Apple actually had it right with the first iPhone. No apps, just e-mail, texting and a good web browser.
akho 10/26/2024||
I want maps, a taxi/bike rental app, banking, notes, a camera, a music player, tickets for stuff, and a TOTP gizmo.

You’ll say I can do most of that in a browser, but then you’ve just moved complexity around.

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