I’m not so sure. Just think about coding assistants with MCP based tools. I can use multiple different models in GitHub Copilot and get good results with similarly capable models.
Siri’s functionality and OS integration could be exposed in a similar, industry-standard way via tools provided to the model.
Then any other model can be swapped in quite easily. Of course, they may still want to do fine tuning, quantization, performance optimization for Apple’s hardware, etc.
But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.
Doubt it. Of all the issues I run into with Siri none could be solved by throwing AI slop at it. Case in point: if I ask Siri to play an album and it can't match the album name it just plays some random shit instead of erroring out.
Ollama! Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model! They’ve kept the last 10 years with a Siri who doesn’t know any contact named Chronometer only to require the best in class LLM?
I'm genuinely curious about this too. If you really only need the language and common sense parts of an LLM -- not deep factual knowledge of every technical and cultural domain -- then aren't the public models great? Just exactly what you need? Nobody's using Siri for coding.
Are there licensing issues regarding commercial use at scale or something?
Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.
The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak to the Google Voice Assistant.
I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it said "I can't help with that right now, please try again later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox and found it for me.
Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the experience with Android Auto becomes more and more garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're going to have 2 google product voice assistants.
Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at this point.
I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.
The quality is absolutely part of the issue. Imagine the difference between a nude stick figure labeled your mom, and a photorealistic, explicit deepfake of your mom.
Well also in context the stick figure could still constitute sexual harassment.
If a big boobed stick figure with a label saying "<coworker name>" was being posted on your social media a lot such that people could clearly interpret who you were talking about, there would be a case for harassment but also you'd probably just get fired anyway.
Yes, but in that case everyone would understand the image is a crude depiction of someone—judging the poster—and not a real photograph—judging and embarrasing the target.
Well, if we just guarantee that we put "AI Generated" at the bottom of those images, it will be clear it's not a real photograph, and then this problem disappears?
It’s impossible to guarantee that. As soon as you add that message, someone will build a solution to remove the message. That’s exactly what happened with OpenAi’s Sora.
Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.
Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.
It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.
It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.
The US had Three Mile Island. Japan had Fukushima.
One of the biggest arguments against nuclear is that reactors are insanely complex. Beyond a certain level of complexity, safety and predictability become impossible even with perfect management - which certainly doesn't exist in the nuclear industry.
This is especially true of any nuke system which needs external cooling, because stable water levels aren't a given any more because of climate change. Between floods, droughts, and storm surges, the environment is part of the system - something Fukushima discovered to its cost.
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
Again I don't know why people do this framing that its either renewables or nuclear. We can and should develop and have both - they provide different energy products to the grid. Solar and storage ARE NOT viable at scale for 99.99% uptime requirements or industrial facilities that are in remote locations.
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
Thanks for the reply! I think you're arguing with the wrong person in the second half, though. I agree that renewables could potentially be more economically viable than nuclear power[1]. My reply was disputing the "people can die from nuclear therefore we should never use nuclear" argument, not arguing about economic viability. Also I think that broadly claiming that your opposition is "completely irrational" is not a very tactical rhetorical move.
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
The US has been annexing land almost since its foundation. Ask the original Native Americans. Or the people of Hawaii. Or Puerto Rico.
The US USP was essentially just its success as a consumer economy, with relative prosperity compared to Rest of World and nice things to buy.
And there used to be nominal free speech. You could criticise the government, and nothing would happen unless you became organised enough to start threatening capital, in which case you might well be murdered.
That's the good news. The bad news is that non-whites in the US have always had a much worse time of it, and the veneer of freedom has always been very thin for them.
Now the US has stopped pretending to be a creative economy and has decided not to hide its addiction to violent extraction.
Academic electroacoustic music uses large speaker arrays to place sounds in different locations, and "flying pianos" is a standard in-joke. Because you can indeed make a piano sound fly around the room, with or without doppler effects, to taste.
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