$1M prize to debunk hype over AGI, Apple Intelligence is modest but clever, Google is still stuck on that stupid ‘pizza glue’ answer. AI Eye.
The big announcement at Apples WWDC this week may have seemed underwhelming at first glance, but is a very smart move the closer you look: Yes, were finally getting a calculator on the iPad a decade after the device was first launched.
The company is also cleverly avoiding most of the issues with hallucinations, privacy and over-promising and under-delivering on the hype that plague most AI products (see Adobe, Microsoft and Googles recent AI debacles).
Instead, Apple is using compressed, on-device, open-source derived models, which cleverly hot swap adapters when required that have been fine-tuned to specialize in one particular task, whether it is summarization, proofreading or auto-replies.
The idea is to increase the chance that most AI tasks can be completed successfully and privately on the device itself and, of course, to finally provide a compelling reason to upgrade your phone or iPad.
More difficult queries are sent using anonymized, encrypted data to a medium-sized model on Apples servers (which doesnt store the data) and the most complex tasks involving writing or synthetic reasoning are sent on to ChatGPT after youve given it permission. OpenAI cant store your data either.
Based on the presentations, the privacy and functionality aspects seem very well thought out, although we wont find out for sure until September. Apple didnt build the first smartphone, but it came up with one of the best versions of it with the iPhone. It will be interesting to see if its cautiously optimistic approach to AI enjoys similar success.
Like a snake eating its own tail, it seems that all of those articles about how stupid Googles AI Overview answers were have just been making the answers worse. You may remember Google telling search users to eat rocks, that cockroaches live in cocks, and, most famously, that glue is a good way to stick cheese to pizza.
This week, Googles AI is still telling users to add two tablespoons of glue to pizza, citing news reports from Business Insider and The Verge about its own incorrect answers as the source. Verge journalist Elizabeth Lopatto wrote:
