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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It's not my area, but I read Google's AI blog and they seem to be doing machine learning research that ends up in its phones, such as various camera improvements and offline Google Translate.

It seems like it's the sort of thing you do when you can, but often it comes as a second phase after getting it to work in the data center.

I didn't see anything in this article that was obviously unique to Apple.

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https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/05/federated-analytics-collab...

https://federated.withgoogle.com/

I think a lot of people have underrated the benefits Apple reaps in this area from being so far ahead in chip design and controlling their hardware. As regards to successfully productizing ML I’ve recently become convinced that Apple has been more successful at it than Google so far. Translation was already well within Google’s wheelhouse and they had been doing it for years, and their work with cameras is going to inevitably be hindered by the fact that they can’t depend on certain specs the way Apple can. I suspect the Pixel exists at least partially to prove that they understand those benefits.

Apple is bad at AI because Apple is bad at software, and increasingly bad at common sense. Being good at hardware won't compensate for that.

Example: Apple Maps regularly thinks I need help finding my way home from locations close to where I live. Some basic practical intelligence would understand that I have visited these places before and there's a very good chance I already know my way home.

It would know that I would appreciate a route if I'm a couple hundred miles from home at a location I've never been to. But a shopping trip to the next town fifteen minutes away? Thanks, but no - that's Clippy-level "help."

IMO the company is stuck in the past, its software pipeline is so badly broken the quality of the basic OS products is visibly declining, and it's unprepared for the next generation of integrated and invisible AI applications.

Siri was a magnificent start but it seems Apple not only failed to build on it or take it further but actively scaled it back to save a few dollars in licensing fees.

Google is doing better by looking at specific applications - like machine translation. But because it's an ad company with a bit of a research culture it can't imagine an integrated customer-centric general AI platform - which is where the next big disruption will come from.

I’m not so sure your example is the best at “bad common sense” - I can see a ton of use cases where this is useful for a lot of users. For example, you live in the suburbs next to a highway, and your route home is usually 15 min. You get the notification and see today it’s 30 min because there is an accident. Instead you take the back roads or wait at work a little longer for it to clear. The directions aren’t the value, the time estimates are because in your mind you can’t know current traffic conditions of the highway. It’s a replacement for the 4:30 PM traffic updates on the radio station.

Also it works well with the “share ETA” feature where you can automatically share your ETA with family when you start directions home.

And anecdotally, my google home does the same thing at 5pm every day...but it gives me directions “home” from “work” when it is actually routing me to my old house which I moved from 6 months ago. My home address is updated and the old one removed, so

Yeah, I just completely disagree. I agree that Maps' machine learning isn't very good but I've been completely unimpressed with Google's as well.

>IMO the company is stuck in the past, its software pipeline is so badly broken the quality of the basic OS products is visibly declining, and it's unprepared for the next generation of integrated and invisible AI applications.

This has been a meme for a few years now and I don't know what the basic quality that's declining is. Their development has arguably accelerated and it doesn't seem like it has any more bugs than normal. I agree that Siri has not been advanced as much as it should have been but it seems like they're working on it.

>But because it's an ad company with a bit of a research culture it can't imagine an integrated customer-centric general AI platform - which is where the next big disruption will come from.

I'm not sure what you mean by "general AI" but I think Apple has the best shot at it of any company working right now (unless you mean AGI).

Even there, Google is hindered by the fact that it is so bad at hardware. The Pixel's camera lead is not as much as it used to be, and now Apple is ahead on video. The newest phone from Google uses the same sensor as the Pixel 2, whereas others have moved onto bigger sensors with quad-bayer filters.

Yep.

Pixel is Google being aware of their handicap in this in-house hardware prototyping and research area, and ironically and obviously and predictably for Google, they apply ML to it too.

Apple can come at this same problem from the hardware and software sides all at once, with their own internal dev cycles aligning with the yearly iOS/iPadOS software drops, and iPhone/iPad hardware drops timed to a month or two of each other, year after year. Sure, it’s buggy as hell, but it still works better than Android. One would hope so, since you can’t do proper sideloading, as Android natively supports.

Apple’s security argument is a childlike excuse for not doing one’s homework, not a reasonable justification for Apple unreasonably and intentionally feature-gating iOS and iPadOS devices. I’m an owner and I’m root. I fully control devices I own because that is a Natural Right of exclusive ownership of hardware devices under American First Sale Doctrine, which has also been recognized by the Library of Congress as Constitutionally-protected usage to preserve inalienable rights to nondiscrimination in computing devices.

So Apple can take a hike. We’re getting what we need, and we’re getting bugs fixed. Jailbreaking has surfaced more 0days than jailbreak devs squirrel away for the next rainy day after iOS updates. We need native full root support, full stop.

These research phones have landmines everywhere in the license agreements to get one, and I’m not re-buying an iPhone I already own to get half-assed fakeroot, especially when I’m already running as root on all the iPhones I ever bought. It’s not hard to avoid updates and save blobs, but should we really have to intentionally run old, known-insecure builds just to have r/w and root? Is this a mainframe? This is a joke.

https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...

What is Apple even arguing against? It’s not reality, that ought to be clear. They’re arguing for increased and continued profits for Apple, at the cost of our rights being trampled and violated, and were supposed to accept that they had our best interests at heart via increased security? Tell me another joke. Benjamin Franklin and me’ll be here all life.

The lack of free sideloading without a $99/year dev ticket is a joke. The scraps we get with 7 days between resigning apps is a joke. Devs are forced to abuse TestFlight to distribute apps which would otherwise be listed on App Store, if not for developers’ fears of App Store rejection, and potentially TestFlight revokes.

There’s gotta be a better way, but jailbreaking is the best we’ve got, for now. To that point, the Jailbreak Bot on Telegram is a public service, as is saurik himself and the entire reddit community r/jailbreak.

https://t.me/rJailbreakBot

https://old.reddit.com/r/jailbreak

All that being said, Apple really is in a league of its own, with the market capitalization to back it up; Apple has features found in other companies while simultaneously being unlike every other company on Earth.

[Current]

https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/vision/object-detection...

[2018]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90247454/the-pixel-3-puts-google...

How is this at all related to discussing Apple’s position in AI/ML?

I agree that iOS should have some escape hatch where power users can sideload but the problem is that the current situation is really good for privacy. Apple is able to act as a powerful agent to the powerless user to force companies to respect the users device and privacy. You can see on android the same apps tracking the user in ways that just wouldn't be allowed on iOS.

If there was a way to sideload apps then Amazon would probably create a 3rd party app store to compete with the main one. This would probably result in major apps moving over so they can abuse users in all kinds of ways banned from the app store.

I'm not really sure what the middle ground is here where iOS continues being the privacy OS while also letting the user do whatever they want.

That’s not true. Jailbreaks exist, and always will. That’s the current status quo. Opening up sideloading will surface more bugs. Apple already has best-in-class built-in 2fa for Apple ID. To say they can’t just leverage Secure Enclave to do the heavy lifting is just to fail to make Apple’s argument for them. Security would benefit, because Apple would have more devs seeing and reporting more bugs if sideloading were possible. It’s a simple truism. Look at the new Microsoft.

In a sense maybe the iPhone (and Android phone) is a mainframe?

The user shares the system with ... the apps.

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