iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows
users to make certain queries via GPT-4o
Any iOS users here who use any AI provided by Apple on their devices?
I have not seen a glimpse of it yet (I think it asked me once to enable it and I denied?). And when I ask friends about it, they also do not use any AI provided by Apple.
If anyone here is using it - how and what for? Do you like it?
I often say "hey Siri, ask ChatGpt <x>" when I'm hands free and want a better answer than siri throwing up some web pages and saying "i found this on the web for <x>".
I use the Siri ChatGPT integration pretty consistently on my Mac. I like the keybinds for it, and I also like that if Siri has the answer for my question it's usually instant; when it doesn't, it sends it off to ChatGPT for me.
As for their other stuff, I use Apple's email inbox summary feature constantly, and I occasionally use the writing tools AI stuff just to proofread long text I've written to make sure there aren't any glaring mistakes I'm missing.
I think I enabled it, downloaded whatever it needed, realized it took an extra X gigabytes of storage on my phone, and disabled it.
And then realized I was not getting that space back :-D
I have used the built in editor in their photos app a few times to remove an object from a photo (which works very well) which they label as "AI" but I swear existed before any of this.
They might, but not actually know. Does iOS (poorly) summarising notifications on the screen count as using AI? I can't remember what the default setting is in iOS 16, but in the new iOS this year you get prompted for this during OOB setup.
Name recognition? Advertisement? Federal grant to beat Chinese competition?
There could be many legitimate reasons, but yeah I'm very surprised by this too. Some companies take it a bit too seriously and go above and beyond too. At this point unless you need the absolute SOTA models because you're throwing LLM at an extremely hard problem, there is very little utility using larger providers. In OpenRouter, or by renting your own GPU you can run on-par models for much cheaper.
The short version is that is you give a product to open source, they can and will donate time and money to improving your product, and the ecosystem around it, for free, and you get to reap those benefits. Llama has already basically won that space (the standard way of running open models is llama.cpp), so OpenAI have finally realized they're playing catch-up (and last quarter's SOTA isn't worth much revenue to them when there's a new SOTA, so they may as well give it away while it can still crack into the market)
I understand the rationale behind open sourcing llama.cpp. Because it has a lock-in effect.
But I don't see how open sourcing weights has a lock-in effect. In fact, it seems OpeanAI's open models can be run on llama.cpp. So by offereing them, they make llama.cpp even MORE useful. Instead of driving developers towards their own tech.
I believe it's to create barriers to entry and make the space harder to compete in.
There's still a ton of value in the lower end of the market by capability, and it's easier for more companies to compete in. If you make the cost floor for that basically free you eliminate everyone else's ability to make any profit there and then leverage that into building a product that can also compete at the higher end. This makes it harder for a new market entrant to compete by increasing the minimum capability and capital investment required to make a profit in this space.
I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons:
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
Have a look at the "Mother of all demos". It dates from 1968.
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
No, because in the '80s there were already real use cases. Business was being done over email, thousands of home users were paying to get access to chatrooms...
How are there not real use cases for crypto already?
Surely more business is being done with crypto today than was done using the internet in the 80's.
I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto. A significant portion of my savings is in crypto. For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card. When I travel to foreign countries that mostly use cash, I'll usually exchange crypto for local currency rather than carry large amounts of USD or deal with sketchy ATMs.
> I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto.
Where's the value creation? At some point value has to be coming into the system, and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
> For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card.
I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
> and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
A lot of the value is technically from crime, i.e., using crypto to skirt government laws and financial regulations that I believe are unjust.
> I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
Ideally they wouldn't be needed, but they still allow one to take advantage of the other benefits of crypto (like unrestricted cross-border transfers) and still have access to a large markets of products and services.
This ignores that the internet exists now, and ideas spread millions of times faster. No other tech has needed that much time to mature and find use since.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
I don't buy it, crypto doesn't bring anything to the table that improve either SWIFT or the gold reserve that we actually need, but I understand crypto product developers see an advantage in switching from something they don't make any money on to something they do. As a consumer, or in this case as a citizen, crypto presents no advantage.
Yeah, there's a line early in the article about use, the gist of which is "[unlike cryptocurrency] the utility of the internet was obvious from the start".
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.
Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.
All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.
The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.
Money isn't a difficult concept? Tell that to the people of Turkey, on Venezuela, or Argentina. Ask them about the utility of money as a "store of value" or means of transaction. It can be mismanaged to disastrous effect.
Assuming you're in the US or EU, you have a privileged perspective: your currency is widely adopted and has been (relatively) stable. I think smaller countries (and especially the businesses therein) are better able to appreciate a global-by-default, noninflationary store of value they can use to transact with anyone, at an established rate.
You could cut Visa and other CC companies out of the loop: they'd be obsolete. Their functionality would be inherent in the network. That's huge savings, reduced complexity, and you don't have arbitrary companies with the ability to blackmail you.
Microtransactions online would become feasible, and would use the very same infrastructure as multi-billion-dollar global transactions. Nice and simple. No fax machines or SWIFT codes or intermediary banks. No reliance on banks with a monopoly on access to the financial system, that can pull a plug on a project at any time for any reason--or prevent interesting experiments from happening in the first place.
You know some places pay like 20+% fees on remittances? That's a shitload of money that the (relatively poor) destination countries badly need! There's a lot of gouging and rent-seeking that goes on in the economy (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-eve...), and a lot of it is enabled by the rigid, crufty and archaic financial system. A simple, open, global public system would fundamentally change that.
I dunno. Your attitude seems the same, to me, as somebody from 1994 who's happily using AOL to read the news, chat, and send emails (though only to other AOL members, of course) saying "What's the utility of this 'internet' thing? I can already do all that stuff! Networking is well-understood, and the 'internet' doesn't bring anything new to the table!" Their perspective on what was desirable or possible was strictly limited by the status quo. Just as was the case then, the best and most interesting use cases of cryptocurrency probably aren't even imagined yet: the infrastructure is necessary to imagine them.
Why is crypto better at replacing SWIFT and Fort Knox rather than, say, SEPA or fiat currency (which replaced Fort Knox shortly after the invention of ARPANET)?
I would love it if the whole world signed on to SEPA, but I'm not holding my breath. And even if it worked worldwide, I don't want to rely on a payment system that can be used to censor even legal artistic expression (see the recent Steam removals) or political protest (remember the Canadian truckers?).
The whole article is based on an incident a YouTuber talks about in one of their videos. The incident was not captured on video and was not even described as dangerous by the YouTuber himself.
I would say if that is all you have to discredit the Tesla robotaxi project, then the project seems to go pretty well.
The whole article is not based on that incident. For example:
>The former U.S. Marine hosts the crowd-sourced FSD Community Tracker, the single most sophisticated and reliable form of empirical data collection and analysis on Tesla’s self-driving technology that is publicly available. Car executives like Volkswagen Autonomous Mobility CEO Christian Senger speak highly of it as a benchmark, and even Musk—who has his own internal data on disengagements that he refuses to share—singled it out as proof the company is making progress.
>Currently, its data shows even the latest FSD version from Tesla results in a critical disengagement roughly every 340 miles between both city and highway at present. Called 13.2.9, it rolled out in May just weeks before the Austin service launched. “You sometimes hear Elon saying, ‘we’re having a hard time finding disengagements.’ That is such BS,” Martinez adds.
Online reviews follow an inverted gaussian distribution it seems like, the majority of users never bother, it's either the fans/bots or the angry ones.
It’s tough to trust ratings when the details tell a different story. Using something like HiFive Star to track and compare reviews across sites helped me get a clearer picture before booking. Made choosing a place less stressful and more reliable.
Not true. There is limited ad space which all advertisers compete for. No matter which model, CPC or CPA, the advertiser who pays most gets the ad placement.
Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
He's not saying advertisers don't compete. He's saying it changes from advertising being a massive risk as well as a cost, to just a cost. So the auction is won by the company with the biggest instantaneous profit margin on a SKU, instead of the one with the biggest war chest that can afford to risk on that massive prime time slot. This change in incentive favours shitty products.
It will only get worse with LLMs being at the core of ever more activity.
I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:
1: Prevent innovation via regulation
2: Problem: Being dependent on foreign technology
3: Fight the problem with more regulation
4: Goto 1
Maybe people from China, Japan, India, or the UK can shed some light on why no state-of-the-art LLMs come out of these countries?
6: Make employees much harder to fire, make companies much less likely to hire
7: Continue speaking 48 different languages and teach english too late so you have fragmented markets that on average can barely talk with each other at a 1st grade level
8: Have wildly different regulatory, legal and tax schemes within each fragmented mini-market such that EU-wide expansion is difficult
9: Cement social welfare expectations based on economic and population-driven realities that no longer exist, making competitive taxation regimes impossible
10: Force almost all private capital into centralized government run pension systems that are massively underinvested in risk assets, starving the business/venture ecosystem of capital while not meeting the social welfare expectations.
I could list a million examples. But here's one, imagine if selling a physical product in Illinois vs. Ohio required:
- hiring a human representative in each state and paper-based filings and correspondance in different languages for the VAT register
- Joining a dual-state system for financing the recycling of the packaging
- Registering with a package register who has the right to refuse your product over marginal differences
- Changing the packaging language for each state
- Having your supply chain examined by officials of each state, in different language (better hire someone), for things they don't like
- Hiring a local representative in each state to manage interactions with regulatory bodies related to EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility)
- Treating your IT systems in each state differently based on nuanced data rules and compliance
Yes, it's worse than the US. California is the most regulation-happy US state and they're a cake-walk compared to interfacing with EU beaurocratic idiocy (in many different languages!).
That doesn’t really matter for the point at hand, which is that Europe’s overregulation stifles innovation and international competition. Unless you’re arguing that the reason Europe hasn’t produced a SOTA LLM is because it’s not a net benefit, in which case that’s ignoring that it’s going to happen regardless and if Europe supposedly has its head on straighter than others, it would be most beneficial for the leading LLM to be European.
> in which case that’s ignoring that it’s going to happen regardless
we dont know the long term effects that llms have on a society that does not have these regulations in place. having europe as a backup in case the usa falls apart is probably a good idea
Replace "leading LLM" with progressively more evil things and see at what point the "if they exist, they better be European" logic stops seeming logical to you.
On this note, even if LLMs or "AGI" make businesses more profitable by improving margins and allowing them to cut labor costs, you eventually have to balance it out somehow - all those people who've lost jobs are competing for a smaller number of available jobs, and the people who can't find jobs will either need to be supported by taxpayer dollars or die in poverty.
People talk about UBI as a solution for this but the money for UBI has to come from somewhere. Are corporations going to voluntarily pay a new tax to support UBI?
It's not a zero sum labor market. Some jobs are being destroyed but others are being created. The new AI data centers will require a huge amount of electrical power and someone needs to build that infrastructure.
It makes the fans of my laptop spin at full throttle. And you don't get the plain text reply from their LLM. You get a mingled html-rendered version that chops up code left and right, so I can't test it.
Reading through the comments here, it seems that most people on HN vastly underestimate the significance of the "store of value" use case.
It is a core aspect of human life.
And there is no other asset that does that with as little inflation and risk as Bitcoin. That seems counterintuitive because Bitcoin is portrayed as a very risky asset. Which it is in the short term. But long term, fiat, gold, equity, and real estate all have an even worse inflation and risk profile.
Sorry, one cannot make statements about crypto "long term" yet.
Nobody should hold large amounts of fiat long term. That's what shares and bonds are for, which incidentally also support productive enterprises (unlike crypto).
Long term, equity, debt, gold have pretty good inflation and risk profiles. Real rates have overwhelmingly been positive, so government bonds are a fairly good store of value.
That is what the government tells you. But I don't see that when I look up my real expenses.
When I look through my old bills, what I paid for apartments, hotels, coffee it seems the real inflation was around 8% over the last 20 years. For hotels for example, it is easy to look up the same hotel today and see how prices changed.
And bonds paid less than 4%.
Can you give an example of something that increased less than 4% in price annually?
I want a 'store of value' to be fairly predictable, and even with inflation (generally 0-4%) fiat currencies have that (I can plan around that by investing in bonds and equities, or even some bank savings products).
...which is why its not gonna plunge anymore. too many people have "seen" the pattern now, and the instant it dips even 5% people are gonna be buying "the dip" in droves, thinking this is gonna be their entry, this is their moment in the sun. "I've seen it do this before, I know how it ends, I gotta get in now!!!"
There was ~20 years of it not doing much. Then ~10 years post-GFC of it not doing much. A lot of folks are looking at headlines and making long-term conclusions that certain things are inevitable:
> ...which is why its not gonna plunge anymore. too many people have "seen" the pattern now […]
And how many times has the 'stock market plunging pattern' have we seen? Does that prevent people from panicking? As someone who has been in /r/PersonalFinanceCanada for many years now, the panicked posts of March-April 2020 were very real.
There is an entire field of study examining how people act badly when it comes to money:
thats true, but you say that - bitcoin maxis are probably hoping and praying that you're right, that there'll be a free-fall - just so they can buy even more of the damn things LOL
gosh what a clown world, this stuff is so ridiculous.
I feel like we’re in a speculative thought loop. People seem to lose all memory when an asset rises. Every time it goes down people lose their minds and wonder how they could be so stupid to put money in such a risky asset, then it goes up and the same stories come out how it won’t go back down. Never trust investor sentiment online. It’s like taking advice from a drug addicted gambler.
Indeed. And then at some point the sentiment will change. And at that point I hope the crypto and real world are not too intermingled, because it'll get ugly.
its probably intermingled at the highest levels that we couldn't know of. like transferring $100 millions to overseas 'freedom fighters', 'regime change operations', various suchlike endeavours with plausible deniability.
admittedly bit of a conspiracy but its not that far removed surely
I believe the risk with crypto lies in the regulatory aspect.
Crypto is polarized, as far as politics goes. Especially if we look past the US. When a pro-crypto government rules, risk goes down. And opposite when the skeptics take charge.
i actually used to like the hamster wheel. until i learned how much money people were making on crypto. now i dont like the hamster wheel...
crypto is a legit information hazard that threatens to completely demoralize the actually productive hamsters in the economy. if everyone knew they could've made more money in a year than their entire career, they'd give up working forever.
You could have invested in any big tech company, and arrived in the same place.
It puzzles me how people see 10x-100x’ing their money on crypto as gods gift to humanity and a stroke of brilliance, but making the same amount by investing in NVDA seem like just another lucky stock pick.
If anything, there will always be the next FAANG startup, that will make one fabulously rich.
Not that that crypto was a sure thing, for a long, long time. Everything that hyped it up in the start, are more or less dead now. It has been collectively decided that coins like BTC have little practical value, outside store of value. As I wrote in this thread, back in the early days the main attraction of bitcoin was mass adoption for daily use as a currency. We've long since moved away from that. What makes it valuable today, was only a part of the equation back then. And that's not taking in all the regulatory risks that were looming (not that they have been completely eliminated).
Likewise, for the longest time GPUs were mainly seen as a consumer product for graphics usage. Then machine learning algorithms started using them, and the rest is history. If you invested in Nvidia on the thesis that all they ever were going to serve were gamers, you likely wouldn't have foreseen the current price.
A more general and vague guess would be: Something related to data, AI, green energy, healthcare, etc. - look at our biggest unsolved problems, and then at the companies that are working to solve them.
Look for something that popular AI uniformly but inexplicably endorses. One side of Costa Rica versus the other. Stock ticker symbols which coincidentally look like Gaelic words.
I can't tell if you're having a psychotic break, endirsing a specific conspiracy theory, making fun of people doing either of those, or obtusely referring to a particular stock.
I think the reaction to BitCoin in 2011 had a mix of those four, in addition to “why?”. Back then, the why brought in some libertarian utopian theory on the heels of the 2008 collapse. So, what I’m saying is that conversations on the next explosive opportunity won’t start with “why?” but instead will look like a psychotic break, conspiracy theory, parody like FartCoin, or be obtusely cloaked in jargon.
Amazon also had a p/e over 100 and a p/s over 10 in its earlier history.
You also have to look at the market size these companies are addressing while having few competitors.
Tesla for example is addressing "driving cars" with its self-driving project. There are 2B cars on the road. If we value driving them at $5 per day, that is $5 * 365 * 2B = $3650B in annual value. Capturing 10% of that would be $365B per year. At a p/e of 30 that is over $10T - ten times Tesla's current market cap.
I think your numbers are a bit understated. You are missing some other important sectors Tesla is adressing - "driving cars on Mars" and "autonomous drones". You should add an additional 0 or maybe two 0s to your numbers.
People are generally not interested in discussing assets in depth. Or any other topic for that matter.
It would be so awesome to have a forum where intelligent, grown up people discuss the possible futures of Bitcoin. Or any other asset. But I have not found one yet. If anybody knows some place, please please post a link!
We had that, it was bitcointalk, between 2011 and 2016 it was a great place to do business, meet other people interested in bitcoin and to make and create new things.
Then it slowly drifted into scammers and low quality begging posts.
Honestly, no. When people seek for forums to connect with other humans, LLMs aren't a good alternative for that. And I say that as someone who generally find LLMs useful, I'm not a "AI is impeding doom" person, but their use shouldn't replace the human connection and human conversations.
I have not seen a glimpse of it yet (I think it asked me once to enable it and I denied?). And when I ask friends about it, they also do not use any AI provided by Apple.
If anyone here is using it - how and what for? Do you like it?