Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
To be honest, apart from trying to make an image with Playground, I haven’t used any of the new Apple LLM stuff, since it was released in mid-April. The email changes were disabled within minutes of AI appearing on the phone in April, I use the Inbox Zero technique and the AI was hiding 5 from the 7 important messages still in my inbox that needed dealing with.
I am currently sitting in a 3-day AI workshop at work, and apart from a few simple things, like summarising standards documents and new laws, people are currently struggling to come up with “real” tasks for the AI to do, at least in areas where it doesn’t matter if it makes mistakes.
I’ve used Perplexity and Co. and they are fine for some tasks, but I haven’t found them useful enough to warrant paying for them. To be honest, the AI I probably use most is Leo in the Brave search engine, and that is because Brave randomly adds AI results to the top of some searches.
That is also interesting, I probably use search about 50-60% less than I did 5 or 10 years ago, especially outside of work. And, no, I haven’t replaced it with AI, I use AI for about 2-5% of the searches I still do.
Apple being late to integrate error prone software into their products doesn’t bother me. I’d rather they work on accuracy and bring the product to market once it is reliable. My experiences with ChatGPT and Perplexity haven’t given me great confidence in their results - I did a string of research queries in Perplexity a month or so back and the first half dozen sounded reasonably accurate, then the next one was wildly and obviously wrong, it had me scrambling back to the previous answers to double check they were right.
If I can’t rely on the answers, I can’t use the service, especially in a business setting.
I find the advances in AI we currently have fascinating, but none of the models I’ve used so far are reliable enough that I would call them even alpha quality, let alone ready for prime time or something I would pay for.
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I like Jason’s take: Apple is scared to compete with others on their platform.
This is unrelated to the show, outside of it being Apple related:
My iPad died over the weekend so I had to buy a new iPad. I was using a 12.9" M1 iPad Pro and I thought to myself: gosh the iPad Pros have gotten so expensive, thankfully it seems like the 13" iPad Air will be perfect for me! I take it home and set it up and the 2 things I knew I would miss, but get over were fine: I knew I would get used to 60hz and Touch ID again but what caught me off guard after using an iPad Pro for the last 9 years: wow the 4 speakers on the iPad Pro make a huuuuge difference. I use my iPad speakers a lot and I didn’t realize how much better the speakers in the iPad Pro are compared to the Air. The next day I went to the Apple Store to return the device and get the new Pro.
This is my 2nd time buying an iPad not on release day, let alone 1 year post release. I hope I don’t regret it. My first time was the 2016 iPad Pro 9.7" and I would say that device wasn’t a regret, but there was a year of pain in 2017 with iOS on that device which forced me to get the 2018 iPad Pro. I don’t wanna be buying another iPad for at least 4 years!! But I’m a bit worried since I am a year late to the cycle, it might be bad. It’ll probably be fine. The M4 iPad is more powerful than my Macbook Air, and if my Air can do it… my iPad probably can too
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@Leo Thank you for asking Andy again about his blog. I have been waiting a long, long time for launch.
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