Apple has actually really really fallen behind. Their speech reco is shit. Their maps are super shit. Siri search is so bad and gets in way all the time that I turn it off right away on my iOS devices. Their photo management and image search is literally circa 2000. The spell check and completion is circa 2007 (ie no significant improvement since first enabled). They can’t get right even about when to auto-turn caps. Large number of badly spelled and misunderstood messages in the world can now be attributed to utter incompetence of Apple in AI arena.
To me it wasn’t a surprise that Apple finally got out of self driving car project. They simply don’t have cultural aspects to undertake such a massive AI heavy project including hiring and motivating the necessary talent. This is prime example of how money can’t help if you don’t have right culture. They focused on design so much that ML and AI were relavent only to the extent it helped design. Thing is that such pragmatic view doesn’t work in highly exploratory and rapidly advancing field where 90% of the things have no apparent business use but you do need those in the hope of cross-pollination with other 10%.
Apple is not an AI company and is not setup to be an AI company. There will be massive cultural shift that would be needed to turn this around.
Apple Maps has improved significantly over the past few years. I now have no issues using it for every situation, except for some place where they don’t have transit info. Still need google maps for that.
To me it wasn’t a surprise that Apple finally got out of self driving car project. They simply don’t have cultural aspects to undertake such a massive AI heavy project including hiring and motivating the necessary talent. This is prime example of how money can’t help if you don’t have right culture. They focused on design so much that ML and AI were relavent only to the extent it helped design. Thing is that such pragmatic view doesn’t work in highly exploratory and rapidly advancing field where 90% of the things have no apparent business use but you do need those in the hope of cross-pollination with other 10%.
Apple is not an AI company and is not setup to be an AI company. There will be massive cultural shift that would be needed to turn this around.