A slightly less cynical take is that they want to temper expectations for the capabilities of LLMs in people’s day-to-day lives, specifically in the context of Apple products. A “smarter Siri” is never going to be an autonomous personal assistant à la Jarvis from Iron Man, which seems to be where a lot of investors think things are going. That tracks with this [0] preprint also released by Apple a few months ago.
A slightly more cynical take is that you’re absolutely correct, and making excuses for weak machine learning prowess has long been an Apple tenet. Recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google’s equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming “we keep your data private so we can’t train on it the way Google can.”
A slightly more cynical take is that you’re absolutely correct, and making excuses for weak machine learning prowess has long been an Apple tenet. Recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google’s equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming “we keep your data private so we can’t train on it the way Google can.”
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229