The Chaser Report - Apple Intelligence Still Won't Fix Apple Maps | Welcome To The Future

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Charles and Dom take a look at what Apple has promised about their new product: Apple Intelligence. Then they take a guess at how well those promises will be executed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. And welcome to another episode of Welcome to the Future. Future, Future. And what a future it is, Charles. I watched a bit of the Apple keynote this week. Oh dear.

The can with Craig, Federigi and team skydiving out of a plane over Apple Park, or did they? And then Tim Cook on the roof next to the solar panels for some random reason. Like, I think he was going to jump. But he didn't. Instead, what they did was launch a thing called Apple Intelligence. And it seems like this is an upgrade for Siri. Yes, yes. And having used Siri for quite a few years, I can understand why the thing that is lacking in Siri is intelligence.

I've actually got five reasons why Siri is bad. And if you open your iPhone, you can search for them there. That's right. Yeah, when you're driving and you want to know something, it's like, yeah, once you've parked, I can give you that very simple search result. So, hey, Siri, summarize this podcast about Apple Intelligence. Sorry, I can't help you with that.

Did you hear that? I don't even know what device that was. There was Apple HomePod mini. Oh, okay. Yeah, there you go. All right. I thought it was going to be my series, but instead of your series just jumped in. He said, I can't help you with that.

Although your series did shut up my series. So, I don't know, they're fighting or something? What's going on? Yeah, you're right. Anyway, we'll talk about Apple Intelligence and the brave or potentially terrifying new world that it involves in a moment. Now, Dom, I know that this is supposed to be a sort of takedown of tech, where we shit on new tech. I mean, we've moved from shitting on Bluetooth to shitting on AI. as the general direction of Welcome to the Future?

Well, what I was going to say is, like, generally I am very excited about Apple intelligence. I actually think there's going to be nothing wrong with it. I'm not being sarcastic. Really? Yes, I'm not being sarcastic. I think it's going to change a lot. I think it's extraordinary. I think it's really exciting.

But it doesn't have Bluetooth. So the first thing I just want to get out of the way is if they can work out a way to get Bluetooth in there, it will be the perfect product. Hey, Siri, why don't you have Bluetooth? Sorry, I can't help you with that. I really hope we're picking up this audio. So Apple has a tendency, and they do this reasonably well at times. Whenever their early movies on something, they're massively screwed up.

Yes. Everything since the Macintosh, really. But when others have made massive mistakes, they do occasionally come in with a superior product that actually avoid some of the pitfalls, not including Apple Maps, which took a very good product, to Google Maps and went, let's do a shit version of this. By the way, Charles, I don't know if you knew this, but on Apple Maps, there's actually a hospital around the corner from your house.

According to Apple Maps, I looked at this. There's like a giant red health icon. That's great. And it says there's a medical clinic there. I had a look. It's just a regular terrace house. So I don't know if Apple Intelligence is going to work on Apple Maps, but this is their attempt to give everyone the power of things like ChatGPT

and Google Gemini, but without, A, the terrible result. we've seen so far. But most importantly, Charles, without the nightmarish privacy, because this is Apple's big pitch to us all, is pay more for our product, pay more for our products, pay an exorbitant amount of money for our, you know, RAM upgrades and everything. But you won't be surveilled.

And that's looking like an increasingly good proposition. Yes, exactly. And so if you've used AI much at all in the last six months, what you've realized is there's a huge problem with, with the gap between its clear potential and all its most useful use cases, right? So the thing is, when you go on to chat GPT and you type something and you ask it to write your essay for you

or cheat on an exam or, you know... All that good stuff. Deal with, you know, Dom's interminable email, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. You know, explain Charles's personality. Send a compliment to a lowly, employee you know those sorts of things you need to do quite well um yet every time you start a chat

you have to set up all your context again and it gets better the more information it has so you have to sort of have a conversation with it and it really thrives when it's sort of 30 or 40 prompts in where you've actually sort of told it the whole of a backstory and suddenly it really does vibe with what you're needing right and this is because um the large language model gets trained on vast amounts of sort of general information from the internet and it's quite good at summarising stuff like that like if you want an explanation of i don't know a theory or something it's pretty good at bringing all that stuff together these days but yeah it doesn't know you it doesn't know what you want it doesn't understand your particular context and even in the

way that google search will know what you will know for instance you're searching from australia where this particular word means this thing or whatever it might be that they don't have that context or that information yes and at the same time charles giving them that context and that information is absolutely terrifying. It's a horrific proposition. Yeah, it means, I mean, Google's now offering Google Gemini built into Gmail, and the idea of Google's AI,

which has been mining our emails for ads for years, doing that, I don't trust them, I fear it, it's really worrying, and yet you'd think it would actually work better if it was able to do that. But how do I not feel utterly violated by its surveillance? But also even Photoshop now

is a nightmare. So Adobe just updated their terms and conditions in the last week. And one of the things is, under their new terms and conditions, they can send any and all of your work to their servers and are allowed to use it for whatever purpose they need to sort of, they say, optimise and improve their product. But clearly all your own copyrighted work suddenly becomes into their possession. Oh, speaking of which, have you seen on Instagram, all these people, I think hundreds

of thousands of people have been posting these things that say, Dear Instagram, you are not allowed to take my images and scan them into your AI. I don't give you copyright. And so this has gone viral. It's like one of those sort of chain letter things that everyone's been putting. It has absolutely no effect. You've already agreed to that. We didn't even realize.

And in fact, probably Instagram didn't even realize when they created that term in condition. It's like Reddit. So every post, every photo you've ever put, every text you've put on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. That's all part of the language model. That's all now just training data, right? Yes. Okay, so the idea of handing over your life to some robot that you don't really trust is a nightmare. At the same time, you go, well, what's the one thing that AI is very good at?

It's taking all the large pieces of data that you've accumulated over the course of your entire life, you know, decades worth of emails and text messages and calendars and, you know, knowing your habits, being able to look at your photos. if you could actually just tell chat GPT all those things and put it all in there and it would be able to scan it and it would actually be able to know what your tone is what you like to do what you know your preferences like there's a whole lot of really fucking important information your deep psychological complex with Craig Rucastel that dates back many years yes and and the sort of vicissitudes of relationships you could go oh well that's clearly

when you know you were having a terrible argument and hating on that person. But this is the thing, right? Here are some ideas for a lawsuit. All right. So this is the thing. I've seen people using chat GPT, and this is not very comedic at this stage,

but we'll try and have the old joke here or two a bit a little bit later on. But I've seen experts in AI training chat GPT, and it's amazing what it can do. So for instance, you can upload a database to it. Let's say you wanted to do, I don't know, some sort of research into the Australian media. You could download from a database every article written in the Australian for the past 20 years.

Yes. And chat EPD could go through that data and work out what Chris Kenny was most obsessed with. Yes. Is it the chaser? Yes. Is it himself? No, it's the ABC.

But you can actually demonstrate that by going through. And no human can really do this without years or without many, many weeks of work. Every single article ever. I think the problem is, if you ran, you know, Gerard Henderson through a human, they'd just end up killing themselves. They'd read everything. Oh, imagine having to read the whole of media watchdog. Yeah.

Although I think for many years, Gerard's actually been using AI just to spit out identical columns. But no, this is the thing. So you can give it a complete data set. Yes. And it's really powerful. And it doesn't have all the flaws that it has because it's a specific set of information. So, Charles, what if you could give it all of your information in a way that wasn't freaky?

And this is the thing, this is the real breakthrough of Apple Intelligence. So they've been advertising, oh, it'll just do everything. But the real nuts and bolts behind it is really quite clever, which is that they're going to use a sort of blockchain-style tokenized version of server-side interactions. So the point is, they've... Sorry, sorry, hey, Siri, can you explain what Charles meant by that? I found some web results. I can show them if you ask again from your iPhone.

Yeah, Google it is what Siri says. The Chaser Report. More news. often. So the point is Apple's been clearly got their eye on AI, and they've been building inside all their chips, this thing called a neural engine, right? And that is very optimized for AI-style applications. But even the fastest Apple chip requires hundreds of gigabytes of RAM to really be an

impressive onboard computer for AI, right? Yeah. So I can't do it on the first. the device. It can't do a lot of the tasks on the device. And so what they've decided to do is they've gone, well, we'll do as much as we can on the device and it'll be nice and snappy and fast. But when we do really need to just get the larger, you know, chat GPT servers to

look into something. Yeah, to get the supercomputers to really look at Chris Kenney in intense detail. What we'll do is we'll encrypt all that information so nobody can read it on the, there or on the way back, but we'll also tokenise it, which means that. Even if you had a tap on that feed, you wouldn't, you'd only get one slice of information, which would be encrypted anyway, and then the trail would go bare because you don't know where the next piece of information is coming from. Yeah, in much the same way that Apple Pay tokenises your credit card details so that it's just

a sort of one-time thing. And the waiter who brought over the credit card device can't then, you know, copy down the details because they never saw them because they were completely encrypted and in a sort of once-off, in a one-off transaction. And it evaporates. So once you've got that information, that's it. There's no being able to go back and re-prosecuted and sort of thing. So it is a genuinely private thing that exists onboard your computer.

Like the police can still seize your computer and see what's going on there. But in terms of it then spilling into the cloud, which I am. imagine, you just wouldn't. That would be the absolute nightmare, yeah. They seem to, and I've read some technical analysis of that thing, and they're describing it's sort of a blockchain style of thing. I mean, I'm not reassured by the phrase blockchain style. But the whole idea is that it's actually quite a clever way of doing it, and they seem

to have solved that huge problem. And I think this is why I'm so excited, which is, I'm going to retire. Like, if this works, it'll learn my voice. Yeah. My main job is, you know, replying to emails and things like that. So, you know, it can do that. It can probably, it'll, you know, be able to do my voice. Yeah, we can talk to you.

I'll just say, oh, I've got to do it on Zoom today. Yeah. And. Or on FaceTime. Yeah. Oh, sorry, the camera's not working. And then that's it. That's very good.

So I really secure but personalised. It's sort of like having your cake and eat it. It's very personalized but very secure. And it means it can go through your calendar. It can go through your photos and do all kinds of things. But what this makes me think, Charles, as well, is if they've managed to figure out how to do all this stuff with total privacy and security,

this tells me that the engineers at Apple really want a way to browse porn securely. I'm very impressed. I figured out how to, oh, you'll do it once on the server and it will get completely deleted, and there'll be no law enforcement will be able to get in there. I'm just going to say, I think, that they might want to replenish the tissue supply at Apple Park. That's all I'm going to say.

Oh, dumb. Yeah, and the porn will be optimized. It will be. It'll have the complete personal history of the person doing this. Oh, gross, that's so good. But anyway, but as we know, and this is a known fact in the tech world, is that porn has driven much of the technological advances in, like, I mean, why do you think the video cassette recorder got invented?

It wasn't so we could tape sitcoms off the TV. Like, this is just the way that it works. Why do you think streaming video involved? I don't understand what the, oh, is it such things like sexts? Like, it will get good at sending sex? Maybe it will. Yeah. I haven't hypothesized exactly what's going to happen in the sort of online

virtual prayer room thing that Apple employees are setting up. but something that's a brief session that disappears forever. You're saying that is going to be the use case. Whatever twisted shit they want to do with their AI, they can. Okay, so now that we have established that it's going to be amazing, what will we actually use it for? Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's not like there are so many things in your day

that you can't just keep track of them with your calendar. Well, you know what I mean? Maybe if we had successful careers and were busy, that might be useful. But one of the things that's going to be able to do is generate, content automatically. So they've said that in, I don't know, you know how they've got that pages, word processor that nobody uses. Apparently it'll be able to kind of write things on your behalf for you. So I think the Chase of website is pretty much sorted out. Take a topical story, apply one of the templates we've been using since 1999, copy and paste. I think insert

grammatical errors is a current step in the process. And then we'll go from there. But so you're generating content, photo editing, remove someone like, for instance, remove But, like, we know all this. Now, what's the next... Oh, what's the next phase? What's the next generation? Like, these are all things you can do with AI now. What is the thing that combining photos with calendar with email will do?

Like, won't it sort of go, hey, I've noticed... Like, what you want it to do is go, can you suggest a better career for me? That's pretty handy. Well, how about this? How about this? I've noticed that you're very good at making typos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to get a job at the chaser?

That's right. So, for instance, all right, let's say, so it has all my texts, all my emails, my full calendar, all my photos. Yeah. Okay. Generate images where I'm having a really meaningful time with my children when they're two or three. Rather than just saying, go away, look at screens, I'm busy. Yes. Show like, you know, me running through a field of flowers with my children and, like, reading them stories on my knee in a way that I, because they won't remember.

So what you're saying is we're going to create a better tomorrow by rewriting the past. By falsifying the past, is what I'm saying. Yeah, maybe, maybe refabricate my presents. Fabricate the present as well. Yeah, fabricate the present. So you'd rock up to your family at the end of each day and say, here are some photos from today. Here's what I've been doing.

That I've created of us going on this lovely family trip to the Blue Mountains. and we went on a lovely, healthy walk. And maybe you can say to this new Apple intelligence, okay, given what... So basically to guess, like, your family. And yourself. Yeah, yeah. Yes. You know, but what about, maybe you could actually use it the other way around

and actually use it for an empowering purpose child. Maybe you could say, look, looking at my entire, I don't know, relationship history and adjusting for that, what's a great venue for, I don't know, an anniversary dinner or something that I would not have chosen. Like all the things that I've wanted to do in the past, ignore that kind of stuff. They filter that out. That's the George Costanza set.

Yes. Where you do the opposite. Exactly the things that I've said or thought in the past. I mean, I must say, Facebook started surfacing my old Facebook, like, status updates from 10 or 15 years ago. And I hate that guy. It's so boring. And this is before I settle down when I live by myself. And it's just like, that guy was drowning.

Can we just... So I want to go back to that guy and just the opposite of that and I might even fabricate all my past social media posts. You're right, yes. So that, you know, 2011 Dom had witty epigrams to make it was up to fun stuff. Yeah.

Rather than kind of, I don't know, clearly just self-loathing in Facebook status update. So I'm optimistic that I can de, like I don't want to personalise this. I want to depersonalize it. That's what I want to do. Yeah. And so does that mean we'll have a... sort of new social hierarchy where people who have access to Apple intelligence will suddenly

be the people you want to hang out with because they seem to have such amazing lives. Yeah. Every time you see them on Instagram, they're, you know, jumping off the Burj Khalifa or, you know, the great thing is, oh, this is the wonderful thing about it basically turns it turns everybody into Craig. Yes. Yes, it's like a digital craig. But the best thing's going to be, Charles,

that all the dipshits I know who post embarrassingly unselfware photos of themselves. Like, I think I sent you the other day an image of someone we know who shared a photo of themselves in the first class seats in it, like in a plane or something. Yes, I saw that. You won't be able to believe any of that anymore. So there'll be no proof that this dipit shit

was actually in first class or whatever, drinking champagne or whatever it was, or taking a selfie with a celebrity because anyone will be able to fake that any time. So in actual fact, to get ahead of the curve, what you should do is start posting real posts of your drab existence to curate a sense of authenticity. That means that, you know, like, oh, Dom, he just posts, you know, about how boring his

life is and how he just chubs off the kids. My God, I really like him because he's not like everyone else. Oh, that's like a normal core thing. Yeah, norm court, yeah. Because what I was thinking is I might, you know, take a photo of myself having coffee alone in a cafe. Yes. Take all those photos now as raw material and then just, I don't know, insert, oh, my God, Dom had coffee with Duol-Lieper? That's amazing.

And so if it's really, and to get the best photo, as you know from AI, you need a nice big empty space for it to work with. I can do that. I can do that empty space. But isn't the point that not only can this sort of create images about it, but the AI, you know, And it's written by Apple, pretty smart people behind it. They should be able to orchestrate that life. Like, not only will they be able to synthesize a photo of you with Duolipa, they can curate a sense of Dom where Duolipa ends up reaching out to you

to go, hey Dom, you're so amazing, I want to have coffee with you. Can I have one of your famous coffees? You've really got to take it too far, John. You think this is going to finally fix you, don't you? No, this is right. This is what's going to happen. I'm going to have a beer with Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, at aviation.

Or it's going to be like, do you remember the time they invented their, that music-based social network within iTunes? I can't even have this called. Oh, yeah. Or the Apple Vision Pro or the Lisa. The Pippin. Their games console, the Pippin.

The Newton. The Newton. Yeah. It could well be like all of those things. Or it could be like, Siri. Hey, Siri. Do you think Apple Intelligence is going to be better than you? I'm pretty loyal to Apple.

It's just how I made. Pathetic. Oh, God. So, oh, it's such a terribly boring corporate bland. The problem is that is exactly the sort of thing Tim Cook would approve of. Yes. All right, what are you got? Google Apple's clearly going to be shit.

All the porn will be missionary. No, it'll be worse. All the poor will be California. 40 in wellness Our Gehry is from Road We're part of the Aconicless network Not powered by Apple Intelligence Yet

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