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Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom
(www.theregister.com)
the hallucinations will continue until morale improves
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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All year long, from January to Decuary.
The full ten months of the year?
lmao
Thanks, magical mushroom man
In addition to pushing something before it’s ready and where it’s not welcome, Apple’s own stinginess completely screwed them over.
What do LLMs need to be smart? RAM, both for their weights and holding real data to reference. What has apple relentlessly price gouged and skimped on for years? Yeah, I’ll give you one guess…
For 15 years, Apple has always lagged behind Android on implementing new features, preferring to wait until they felt their implementations were ready for mainstream consumption and it's always worked out for them. They should have stuck to that instead of jumping on the AI bandwagon with a half baked technology that most people don't want or need.
Unfortunately, AI is moving at such a pace that this IS the usual Apple delayed-follow. They had to feed the public hype for something like 9 months. And it doesn’t seem like a true fix for hallucination is coming, so they made their choice to move ahead. Frankly I blame Wall Street because at this point they will eviscerate anyone who doesn’t have a demonstrated AI plan and shipped products around it. If anyone is at the core of this craze, it’s investors, because they are still in the “we don’t know how big this thing is going to get” phase with AI. We’re all dealing with the consequences.
Interestingly though, I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet. People did raise the flag that the Internet wouldn’t have the same reliability as traditional media, because anyone could post anything. And that’s remained true. We have mass disinformation campaigns galore, and also specific incidents of false viral stories like “the Pope has died” which are much like this case, just driven by malicious humans instead of hallucinating software.
It makes me wonder if the problems with AI will never be truly solved but we will just digest AI and learn to live with it as we have with the internet in general. There is also a comparison in my mind between AI and self-driving cars, because every time one of those has a big fuck up we all shout and point and cry that the tech will never be trustable, meanwhile human drivers are out there killing by the hundreds of thousands annually and we don’t even blink at that anymore.
the problems with (the current forms of generative) AI will not be solved, because they cannot be solved. They are intrinsic to the whole framework.
Error correction is also intrinsic to all of computing and telecommunications, though. That’s a loose comparison but I hope we can make progress on this and get it to a manageable state, even if zero is impossible in principle. A lot of things in life only asymptotically approach zero and yet we live.
Well they're half doing the right thing, just collecting app analytics to train on now so they can properly do it later, seeding the open ecosystem with MLX, stuff like that.
But... I don't know why they shoved it in news and some other places so early.
LLMs
Emphasis on the first L in LLM. Apple's model is specifically designed to be small to work on phones with 8 gigs of ram (the requirement to run this)
The price gouging for RAM was only ever on computers. With phones you got what got, and you couldn't pay for more.
What do you mean couldn't pay for more? There are plenty of sub-$200 android phones with 8GB of RAM, and 12-16GB are fairly standard on flagships these days. Asus ROG Phone 6 is rather old and already came with 16GB what, three years ago?
It is definitely doable, there only needs to be willingness. Apple is definitely skimping here.
The iPhone has one ram option. If you buy an iPhone 16 your only option is 8 gigs.
Ah I see. I understood you meant that bigger RAM modules aren't available in the industry so apple couldn't add this even if they paid more, not that we as customers couldn't spec a phone however we'd like. That makes sense now.
Yeah... and it kinda sucks because it's small.
If Apple shipped with 16GB/24GB like some Android phones did well before the iPhone 16, it would be far more useful. 16-24GB (aka 14B-32B class models) are the current threshold where quantized LLMs really start to feel 'smart,' and they could've continue trained a great Apache 2.0 model instead of a tiny, meager one from scratch.
I don’t know how much RAM is in my iPhone 14 Pro, but I’ve never thought ooh this is slow I need more RAM.
Perhaps, it’ll be an issue with this stupid Apple Intelligence, but I don’t care about using that on my next upgrade cycle.
My old Razer Phone 2 (circa 2019) shipped with 8GB RAM, and that (and the 120hz display) made it feel lighting fast until I replaced it last week, and only because the microphone got gunked up with dust.
Your iPhone 14 Pro has 6GB of RAM. Its a great phone (I just got a 16 plus on a deal), but that will significantly shorten its longevity.
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What I find surprising in the debate about AI and hallucinations is that everyone points the fact that's it's very dangerous and it will spread misinformation.. But the problem is the inability or unwillingness to fact check our information.
Nobody wants to fact check something they saw on meta or tik tok. Nobody will. There is no difference between someone trusting some random influencer and someone trusting an AI. They are both set to fail the same way. Both lack critical thinking.
Instead of being afraid of AI and hallucinations we should be investing massively in teaching the newer generations on fact checking and critical thinking.
IA is a great assistant but only if you can fact check it. If you can't or won't then it's a terrible assistant that will set you up to fail.
To be clear, I also struggle to fact check stuff and I definitely was misinformed many times in the past. Nobody is really immune to that problem. IMO IA doesn't change much about that problem.
But you shouldn't have to actively fact check every headline from the BBC because their headline doesn't actually say what you read.
And there's very little value to "summarizing messages" if you aren't actually summarizing messages and the content doesn't match the summary.
Yes, you should do more critical thinking, but lowering the quality of information of every interaction with the internet very clearly makes things worse.
If you have to fact check everything it says, we're better off as a species boiling the developers in dog shit.
"we've added a profoundly energy intensive feature that is wrong most of the time" okay, get in the vat.
What I find surprising is that so many people (i.e. you) still claim to fact check everything. You don't. I guarantee it.
Most people don't read news for a living. You can't fact check everything you read online. That's physically impossible. And if you'd be honest to yourself, 95% of headlines you read are just noise and you don't read any further. Not because you're too stupid, but because you're not that interested in Trump's latest shenanigans or Italy's economic outlook.
You didn't even read my entire comment...
Read it entirely and you will see that this aggressive tone wasn't necessary or justified.
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This is true. Its baffling to me that so many people 'trust' influencers as much as they do.
Curse you, AI from 1974!
AI-generated products can be a bad fit for news
No shit. The fact they only discovered that once they've got burned proves they never even questioned what generative AI does.
Though I'm sure half of the blame is from them asking it to tack the most clickbaity headlines on every article they can. Even human editors all but outright lie in those, of course an AI is going to hallucinate you the best title it can.
they didn't. This is about a properly written headline by BBC being butchered when summarized by apple intelligence, which they have no control over.
The article doesn't explicitly state it, but the wording implies that this headline was not created by BBC. This appears to be a service running on Apple products producing its own summary of the news article. So the BBC didn't get burned by something they did and that's what they're complaining about.
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That's the BBC criticising Apple for indiscriminately mangling all notifications with AI, like news headlines. The BBC could boycott the Apple platform, but that's basically their only lever to stop Apple doing this besides asking nicely.
I didn't get that from the article but then, yeah, if it's Apple rewriting BBC headlines like that, what the hell are they thinking.
They aren't. They're just putting AI on everything.
claiming that Luigi Mangione [...] had shot himself.
AI-generated content is prone to inaccuracies
Somebody would call that an "inaccuracy"?
If I serve you a pile of lukewarm shit on a plate and say here's your dinner, would anybody call that an "inaccuracy"??
I say, life and death is even more than that.
Ahh yes, the sales and marketing hype of AI continues while the public is still being fed this bullshit.
There are very few good use cases for AI, but sales people continue to peddle it for fucking everything.
Yesterday I was driving and my Android Auto asked if I wanted to enable AI to summarize my text messages. In what world is that a good idea? Text messages are already short. Why would I need a computer trying to make it shorter and potentially fucking up all the context?
There's a famous quote attributed to Charles Babbage with regard to his difference engine (or some other calculation machine of his invention) which goes: "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Apprehension is right, Mr. Babbage. You were lucky to find yourself talking to those who, in some unconscious way, suspected that something might be wrong in their thinking, leading them to at least enquire. There are those whose ideas are so confused, or even so completely lacking, that they will assume that no matter what is put into the machine, the right answers will come out.
graphene os looking more & more attractive every day
It's great. Been using it for three or four years now. Never looked back.
“Intelligence”
I have a few friends at the Beeb, albeit not in the newsroom, and they have a blanket ban on ALL GenAI tools that aren't self-hosted. I would be very surprised if IT at the BBC wasn't blocking Apple Intelligence outright.
Although reading the article, I can't really tell if this means content was rewritten on the BBC content side, or a hallucination on-device using BBC content.
Well read the BBC article on this then: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno
It's an iPhone 'feature' that summarises a bunch of notifications into one. It took a set of BBC headlines and turned them into "Luigi Mangione shoots himself..." They don't list the article that was being summarised so I don't know what the original headline was.
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