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Comment by GuinansEyebrows

8 hours ago

i wonder how many of them are like 100% of my requests?

- "set a timer for 14 minutes"

- "remind me to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow at noon"

- "turn off the bedroom lights"

that don't require any form of AI and have functioned perfectly well (aside from having a hard time when i mumble) for years on non-AI versions of Siri?

I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

  • I think you're going to need some kind of ML to turn that question into a structured search, and interpret the results.

    • Not necessarily. NLP is possible to do without any ML. See ELIZA [0] as an example, which used pattern matching and substitution to process natural language. A few simple rules can cover a majority of requests. It's still AI, but not ML.

      Though I do agree that the ML-based NLP thst we have today is much more usable, albeit more compute-expensive.

      [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Siri was always AI, but the popular connotation of "AI" changes all the time. It now means "LLMs built with transformers."