Tag: efforts
Report: Apple’s AI and ‘Siri’ Efforts Hindered by Caution, Dysfunction
Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT… For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there.
They’d left Apple last fall because “they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs…according to two people familiar with their thinking… They’re now working on Google’s efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people.”
MacRumors summarizes the article this way. “Siri and Apple’s use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information’s Wayne Ma.”
The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company’s AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company’s AI technologies. Apple’s virtual assistant is apparently “widely derided” inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently “devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant.”
SiriâOE’s leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE’s usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it “a waste of time and money…” Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant’s functions to be performed on-device.
Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE’s responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple’s website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users.
Similarly, Apple’s design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear “all-knowing.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Report Details Turmoil Behind Apple’s AI Efforts, ‘Siri X,’ and Headset Voice Controls
The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company’s AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered Siri and the company’s AI technologies. Apple’s virtual assistant is apparently “widely derided” inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time.
By 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently “devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant.” Siri’s leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse Siri’s usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about Siri coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it “a waste of time and money.”
Many Apple employees purportedly left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, including the large-language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally attempted to persuade engineers who helped Apple modernize its search technology to stay at the company, before they left to work on large-language models at Google.
Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give Siri the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing Siri, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant’s functions to be performed on-device.
Cook and other senior executives requested changes to Siri to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers Siri’s responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from Siri to push users directly to Apple’s website instead.
Siri engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released.
Engineers claim to have spent months persuading Siri designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up Siri to answer the huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple’s design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a Siri answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted Siri to appear “all-knowing.”
In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed “Blackbird.” The effort sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness.
Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed “Siri X,” for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri’s processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird.
Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X, which killed the ambitious project to make Siri more capable. Siri X was mostly completed in 2021 and now many of the voice assistant’s functions are processed locally.
Most recently, the group working on Apple’s mixed reality headset were reportedly disappointed by the demonstrations provided by the Siri team on how the virtual assistant could control the headset. At one point in the device’s development, the headset team considered building an alternative method for controlling the device using voice commands because Siri was deemed to be unsatisfactory.
This article, “Report Details Turmoil Behind Apple’s AI Efforts, ‘Siri X,’ and Headset Voice Controls” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Russia abandoned efforts to take more territory and is focusing on defense, Ukraine claims
Apple Investing Another $200 Million in High Tech Carbon Removal Efforts
Apple is investing up to an additional $200 million in the Restore Fund, doubling its initial $200 million commitment. The fund will be managed by Climate Asset Management, a joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination.
With the new investment, Apple is aiming to remove one million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year while also generating a financial return for investors. Apple suppliers that become part of the fund will be able to take advantage of new high-impact carbon removal projects.
“The Restore Fund is an innovative investment approach that generates real, measurable benefits for the planet, while aiming to generate a financial return,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives. “The path to a carbon neutral economy requires deep decarbonization paired with responsible carbon removal, and innovation like this can help accelerate the pace of progress.”
Climate Asset Management and Apple want to focus on nature-forward agricultural projects that generate income from sustainably managed farming practices as well as projects that conserve and restore critical ecosystems that remove and store carbon from the atmosphere. Apple says that Restore Fund investments will be subject to “rigorous social and environmental standards.”
Apple has achieved carbon neutrality for its corporate operations, and it has encouraged its suppliers to become carbon neutral by 2030. Apple ultimately wants all Apple-related operations to be carbon neutral by that date, and more than 250 of its manufacturing partners have committed to that goal.
Apple’s earlier investments in the Restore Fund were done in partnership with Conservation International and Goldman Sachs. With that contribution, Apple is working to restore 150,000 acres of sustainably certified working forests and protect another 100,000 acres of native forests, grasslands, and wetlands. These projects are forecast to remove one million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year by 2025.
This article, “Apple Investing Another $200 Million in High Tech Carbon Removal Efforts” first appeared on MacRumors.com
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Cohere expands enterprise LLM efforts with LivePerson partnership
: Chipotle must not interfere in union efforts, shareholders say in proposal
NLRB accuses Activision Blizzard of labor violations during unionization efforts
Activision Blizzard, publisher of the Call of Duty franchise, has been accused by a U.S. federal agency of spying and intimidating workers amidst unionization efforts at the company. According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the video game publisher has been illegally surveilling employees and threatening to shut down internal chat channels to keep the staff from organizing.
As reported by Reuters, the Communication Workers of America union has accused Activision Blizzard of illegal labor practices as the union has sought to help workers at the company organize. A spokesperson with the NLRB told Reuters that a settlement has been issued with Activision and unless the company agrees the board will issue a complaint against the company in California and three other states.
A spokesperson with Activision told Reuters that the claims from the CWA were false and that the company was committed to fighting toxic workplace culture.
Unionization efforts at the publisher have been slowly picking up, with workers staging a walkout last year to protest “a lack of gender equality at the company.” The CWA claims that Activision used “security staff to keep tabs on workers during the walkout.” Another claim from the union is that the publisher threatened to close workers’ internal slack channels “where employees frequently discussed working conditions.” A spokesperson with the CWA told Reuters that both claims were found to have merit.
The reports of union busting within Activision Blizzard couldn’t come at a worse time as the company is still in the midst of being bought by Microsoft. The deal has yet to be finalized as the merger is facing increasing scrutiny from the FTC and European Commission, but it’s expected that the deal will be approved sometime at the end of April.
This is also not the first time anti-union complaints have been lodged at Activision. Last year a separate NLRB complaint claimed that the company used a policy limiting what workers can post on social media to bar them from discussing working conditions, as reported by Reuters.
TikTok whistleblower claims US data privacy efforts are seriously flawed
TikTok’s efforts to address US data privacy fears may have holes. A self-proclaimed whistleblower talking to The Washington Post says the social network’s plan to protect American users’ data, Project Texas, has major flaws. The former Trust and Safety team member claims the $1.5 billion initiative will still let TikTok connect to parent company ByteDance’s Toutiao, a well-known Chinese news app. That link could theoretically allow China to access US data. A truly secure approach would require a “complete re-engineering” of the service’s infrastructure, the ex-employee says.
The staffer also claims to have met with the offices of Sen. Chuck Grassley and Sen. Mark Warner to discuss the alleged weaknesses. Representatives for both senators acknowledged that meetings had taken place.
We’ve asked TikTok for comment. Unnamed people at the social media giant tell The Post that the claims are “unfounded,” and the Toutiao code only amounts to a “naming convention and technical relic” that doesn’t tie the app to China. They also believe that the relocation of US data to Oracle servers undercuts the assertion that Toutiao could affect the US business. The whistleblower was only employed for half a year, and he supposedly left months before Project Texas was finalized. He may not know the full picture, in other words.
TikTok has repeatedly denied cooperating with the Chinese government, and there’s no publicly known evidence to that effect. Douyin, the equivalent app available inside China, has completely separate content.
The timing of the purported revelation isn’t good for TikTok. House and Senate bills (Warner co-sponsored the latter bill) could lead to nationwide TikTok bans if they become law, and CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to testify before the House on March 23rd to address security and child safety concerns. Politicians are worried the Chinese government may use TikTok to collect data on Americans and spread propaganda, and the report doesn’t help ease those fears.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-whistleblower-claims-us-data-privacy-efforts-are-seriously-flawed-211255093.html?src=rss