The Telepathic Computer - Apple's AI problem and what Siri should be
accelerateordie.comIn 2021, I built the first real-time video generation AI app for Apple Silicon. It was revolutionary - until it started melting iPhones. When my demo literally burned Sam Altman's hand, I discovered that Apple's on-device AI hardware was not designed for modern AI.
Look inside any M-series Mac today. Nearly half the silicon - the Neural Engine cores - sits idle, designed for the pre-transformer era of AI. Meanwhile, my ninety-five-year-old father struggles with a seventy-five-inch screen he can barely see, finding brief moments of magic only when speaking to Siri.
The problem isn't just technical - it's ideological. Apple's privacy stance prevents them from gathering the real-world data needed for truly adaptive interfaces. But there's a solution: AppleCare Platinum, a premium human support service that could evolve into a radical new kind of UI - by serving as an Enders Game for AI computer use training data.
I don't see why Apple couldn't just renege their privacy agreement and tell their userbase to pound sand. Not like they'd have any real alternatives anyways.
Apple could afford to hire a bunch (10K? 50K?) of people to participate in multi-year user studies to mostly sort this out.
Or they could afford to lose ~10-50k lifelong customers to accrue the data required to onboard the next million users. I think people vastly overestimate how many Apple customers consider privacy a dealbreaker for their purchase.