I've personally known Ari, the guy behind Sky, since the mid 2000s when he was a frequent visitor to the forum insanelymac.com, back when OSx86 was a big deal. Even back then, he really stood out and I'm glad he's continuing to make waves.
I think this acquisition makes a lot of sense and it's good business. Finding good MacOS developers who know the system level APIs more so than the docs is a tough go. It would make a lot of sense that OpenAI would just go ahead and hire out this expertise as they try to get their Mac app and their iOS app to get closer and closer to the system.
When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. Maybe that's not the right word? At least it's past it's peak.
Consider the efforts and costs of merging a new team with yours, getting different cultures and people to work together, integrating an entirely new code base with your own.
Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this strategy going forward.
Think of it this way, even with lots of capital on hand, will a company just poach/hire the other companies engineers or guy it out right for it's "IP"?
I find it concerning because OpenAI's failure will have a cascading effect. And failure doesn't mean collapse, just a declining stock, an out-competed company. Its leadership must feel like they're big enough to where buying out the competition or to add new product lines is a good strategy, but they haven't (as far as I know) turned a healthy profit yet? They already have so many skeptics that claim OpenAI could never raise enough revenue to match its valuation.
And it's not like they have any shortage of competition. Alphabet alone can play the acquisition game and win more readily. ChatGPT and Sora are great, but not they don't have enough of a difference for it to be a moat.
I don't know, I just hope it isn't consultants and MBA's making decisions now over there.
And Sky.app is for MacOS? Shouldn't they be locking in a stronger partnership with Apple and get a stake in Siri instead of competing against Siri and Apple Intelligence?
I guess I just don't get business enough, I'm sure this all makes sense to entrepreneurs.
M&A is a growth lever for startups, especially in a competitive market. Stripe bought Paystack. Databricks acquired Tecton, Neon, BladeBridge, Tabular, Arcion, MosaicML. Wiz bought Dazz, Gem Security, and Raftt. ServiceNow acquired Moveworks. Snowflake purchased Crunchy Data. CoreWeave agreed to buy Weights & Biases. Ripple acquired GTreasury. AlphaSense purchased Tegus. etc. etc.
>Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this strategy going forward.
Having been in several companies that been bought, disagree it's mostly pans out. Most of time, it's just a sub company that does whatever it was doing before and names on paychecks change.
However, revenue rarely increases to point purchase probably made sense or synergy is there.
That's why I said "ok" instead of "great" lol. sometimes it is a disaster, most of the time it's a minor loss or a break-even. when you consider that they could have just hired people and competed directly instead, it's usually a failure though.
It's a sign of executives feeling like they don't have enough control and influence over their own company to enable similar innovation and inventiveness like the competition.
> When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. At least it's past it's peak.
I feel like you might just be ignoring tons of acquisitions... back in 2004, Goole went on a spree and acquired a bunch of companies. I happen to know the founders of what later became Google Photos, but I think Google Maps was even more important... was it already past its peak?
Microsoft acquired Powerpoint in 1987. I don't think they peaked until long after that, but, hell: Microsoft acquired DOS in 1981, and there is no way in hell they had peaked before that point, lol.
I mean, you comment even talks about Siri... do you know that Apple bought that one in 2010? (They also bought the Shortcuts feature, acquiring a company called Workflow... which happens to be made by the same team as Sky ;P. But, I totally appreciate that 2017 might be considered after Apple "peaked", though I imagine most people would disagree, as Apple Silicon has been a massive market disruption... though, arguably, they bought PA Semi to pull off that project, lol.)
I had nearly the same reaction to the headline, I feel like they’re hitting a wall in terms of the things they can innovate on in house and are flailing and are looking for the next hit, in more ways than one. This is just a suggestion of that.
Seems like an acquihire. Honestly, I'm shocked that Apple didn't purchase them, given that Apple has nearly ZERO to show after three years since ChatGPT.
I mean, this seems to be exactly the sort of thing Apple was trying to sell us, right? And they still haven't pulled it off.
Apple is the smart one then maybe. You don't need to hire all the non-technical people, that's what causes issues/stagnation. They could have poached all their people instead. Or, they could have developed a competitor in less than a year (imho). I doubt they'll integrate it with their core-brand any sooner anyways.
My concern is, Sam Altman is now thinking "meh, let's just buy that company" instead of "damn, we need to dig in and beat these small guys".
> Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac. With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you’re writing, planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.
> We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.
AI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it. Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're doing all this work to basically work around jackass site operators who make everything require javascript and don't provide a documented user facing API.
The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off, all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent interface, so people can use their service without having to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.
But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint, do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)
There are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS apps.
The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time. They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a default application that people actually like.
One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to their app.
That makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts.
Shortcuts is the strangest programming "language" that I make useful things in.
My favorite is an automation that triggers when I turn on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth module, it checks the time of day and starts playing my favorite type of music for riding at that time - hard rock at daytime, EDM/synthy music at night.
Shortcuts convinced me to go to iOS. Android has similar stuff but they're all kinda futzy and hacky in unfortunate ways.
It's a bit surprising to me that, say, Zapier hasn't skunkworked up something like Shortcuts that could be crossplatform. It's not immediately their core competency but being able to roll out low code UIs across employees of a phone through that would make a lot of sense.
The unfortunate thing with iOS is that while there's some secret stuff with deep linking ultimately less stuff is exposed than what one might entirely want. But I _was_ able to make a "fake" Find My for my bluetooth headphones in about 5 minutes (bluetooth disconnect -> record lat/lon into a text file on my phone) and that was fun.
I should look at iOS again - every so often I try something like this in Android and people commonly suggest Tasker, but it's such a PITA to write anything in Tasker that I usually abandon the project.
macOS exposes a lot of affordances to code/xrpc/services/etc that Shortcuts (and previously automator) used. They let you do basically anything you'd want on macOS programmatically, without going through accessibility frameworks, code signing and sand-boxing issues. iOS as well to some extent.
Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.
Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and well as they can.
Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8 years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to expose their own hooks for automation.
Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird defensive Android thing in response to someone describing the existence of an Apple feature?
Yeah the closest thing I recall using is tasker but that relies on mostly private intents, the nice thing with shortcuts is it uses the same intents developers use for things like Siri Shortcuts so there’s first class support
Comes to prove that a great UI/UX can work wonders for users. This is what Alfred back in the day was dabbling with, except that Sky seems to have a modern natural language spin to it.
I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.
Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic" does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
btw: Don't know what they think their competitive advantage is going to be with this. Either apple will just clone it, or more likely and quicker (and probably already done) there will be a better open-source version of this that let's you freely choose your local/cloud LLM model provider.
They've had two years to do so, and haven't done anything. Their decision to completely abandon applescript has come back to bite them.
Also I wonder if the current dev team for macOS even knows much about the features that exist. Since mac os 9 apple has included a "summarize" service, you'd think this would be the first thing to be sprinkled with LLM magic. Instead they've just left that to rot and added a new layer for this
Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious. Siri still makes so many mistakes, Homepod can't answer anything substantial without "I've sent a link to your iPhone". If they simply let Claude back Siri, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now.
There is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then dominating by being the platform owner.
Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around being discontent with the currently available alternatives. Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.
I’ve noticed very recently (last several weeks) Siri (via my HomePod) is able to competently answer some very nuanced world knowledge questions that are sourced to random but still reputable websites — it appears to paraphrase enough to appear to be directly answering your question and then cites the source website. It only seems to get fouled up if it’s possible to confuse the question for something supposedly actionable that it chokes on. I have an Amazon Echo in the same room and usually direct such questions to Alexa, but trial Siri every so often to check for progress. And suddenly Siri just started giving appropriate answers with citations. It’s like they just hooked up something new to the Siri knowledge graph, and it’s pretty good.
I wanted to look up Japanese vocab easily with my voice while running. Wouldn’t let me do it (it could show me dictionary pages but wouldn’t speak the translation into my AirPods). However, I could look up English words just fine.
So I had to set my Siri language to Japanese, and now I can look up English translations of Japanese words…though I do have to speak Japanese.
We're still where we were for the past 2 years: by far the best voice assistant available on the market is... Home Assistant wired to a SOTA LLM via API key.
My entirely unsubstantiated theory is that Apple is a company that would not want to release a product it can't control 100%. You can't control an LLM 100%, so here we are.
"Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?" That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of uncomfortable questions for a control freak company.
Yeah, I think you nailed it better than I did, just the lack of predictability is likely enough.
I should also point out that I use an iPhone, partially because Apple being a control freak can lead to great products. That was not meant as an insult to them.
I've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much speculation.
MS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-style
That would be wild: a cash furnace merges with a pile of cash. I had forgotten just how late in the dot-com bubble AOL/TW happened. I think it's far more likely that Microsoft lets OpenAI hang, then pillages the corpse, while Apple goes on to boringly make giant piles of money from hardware.
Congrats to the Sky app developers, so OpenAI believes that the future is in computer assistants?
I don't buy this, it doesn't make sense to me that tools and interfaces made for human comfort and consumption is the right place to plug the AI to automate our lives.
IMHO the computing is ripe for a re-do with everything already being enshitified and putting another lay to cover all the shit we are in isn't going to help anybody.
Amreicans want to make the economy looks good, so they have to fake AI growth. To do that, they have to give OpenAIs a lot of money.
OpenAIs have so much money they have to make bets.
The best ways to make bets are: (a) do what others do: social video, app store, online shopping... (b) buy out other small promising companies so investors have no where else to look.
I've personally known Ari, the guy behind Sky, since the mid 2000s when he was a frequent visitor to the forum insanelymac.com, back when OSx86 was a big deal. Even back then, he really stood out and I'm glad he's continuing to make waves.
I think this acquisition makes a lot of sense and it's good business. Finding good MacOS developers who know the system level APIs more so than the docs is a tough go. It would make a lot of sense that OpenAI would just go ahead and hire out this expertise as they try to get their Mac app and their iOS app to get closer and closer to the system.
This is..disturbing.
When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. Maybe that's not the right word? At least it's past it's peak.
Consider the efforts and costs of merging a new team with yours, getting different cultures and people to work together, integrating an entirely new code base with your own.
Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this strategy going forward.
Think of it this way, even with lots of capital on hand, will a company just poach/hire the other companies engineers or guy it out right for it's "IP"?
I find it concerning because OpenAI's failure will have a cascading effect. And failure doesn't mean collapse, just a declining stock, an out-competed company. Its leadership must feel like they're big enough to where buying out the competition or to add new product lines is a good strategy, but they haven't (as far as I know) turned a healthy profit yet? They already have so many skeptics that claim OpenAI could never raise enough revenue to match its valuation.
And it's not like they have any shortage of competition. Alphabet alone can play the acquisition game and win more readily. ChatGPT and Sora are great, but not they don't have enough of a difference for it to be a moat.
I don't know, I just hope it isn't consultants and MBA's making decisions now over there.
And Sky.app is for MacOS? Shouldn't they be locking in a stronger partnership with Apple and get a stake in Siri instead of competing against Siri and Apple Intelligence?
I guess I just don't get business enough, I'm sure this all makes sense to entrepreneurs.
> When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating.
Google in it's heyday acquired: (a) Android (b) Google Maps (c) Youtube. It was anything by stagnating at the time.
From what I can tell, OpenAI is following a similar strategy.
> When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating.
That’s a gross over-simplification. M&A has been the modern way to grow for decades.
For startups? OpenAI hasn't been public for long enough to no longer be considered a startup.
M&A is a growth lever for startups, especially in a competitive market. Stripe bought Paystack. Databricks acquired Tecton, Neon, BladeBridge, Tabular, Arcion, MosaicML. Wiz bought Dazz, Gem Security, and Raftt. ServiceNow acquired Moveworks. Snowflake purchased Crunchy Data. CoreWeave agreed to buy Weights & Biases. Ripple acquired GTreasury. AlphaSense purchased Tegus. etc. etc.
>Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this strategy going forward.
Having been in several companies that been bought, disagree it's mostly pans out. Most of time, it's just a sub company that does whatever it was doing before and names on paychecks change.
However, revenue rarely increases to point purchase probably made sense or synergy is there.
That's why I said "ok" instead of "great" lol. sometimes it is a disaster, most of the time it's a minor loss or a break-even. when you consider that they could have just hired people and competed directly instead, it's usually a failure though.
It's a sign of executives feeling like they don't have enough control and influence over their own company to enable similar innovation and inventiveness like the competition.
> When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop features, it is stagnating. At least it's past it's peak.
I feel like you might just be ignoring tons of acquisitions... back in 2004, Goole went on a spree and acquired a bunch of companies. I happen to know the founders of what later became Google Photos, but I think Google Maps was even more important... was it already past its peak?
Microsoft acquired Powerpoint in 1987. I don't think they peaked until long after that, but, hell: Microsoft acquired DOS in 1981, and there is no way in hell they had peaked before that point, lol.
I mean, you comment even talks about Siri... do you know that Apple bought that one in 2010? (They also bought the Shortcuts feature, acquiring a company called Workflow... which happens to be made by the same team as Sky ;P. But, I totally appreciate that 2017 might be considered after Apple "peaked", though I imagine most people would disagree, as Apple Silicon has been a massive market disruption... though, arguably, they bought PA Semi to pull off that project, lol.)
This is just how companies work.
Maybe it is the opposite of microservice architecture. Buying a company is like a macroservice.
I had nearly the same reaction to the headline, I feel like they’re hitting a wall in terms of the things they can innovate on in house and are flailing and are looking for the next hit, in more ways than one. This is just a suggestion of that.
Seems like an acquihire. Honestly, I'm shocked that Apple didn't purchase them, given that Apple has nearly ZERO to show after three years since ChatGPT.
I mean, this seems to be exactly the sort of thing Apple was trying to sell us, right? And they still haven't pulled it off.
Apple is the smart one then maybe. You don't need to hire all the non-technical people, that's what causes issues/stagnation. They could have poached all their people instead. Or, they could have developed a competitor in less than a year (imho). I doubt they'll integrate it with their core-brand any sooner anyways.
My concern is, Sam Altman is now thinking "meh, let's just buy that company" instead of "damn, we need to dig in and beat these small guys".
Approximately no one has ever heard of Sky, and ChatGPT has a billion users. This is an acquihire to get talent, nothing more.
The recent prioritisation of the Apple ecosystem is interesting.
Sorra, Atlas, buying Sky.
There have been signs that Apple is going with Anthropic instead of OpenAI for integrating AI features.
This may partially be an aggressive strategic push to take the wind of out such a potential partnership.
What IS Sky? Their landing page is just about the acquisition and I can't infer much from the OpenAI announcement.
The 2nd paragraph in the article
> Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac. With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you’re writing, planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what’s on your screen and can take action using your apps.
> We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.
So it's probably a https://www.raycast.com/ competitor
https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview/
This is what you need to know.
Not sure if you saw the demo video but the blue "Trailer" button at the bottom of their page pops it up to watch.
https://sky.app/
Thoroughly unimpressed. Every one of these assistant apps always go to "send message/add something to calendar".
Hopefully the actual features and interoperability prove the ad wrong and there's a game changing UX behind it.
I've yet to see a useful case for these AI browsers that is something other than a dead simple task.
But when I browse the net, I'm not thinking about asking AI about the info on my screen. I can just read it?
And by no means am I anti AI, I use it a bit for coding
AI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it. Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're doing all this work to basically work around jackass site operators who make everything require javascript and don't provide a documented user facing API.
The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off, all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent interface, so people can use their service without having to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.
It feels like it's always the same 3-4 things.
Travel Bookings Recipes Calendar/Email integration
But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint, do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)
Clippy. It’s Clippy’s the whole way down.
Interesting! The folks who built this made what became Shortcuts on iOS. They are great hackers.
There are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS apps.
Yes.
Some more interesting background:
The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time. They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a default application that people actually like.
One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to their app.
That makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts.
you can see where it all started back in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc
Thanks for sharing, absolutely amazing
Shortcuts is the strangest programming "language" that I make useful things in.
My favorite is an automation that triggers when I turn on my motorcycle helmet's bluetooth module, it checks the time of day and starts playing my favorite type of music for riding at that time - hard rock at daytime, EDM/synthy music at night.
Shortcuts convinced me to go to iOS. Android has similar stuff but they're all kinda futzy and hacky in unfortunate ways.
It's a bit surprising to me that, say, Zapier hasn't skunkworked up something like Shortcuts that could be crossplatform. It's not immediately their core competency but being able to roll out low code UIs across employees of a phone through that would make a lot of sense.
The unfortunate thing with iOS is that while there's some secret stuff with deep linking ultimately less stuff is exposed than what one might entirely want. But I _was_ able to make a "fake" Find My for my bluetooth headphones in about 5 minutes (bluetooth disconnect -> record lat/lon into a text file on my phone) and that was fun.
I should look at iOS again - every so often I try something like this in Android and people commonly suggest Tasker, but it's such a PITA to write anything in Tasker that I usually abandon the project.
Same, never got Tasker to do anything useful for me (though it's been a while, granted)
macOS exposes a lot of affordances to code/xrpc/services/etc that Shortcuts (and previously automator) used. They let you do basically anything you'd want on macOS programmatically, without going through accessibility frameworks, code signing and sand-boxing issues. iOS as well to some extent.
Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.
Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and well as they can.
Which afaik is something that has been in Android for ages. What's so special about the iOs implementation?
Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8 years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to expose their own hooks for automation.
Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird defensive Android thing in response to someone describing the existence of an Apple feature?
Does Android have it? Some Googling tells me it has third party apps which enable it but no built-in equivalent.
Yeah the closest thing I recall using is tasker but that relies on mostly private intents, the nice thing with shortcuts is it uses the same intents developers use for things like Siri Shortcuts so there’s first class support
I've tried Shortcuts but I found the settings app really confusing. They really don't do a good job of explaining how to use them.
Seems pretty obvious Sky.app's functionality will land in the macOS ChatGPT app at some point. I wonder how Atlas fits into that story.
To jog people's memory about Sky: yes this is the app created by former Shortcuts/Workflow.app people
Comes to prove that a great UI/UX can work wonders for users. This is what Alfred back in the day was dabbling with, except that Sky seems to have a modern natural language spin to it.
I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.
Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic" does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
Sky is macOS only. It essentially gives an LLM access to various system APIs coupled with a floating user interface that you can access on command.
> Disclosure: An investment fund associated with Sam Altman held a passive investment in Software Applications Incorporated.
First I’ve heard of this app
Interesting..
btw: Don't know what they think their competitive advantage is going to be with this. Either apple will just clone it, or more likely and quicker (and probably already done) there will be a better open-source version of this that let's you freely choose your local/cloud LLM model provider.
> Either apple will just clone it
They've had two years to do so, and haven't done anything. Their decision to completely abandon applescript has come back to bite them.
Also I wonder if the current dev team for macOS even knows much about the features that exist. Since mac os 9 apple has included a "summarize" service, you'd think this would be the first thing to be sprinkled with LLM magic. Instead they've just left that to rot and added a new layer for this
Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious. Siri still makes so many mistakes, Homepod can't answer anything substantial without "I've sent a link to your iPhone". If they simply let Claude back Siri, they'd be light years ahead of where they are now.
There is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then dominating by being the platform owner.
Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around being discontent with the currently available alternatives. Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.
I’ve noticed very recently (last several weeks) Siri (via my HomePod) is able to competently answer some very nuanced world knowledge questions that are sourced to random but still reputable websites — it appears to paraphrase enough to appear to be directly answering your question and then cites the source website. It only seems to get fouled up if it’s possible to confuse the question for something supposedly actionable that it chokes on. I have an Amazon Echo in the same room and usually direct such questions to Alexa, but trial Siri every so often to check for progress. And suddenly Siri just started giving appropriate answers with citations. It’s like they just hooked up something new to the Siri knowledge graph, and it’s pretty good.
I wanted to look up Japanese vocab easily with my voice while running. Wouldn’t let me do it (it could show me dictionary pages but wouldn’t speak the translation into my AirPods). However, I could look up English words just fine.
So I had to set my Siri language to Japanese, and now I can look up English translations of Japanese words…though I do have to speak Japanese.
We're still where we were for the past 2 years: by far the best voice assistant available on the market is... Home Assistant wired to a SOTA LLM via API key.
My entirely unsubstantiated theory is that Apple is a company that would not want to release a product it can't control 100%. You can't control an LLM 100%, so here we are.
"Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?" That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of uncomfortable questions for a control freak company.
Does that sound plausible to anyone else?
This is for sure the case. Apple’s core product DNA (Run like an appliance, simple and reliably) does not jive with the LLM at all.
Now if only they listened to themselves and fixed their keyboard
Yeah, I think you nailed it better than I did, just the lack of predictability is likely enough.
I should also point out that I use an iPhone, partially because Apple being a control freak can lead to great products. That was not meant as an insult to them.
> Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious.
Plenty of us are glad. Look at Microsoft and Google tried to force feed users inmature broken LLM tech no one asked for
Lol, I pay no mind who post stuff like that. They are clueless.
Discussed (a bit) here. Others?
Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121891 - May 2025 (4 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691
I apologize, when I first saw your username, I thought you were ... lol.
I've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much speculation.
I wonder how that would even work with OpenAI's weird 'non profit' shenanigans.
MS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-style
That would be wild: a cash furnace merges with a pile of cash. I had forgotten just how late in the dot-com bubble AOL/TW happened. I think it's far more likely that Microsoft lets OpenAI hang, then pillages the corpse, while Apple goes on to boringly make giant piles of money from hardware.
"Software Applications Incorporated"... what a very generic company name
Maybe this is what smart actually useful Siri could become?
OpenAI is rapidly skating to where Apple should be, and isn't.
Wow! I was wondering why they were so quiet! Great news
Congrats to the Sky app developers, so OpenAI believes that the future is in computer assistants?
I don't buy this, it doesn't make sense to me that tools and interfaces made for human comfort and consumption is the right place to plug the AI to automate our lives.
IMHO the computing is ripe for a re-do with everything already being enshitified and putting another lay to cover all the shit we are in isn't going to help anybody.
> We’ve always wanted computers to be more empowering, customizable, and intuitive.
Agreed
> With LLMs, we can finally put the pieces together.
I think this is true
> That’s why we built Sky, an AI experience that floats over your desktop to help you think and create.
Never mind, hard pass
And another consolidation in the space to make the big players even bigger, when actually it's hard time to break up the tech feudalism party.
Amreicans want to make the economy looks good, so they have to fake AI growth. To do that, they have to give OpenAIs a lot of money.
OpenAIs have so much money they have to make bets.
The best ways to make bets are: (a) do what others do: social video, app store, online shopping... (b) buy out other small promising companies so investors have no where else to look.
Were there any revenue numbers for this acquisition?
Sky was never publicly available.
The AI grift must continue.
So it begins, they’ve acquired the first half. Now they just need to buy or fork .Net from Microsoft.
i honestly thought it was the entire joke of the headline and all the comments would be mentioning skynet
but ctrl-f says net appears once
[dead]
I don’t know how this will help but okay.
Next step towards AGI?
Perhaps Artificial General Illusion?