This Week's Sponsor:

Collections Database

A Powerful Database with iCloud Sync

Posts tagged with "artificial intelligence"

AppStories, Episode 378 – Are We Entering a Post-App World?

This week on AppStories, we explore whether we’re experiencing the beginning of the end of apps and consider what might replace them.

Sponsored by:

  • Genius Scan – A scanner in your pocket.
  • Jam – Developer friendly bug reports in 1 click.

Are We Entering a Post-App World?

[Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

Subscribe here.

On AppStories+, we explain why we’ve said goodbye to time tracking.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

Read more

Club MacStories Sample: BetterTouchTool Tips, Vision Pro Shortcuts, a Task Manager Review, and the Effect of AI on the Internet

We often describe Club MacStories as more of the MacStories you know and love reading on this website. That’s an apt shorthand for the Club, but when you’re being asked to sign up and pay for something, it still helps to see what you’re buying. That’s why every now and then, we like to share samples of some of what the Club has to offer every week.

So today, we’ve made Issue 408 of MacStories Weekly from a couple of Saturdays ago available to everyone. Just use this link, and you’ll get the whole issue. You can also use the links in the excerpts below to read particular articles.

Everybody in the Club gets MacStories Weekly and our monthly newsletter called the Monthly Log, but there’s a lot more to the Club than just email newsletters. All members also get MacStories Unwind+, an ad-free version of the podcast that we publish a day early for Club members. All Club members also have access to a growing collection of downloadable perks like wallpapers and eBooks.

Club MacStories+ members get all of those perks along with exclusive columns that are published outside our newsletters, access to our Discord community, discounts on dozens of iOS, iPadOS, and Mac apps, and advanced search, filtering, and custom RSS feed creation of Club content. Club Premier builds on the first two tiers by adding AppStories+, the extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered a day early, as well as full-text search of AppStories show notes, making it the all-access pass for everything we do at MacStories.

To learn more and sign up, you can use the buttons below:

Join Club MacStories:

Join Club MacStories+:

Join Club Premier:

Issue 408 of MacStories Weekly, which you can access here, starts with two excellent tips from Niléane on how to use BetterTouchTool to remap the Mac’s yellow and green ‘stoplight’ buttons. Like a lot of tips and workflows we share, Niléane’s was inspired by a similar technique Federico employed a couple of weeks before:

Two weeks ago, in Issue 406 of MacStories Weekly, Federico shared a tip for BetterTouchTool that resonated with me. Just like him, I am used to minimizing my windows instead of hiding them, which can be annoying since minimized windows no longer come up when you Command (⌘) + Tab to their app’s icon…

…after poking around in BetterTouchTool for a few minutes, I realized that the app allows you to change what the red, yellow, and green window buttons do. As a result, I was able to make it so that the yellow button will actually hide a window instead of minimizing it to the Dock.

Read more

The Browser Company Announces Act II for Arc: ‘The Browser That Browses For You’

Today, The Browser Company announced a selection of new features coming to their Arc browser for Mac as part of what they are billing ’Act II’ of their increasingly popular app. There are four features in total, centered around the theme of ‘the browser that browses for you.’

For those unfamiliar, Arc started as a Mac browser built around the Chromium code base with eye-catching features like tabs listed down the side, Split View, built-in ‘easels’ and notes, and the ability to adjust the visual look of webpages. Arc is now targeting what CEO Josh Miller has called ‘a post-Google Internet’ by implementing AI within the browsing experience, amongst other strategies.

Current ‘Arc Max’ AI features like ‘Ask On Page,’ which answers questions about the contents of webpages, and ‘5 Second Previews’, which summarises a webpage at the other end of a link, have all proved to be hits with users.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Arc. I would even call their ‘Shared Quotes’ feature my favorite ‘little’ feature in any browser right now. The Browser Company has big ambitions for 2024, including an imminent launch on Windows, and Miller had this to say about Arc’s next step:

“Here is our vision. It’s really simple. You tell Arc what to do, and Arc will go and do it for you.”

It’s a very broad statement, but with the new features announced today, the context of what he is saying comes more into focus. Two of these new features are available today, with the other two coming soon. Let’s take a look at them in detail.

Read more

How ChatGPT Changed Tech Forever→

I thoroughly enjoyed this story from a couple weeks ago by David Pierce, writing for The Verge about OpenAI’s ChatGPT turning one and how it created a revolution in the tech industry that no one saw coming:

We definitely seem to like being able to more quickly write business emails, and we like being able to ask Excel to “make this into a bar graph” instead of hunting through menus. We like being able to code just by telling ChatGPT what we want our app to do. But do we want SEO-optimized, AI-generated news stories to take over publications we used to love? Do we want AI bots that act like real-life characters and become anthropomorphized companions in our lives? Should we think of AI more as a tool or a collaborator? If an AI tool can be trained to create the exact song / movie / image / story I want right now, is that art or is that dystopia? Even as we start to answer those questions, AI tech seems to always stay one step and one cultural revolution ahead.

At the same time, there have been lawsuits accusing AI companies of stealing artists’ work, to which multiple US judges have said, essentially: our existing copyright laws just don’t know what to do with AI at all. Lawmakers have wrung their hands about AI safety, and President Joe Biden signed a fairly generic executive order that instructed agencies to create safety standards and companies to do good and not evil. There’s a case to be made that the AI revolution was built on immoral and / or illegal grounds, and yet the creators of these models and companies continue to confidently go ahead with their plans, while saying it’s both impossible and anti-progress to stop them or slow them down.

This all gets really heady really fast, I know. And the truth is, nobody knows where all this will be even 12 months from now, especially not the people making the loudest predictions. All you have to do is look at recent hype cycles — the blockchain, the metaverse, and many others — for evidence that things don’t usually turn out the way we think. But there’s so much momentum behind the AI revolution, and so many companies deeply invested in its future, that it’s hard to imagine GPTs going the way of NFTs.

I recommend reading the whole piece on The Verge. I quoted these paragraphs because they get right to the heart of the conflict that I also feel whenever I think about ChatGPT and similar tools. On the one hand, they were (largely? Partially?) built with data sets stolen from artists and creators (including this very website); on the other, the practical benefits of, say, using ChatGPT to help me proof-read my articles are undeniable.

I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot, perhaps because I make a living out of, well, creating content for the Internet. Is there a way to enjoy the power of LLMs without feeling weird and conflicted about how they were made in the first place? Will it even matter years from now? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping Apple will have one.

Permalink

Workflow Co-Founders Want to Bring AI to the Desktop→

When I read earlier this year that Ari Weinstein, one of the co-founders of Workflow before it was acquired by Apple, had left the company, I had a feeling he’d team up soon enough with Conrad Kramer, another Workflow co-founder. I was right. Alex Heath, writing for The Verge, has some initial details on Software Applications Incorporated, the new venture by Weinstein, Kramer, and Kim Beverett, another Apple vet you may remember from the original Siri Shortcuts demo at WWDC 2018:

In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tells me that their focus is on bringing generative AI to the desktop in a way that “pushes operating systems forward.” While they don’t have a product to show off yet, they are prototyping with a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The ultimate goal, according to Weinstein, is to recreate “the magic that you felt when you used computers in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“If you turned on an Apple II or an Atari, you’d get this basic console where you could type in basic code as a user and program the computer to do whatever you wanted,” he explains. “Nowadays, it’s sort of the exact opposite. Everybody spends time in very optimized operating systems with pieces of software that are designed to be extremely easy to use but are not flexible.”

An example he gives: “Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.”

They don’t have a product to show yet, but I’ll say this: if there’s anyone out there who can figure out how to turn generative AI into something more than a text prompt or writing assistant for Word and Notion – something that can be truly integrated with your computer, your data, and, well, your workflow, it’s this trio. I absolutely can’t wait to learn more about what they’re working on.

Also worth noting: the company’s website (great domain, too) is a delightfully retro, emulated browser version of Mac OS 8.

Permalink

The New York Times Declares that Voice Assistants Have Lost the ‘AI Race’→

Brian Chen, Nico Grant, and Karen Weise of The New York Times set out to explain why voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant seem primitive by comparison to ChatGPT. According to ex-Apple, Amazon, and Google engineers and employees, the difference is grounded in the approach the companies took with their assistants:

The assistants and the chatbots are based on different flavors of A.I. Chatbots are powered by what are known as large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They can then suggest words to complete a sentence.

In contrast, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command-and-control systems. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like “What’s the weather in New York City?” or “Turn on the bedroom lights.” If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can’t help.

In the case of Siri, former Apple engineer John Burkey said the company’s assistant was designed as a monolithic database that took weeks to update with new capabilities. Burkey left Apple in 2016 after less than two years at the company according to his LinkedIn bio. According to other unnamed Apple sources, the company has been testing AI based on large language models in the years since Burkey’s departure:

At Apple’s headquarters last month, the company held its annual A.I. summit, an internal event for employees to learn about its large language model and other A.I. tools, two people who were briefed on the program said. Many engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing language-generating concepts every week, the people said.

It’s not surprising that sources have told The New York Times that Apple is researching the latest advances in artificial intelligence. All you have to do is visit the company’s Machine Learning Research website to see that. But to declare a winner in ‘the AI race’ based on the architecture of where voice assistants started compared to today’s chatbots is a bit facile. Voice assistants may be primitive by comparison to chatbots, but it’s far too early to count Apple, Google, or Amazon out or declare the race over, for that matter.

Permalink