ChatGPT Atlas

OpenAI picking up where Apple Intelligence continues to severely lag.

I'd prefer these features were bundled into MacOS.

Where possible, process using FoundationLLM, and having Apple reach for their own privately hosted instance of a frontier model when needed.

It seems obvious to me the company must transform macOS's capabilities here as quality AI assistance is enmeshed in the operating system's UX as a whole.

I think Apple Intelligence probably has good bones to begin with but is vastly underpowered in the local model and needs to hide frontier model usage completely in its tech stack.

The whole integration thing is weird. Siri sucks. ChatGPT can be triggered in a similar way. Siri can use ChatGPT. AppleIntelligence is garbage. I think apple is in a weird crisis spot where they can't quite figure out how to integrate it all, and are scared of ditching Siri entirely. Or maybe any kinds of ChatGPT integrations have just been stopgaps.

Or, they go way deeper into integrations. They let ChatGPT in deeper. And they even give up that coveted 'default search' spot that Google pays them ~20b a year for. Atlas seems like it would compete with Safari?

It is interesting that OpenAI seems to be doing an Apple-first approach with some of its projects (sora2, Atlas)

> Siri sucks.

I’m surely in a niche group here, but I’m appreciating Siri more and more.

It’s a mostly competent tool for basic operations and simple questions. For something I interact with over audio, I’ll choose that over a bullshit machine any day of the week.

Not touching os integration for this shit with a 20 ft pole.

Siri does nothing except set timers. It is completely useless.

I only use Siri for setting reminders and thankfully it works just fine for that.

> I'd prefer these features were bundled into MacOS.

I’d prefer they wouldn’t.

> It seems obvious to me the company must transform macOS's capabilities here as quality AI assistance is enmeshed in the operating system's UX as a whole.

A hundred thousand times no! Today’s Apple is highly incompetent¹ on the software and UX design fronts. They’re making macOS more broken by the release and you want them to screw it up even more with invasive features that they’ve proven they’re not good at? Might as well switch to <insert OS you don’t like> already.

¹ I believe they could do better if they had more time between releases or smaller scopes. But they don’t do that, so the result is the same.

We use it to play music in the car on Spotify sometimes. While it is really bad ad this we found out it mishears quite reliably so there are now some crazy things that I would have never played myself that my family has heard in the car. This has brought a lot of joy to some mundane drives.

But when I am alone on a run I really wished it would just work because without someone else to laugh about it, it really sucks

I think my expectations for apple intelligence were just too high. All I've really seen it do on my macbook is suggest "Sounds great!" or "See you there!" as responses in Messages, and it's like, really, it took the best engineers on earth working round the clock to come up with this?

That's interesting. It has literally gotten worse over time. The same queries that were fine earlier now fail or go wrong. Too often it fails with basically "I can't do that" but not explain why.

A tool like that shouldn't just be "mostly competent" -- the failures just mean it's not worth the time to try (i might as well use another guaranteed tool rather than the coin flip and time sink of asking siri).

That's funny you mention that—very similar experience here. My partner and I often get a laugh out of the strange occasional errors. Things like responding with "…huh?", and then completing the task.

I'd rather see a robot fail rather than eat the world and fill it with trash. But the running use case does sound very annoying!