The Hypothetical Siri Brain Transplant

We’ve been hearing for a few weeks now that Apple is considering using a third party LLM for Siri, particularly Claude. I understand this is not usually the Apple way of solving a problem like this, but at least for the short term, it seems the right move.

I have no doubt that Apple will eventually have its own perfectly acceptable model to drive Siri, but at this point we just need Siri to work flawlessly. And if using someone else’s model for a year or two is how we get that, than I say get out the checkbook.

The New Browser Wars

There’s a new browser war heating up, and it’s all about artificial intelligence. Google—assuming they’re allowed to keep Chrome—is quickly turning it into an artificial intelligence-based browser experience. They’re not alone, though.

Firefox is adding experimental AI-powered link previews. Safari already has some basic artificial intelligence features. (And hopefully, we’ll learn that there are many more next week.) The Browser Company is discontinuing the ARC browser in favor of its new, unreleased browser, Dia, which will also rely heavily on artificial intelligence features.

It doesn’t surprise me that artificial intelligence will upend not only traditional search but also traditional browsing. I don’t think anyone is clear yet what that means.

But we can expect a lot of interesting experiments to show up in browsers over the next few years as it shakes out. If you’ve been using the same browser for a long time, this may be the time to get curious about some new competitors. In this case, I’m taking my own medicine, as I’ve been running ARC, until its recent cancellation announcement, and Brave, which is my favorite chromium-based browser. I think I’m going to even have to spend some time with Chrome. Interesting times.

A Remarkable, Unremarkable Thing

Recently, we had a family celebration. The reason is irrelevant, but the means of our celebration was our usual. We went to Disneyland. We’re fortunate to live close, and two of the four members of my immediate family work for Mickey.

So, we went to “the park,” where we shared a meal at a restaurant, rode the Pirates of the Caribbean, shared a delicious cookie, and stretched our legs by walking through the park before heading home. It was delightful.

While eating our meal, there was another family of four at the table next to ours. Mom, Dad, and two girls, just like us. Although the girls in this case were both under 10, and mom and dad were a bit younger than Daisy and I.

The thing is, I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. As soon as they got seated, both girls got on iPads, and both mom and dad got on their individual smartphones. For the entirety of their meal, they were all eyes on screens. After a while, I shared the observation with my family, and we made a little game of watching and waiting to see if any of them would talk to each other throughout the meal. The answer was, for all intents and purposes, that they didn’t.

Because I visit Disneyland often, I witness this remarkable yet unremarkable phenomenon frequently—kids in strollers with iPads, parents and couples in lines with iPhones. You’d think that after the expense and hassle of going to a place like Disneyland, you’d want to experience it a little, but remarkably, many people don’t.

I’ve been taking my girls to Disneyland their entire lives. Over the years, chatting with my girls while strolling, eating, and waiting in line turned into some of the most memorable conversations of my life. Why would you surrender that for an App?

We often talk about how people can’t put their phones down while in line at the market, but what about during moments of joy? When taking in a theme park with your family, at the beach, or on vacation? Those moments are found solely in your immersion in the now.

Pay attention the next time you are at a place like Disneyland. Notice how many people are remarkably, yet unremarkably, not even there. Don’t let that be you.

A Voice-Based Future?

I’m still thinking plenty about this collaboration between ChatGPT and Jony Ive. The Frontier Model LLMs are a revolutionary technology, but perhaps there is a new hardware paradigm for using them we haven’t seen yet.

Still, I think it’s going to be hard for people to give up their screens, but clearly that’s exactly what Altman and Ive are looking for. I do believe the paradigm of voice computing is underrated. We’re all so used to our keyboards and screens. It’s hard to imagine a world where your primary interface is your voice.

I’ve always been a fan of dictation, so voice computing makes more sense to me than it does to most people. But we never really had the technology to explore it fully until recently, and yet we still really haven’t gone very far in that experimentation.

Personally, I’ve been trying to work more with the ChatGPT and Gemini voice interfaces just to explore the rough edges of a future that is more based in voice computing, and I’m finding it more useful than I thought it would be, even at this early stage.

One of the best uses is as a thought partner, where I can talk about something I’m thinking about, writing about, or working on, and ask for constructive criticism of the idea. The voice interface will point out flaws in logic and thought in a way that is way more fluid than it would be with a keyboard and screen.

Granted there are still vast swaths of my computing that wouldn’t make sense with this paradigm, but what if it could evolve? Several years ago, there was a movie called Her, where the protagonist fell in love with his AI operating system, which seemed silly at the time, but now not so much so.

What’s interesting, however, was the hardware he used was just a little earbud. That was his computer. It talked to just him, and he talked back to it, and it handled the administrative details of his life. I could easily see such a computing interface becoming common in the not-so-distant future.