Let's Talk THAT Apple AI Paper—Here's the Real Takeaway the Internet is Ignoring

A single research paper from Apple just broke the internet. And frankly, both sides of the resulting flame war are missing the point.

I’m so tired, guys. I get that the internet is the greatest narrative simplification machine to ever exist. I grew up online in the 90’s (and earlier, you don’t earn those gray hairs for nothin’).

But even factoring in the usual internet-leaps-to-conclusions, this was bad. And I gotta say as much as I want to avoid ad hominen (or ad corporatum) attacks here, it is very very tempting to make this about the fact that the company that cannot make Siri work properly is issuing a nasty paper titled “The Illusion of Thinking” to dunk on people doing the actual work and producing excellent models.

I just had a fantastic 20 minute conversation with OpenAI’s new Advanced Voice Mode today. It’s really really good. Siri could not do this.

But! But we don’t do those kinds of attacks here because of two reasons: 1) the researchers aren’t to blame for all of Apple’s problems with AI, and 2) it’s just a silly reason to avoid learning from a useful paper.

So my view is let’s dig in, understand what happened here, and understand what we can actually learn from the paper that is making people claim AI is over, AI is dead, etc. This is an example of where the discourse is at:

No. It’s not. And flame wars aren’t helping anybody. So let’s actually understand what’s happening and learn.

Dig in to this article and you’ll get: what Apple actually did, what everybody is missing about the paper, and how it will actually help you build better AI solutions day-to-day. And if you’re not building in AI, learning this stuff is gonna help strengthen your memetic immune system so you don’t fall for the next AI-is-dead meme.