Siri + AI disappoints early testers

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Tip of the day: if you aren’t using Claude Projects yet, I suggest checking it out. You can just drag and drop all your docs & PDFs on a topic in a Project and then you can easily query it anytime you need to. Easy to share a project with others too…

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The most important news stories in AI this week

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1. Preview of iOS 18.1 is out. Siri's new AI features are having some struggles.

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A preview release of iOS 18.1 is out (for developers), with some of the new Apple Intelligence features available. Some tools that are already available are the new writing tools (summarise, proofread, rewrite, tones), AI-powered photo search and movie creation, as well as the new Siri. Ethan Mollick shared some initial feedback from his experience with AI Siri on LinkedIn. The main issue he pointed out is that the small, local model powering Siri isn't powerful enough for many tasks; Siri does have the capability to call a bigger model when needed (ie. ChatGPT), but isn't able to execute this seamlessly yet.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Apple's initial demos of Siri's AI features seemed rock solid, but there’s obviously still some work to do here. It may be part of the reason Apple has postponed the most advanced of the new Siri features to later in the year, possibly stretching into 2025. I’m sensing some dampened anticipations on iOS18 overall, with the feedback from early testers spreading over social media.

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2. IBM's Q2 revenue better than expected, thanks to AI. IBM saw a 4% y-o-y increase in Q2, which was attributable to its efforts in helping companies leverage AI. The biggest growth driver was the expansion of IBM's AI platform watsonx, which is used for automation and productivity enhancement for clients.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ IBM has put themselves in a strategic position, and are now riding the wave. The company has been working on automation for enterprises for a long time, and were early in the market with the watsonx system, which has been greatly improved with the advances in generative AI. They're now capitalising on companies' need to adopt AI safely and effectively for their business.

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3. Morgan Stanley's AI meeting note taker for Financial Advisors. Morgan Stanley has a suite of AI-powered tools, which already includes an assistant with knowledge of "Morgan Stanley’s intellectual capital". The new tool, called Debrief, is essentially an AI-powered note taker: it generates notes from meetings and saves them to Salesforce, surfaces action items, and drafts up a post-meeting email that can be sent at the advisor's discretion.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Manual meeting notes are a thing of the past – even longstanding banks are realising this. However, you don't have to make your own tool – there's already great, cheap note taker tools for companies out there for everyone; we've reviewed the best here.

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4. Figma disables AI feature after noticing it was mimicking Apple. Figma's recently introduced Make Designs, a feature which spins up design mockups based off prompts. When asked to design a weather app, it generated something very similar to Apple's first party app. The mishap was due to certain example screens being added to the model's context; these have now been removed and Figma has the feature on hold until it has thoroughly QA'd everything.

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‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ GenAI and copyright is a theme that won't get old anytime soon. Big, established companies are getting into similar situations on a daily basis, and the proactive response from Figma here (ie immediately pausing the feature while fixing it and explaining what happened) should probably be a best-practice response.