Apple’s January 2025 OS Updates Enhance Apple Intelligence, Fix Bugs

Just updated. Did NOT activate AI.

Guess they got enough heat?

Sorry, should have been more specific; updated macOS to 15.3. Haven’t done iOS yet.

iOS 18.3, on the other hand, DID activate AI.

Not for me…15 Pro Max. I’m had not turned it on so apparently it respected that.

Listening to OpenAI CEO tonight talking about how AI is a game changer that leap frogs society to a new level.

Meanwhile, it’s so stupid it thinks I have 5 fingers on my right hand.

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While odd, it can be viewed as artistic license that it has me emerging from the INSIDE of the piano, rather than sitting in front of the keyboard. But there’s no world where giving me 6 fingers is anything but a design error that would give a 5th grade art homework assignment a “C” or lower.

But we’ve all been seeing these extra-finger AI graphics for a couple years now. I’m mainly disappointed that the magic of Apple pouring their billions into this didn’t give us any better outcome than the multi-fingered junk that’s been going around the Net for a while.

But more, I don’t get how software can screw up this bad. I’m a career software engineer. What is the algorithm that creates people? Doesn’t it model people in some way, kind of like 3-D animation/rendering software? With rules about how to articulate elbows, general proportions, and little details like, ya know, HOW MANY FINGERS to generate on each hand??

Like, how does this happen?? Does the software have trouble counting to 5?? Or does it have a +/-1 degree of freedom when assembling phalanges? And for goodness’ sake, why don’t both hands match?? I’ve never seen a genmoji with 3 eyes or 2 mouths…

So, sorry Sam Altman, I’m not feelin’ it. I’d be really embarassed to put software like this out. But if I got paid that much, I probably wouldn’t care either :-)

Because it doesn’t have any concept of what a “human” or a “finger” might be. It has been trained on millions of tagged pictures, not all of which are going to be realistic. It then uses probabilities to “generate” an image based on your requested description.

When you ask for a picture of a person, it doesn’t know what a person is supposed to look like. It simply knows that out of however many millions of pictures it was trained on, a particular subset were tagged as “person”, and is probabilistically extrapolates from there.

The result is therefore only as good is the data it is trained on, and we have absolutely no clue what that might be. And I’m sure it includes all kinds of artistic renderings that defy real-world biology.

Mmm. Probably should (finally) update to iOS 18 on my primary device, and macOS 15 on both my desktop and server machines. I would have (should have) done it over the holidays as I promised myself, but Tab was put down in late December and the trauma and grief of that hasn’t left me yet. I’ll do the server machine first, I think, on the grounds that the opportunity for total surprise should be fairly minimal.

Apple Intelligence acronym:

iASS

Any takers for what it stands for

You might find this interesting:
Once a model is trained, it generates an image by starting with an image of random noise and refining it into a coherent picture through gradually removing noise.

How to Distinguish AI-Generated Images from Authentic Photographs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.08651

You may be right. But I’m skeptical. I have never seen a picture, or even artists rendering, of someone with 6 fingers. And if it’s using the aggregate of millions of pictures, its “intelligence” would have easily told it to eliminate the couple odd-balls out there, causing it to ALWAYS render humans with 5 fingers.

Yes we do: billions of photos of people with 5 fingers on each hand.

I’m not impressed. Again, a 7 year old would not even draw a stick figure with 6 fingers. OpenAI has the world of data at its “fingertips”. And we’re going to be gaslit into giving it a pass on something this ridiculously unintelligent?

Not happening.

The problem has to do with the many different ways fingers can appear in training images.

It’s also improving in the top systems—Image Playground would seem to be, like much of Apple Intelligence, well behind the times. I asked ChatGPT for some images of hands playing the piano, and while they’re not necessarily perfect, they all had the right number of fingers.

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We don’t know what those photos actually look like.

As @ace pointed out in the article he cited, photos don’t usually include beauty shots of hands. Even data sets designed for hand recognition don’t consist entirely of pictures like this. Fingers (especially thumbs) may be obscured. Wrists may not be visible. Multiple hands (from multiple people may be close together and partially obscured, making it not-obvious what parts connect where.

You and I understand human physiology enough to know that the overwhelming majority of people have two arms, terminating in two hands, each with five fingers in a mirror-image configuration. But the image-generation ML models don’t have any such knowledge - they just have the images they’re given and they don’t have any of the meta-knowledge that you and I use to make sense of the ambiguous images.

And then just to make things extra confusing, there is a lot of artwork out there that deliberately distorts physiology (e.g. https://ring.cdandlp.com/fast54/photo_grande/115298867.jpg - how many fingers does the caricature of Ian Anderson, on the left, have?). I’m sure all kinds of images like that are also in the training data, but can you train a neural net to learn the artistic style without also picking up wrong facts (like the number of fingers a person should have)? I don’t think the tech is close to being there.

People and companies with a product to sell always exaggerate the products pros and try to pretend the cons don’t exist. That’s marketing. I’m not the least bit surprised that “AI” vendors are doing it.

With most products (e.g. when someone claims that their car, or beer or deodorant spray is going to make you irresistible to the opposite sex), we assume that this is taking place and we usually ignore the hype. And I’m sure the public will soon get just as jaded with respect to generative AI, as its failures make more and more headlines.

And yet if you ask a 5 year old how many fingers are on each hand, you will always get the correct answer.

The world is full of confusing images. That’s why scientists don’t gain intelligence by casual web surfing. If scanning Google Images gives your algorithm embarrassingly dumb results, then you might consider tweaking your algorithm to tap into the trillions of searchable facts, also online.

For example, if you Google “how many fingers are on the human hand” worded a million different ways and compile and statistically analyze the results, I bet you will never, ever, conclude the answer is 6.

Still not sold that this is “intelligent”.

These AI models are significantly younger than five years old. We’re in early times still. Let’s see if things get better.

Absolutely correct. Which is why I never call these software products “AI” (except when referencing what other people call them), because there is no intelligence there, not at the level of a 5-year-old, not even at the level of a small animal.

The software generates output based on probabilities derived from its training data and has absolutely zero understanding of anything it processes.

These products are much more accurately described as “ML” (machine learning) or “NN” (neural network) software products, which more accurately describes what they are doing.

As for what people call it, people are and always have been easily fooled. Lots of people have been fooled into thinking primitive chatbots like Eliza are intelligent, so it’s not the least bit surprising that people jump to those same (wrong) conclusions with other natural-language scripting languages (e.g. Alexa and classic Siri). And it’s even less surprising that more people are fooled after integrating ML algorithms and advertising the products as intelligent.

There is actual AI research going on, attempting to design software capable of understanding the problem domain it works within, but these are about as intelligent as a mouse, and even then only within their specific problem domains. They’re nowhere near the level of being able to exhibit near-human levels of intelligence in a broad problem domain. (A good book on the subject from 1995 is Douglas Hofstadter’s book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Not an easy read, but a great introduction to the subject.)

But this AI research has absolutely nothing to do with the ML/NN software being sold today as “AI”.

Although I can’t imagine using this feature on a calculator (as opposed to in a spreadsheet)

I’m fairly sure that many (if not most) electronic calculators worked this way, because I remember it tripping me up decades ago.

If anyone works with managed macs, that have Falcon deployment (aka Crowdstrike), you’ll be glad that 15.3 fixes the Airplay-firewall blocking issue.
I’m still miffed that Apple released 15.2 with Private IP Wifi set to Fixed instead of default off. Atleast you can change that. (might be nice for home users, but not always for managed networks and macs).
Just annoyed that someone delivers your car with the heater on full…during the Summer. “Look, I use this, BUT I’ll turn on what I need, not what you think I need”.

I really wouldn’t get hung up on terminology. Whatever the name implies, AI is just software, and it works well for some things and badly for others. In that, it’s just like all other software, though the ways that it works well and badly are quite different because it’s not deterministic like most algorithms.

True…but the fact remains that if the AI can recognize the value hung as a hand…that should be enough not to put 6 fingers on it…because probably more than 95% of all hands have 5. And since it adds fingers…it seems pretty obvious that it knows it is a hand.

And again I totally agree…today’s AI is not intelligence and we are a long way from an actual artificial intelligence IMO. What is called AI is actually just a more sophisticated algorithm than we had 10 years ago running on more powerful hardware that allows some ‘learning’ for lack of a better term…but it’s not anything close to actual intelligence or real learning. But the media hype has turned ‘more sophisticated algorithm running on more powerful hardware’ into the way more hype-able and sexier term AI.

You’re comparing two different models. I’m using the hand-detection model as an example to show how training images don’t always show all fingers, and that there is often ambiguity in the images.

But that model isn’t generating new images. That’s something completely different, and I don’t think those apps know anything about anatomy. They just have probabilities that certain patterns of pixels appear near other certain patterns.

And if there is ambiguous training data (e.g. two hands held close together with the wrists obscured or out of frame), those probabilities could easily produce fingers where they don’t belong.

I think you’re getting so upset over this because you are assuming a level of understanding that simply does not exist.

Maybe comparing “AI” to mice is unfair (to mice). This article discusses the intelligence of an amoeba!

Apple does not offer me the option to upgrade my iPad Air 4 from 17.7.2 to 17.7.4, the only option is 18.3 which I don’t want to install because it will not offer me anything (except possible new bugs) as none of the AI options will be available to me (I live in Europe and my devices are too old anyway). Same things applies to my iPhone 12.
IMHO this Apple policy of ‘forcing’ users to upgrade to the latest mayor version of the OS is bad and irresponsible. Now people like me, who don’t want the hassle and risk of a big upgrade which provides them no benefits, have to ‘accept’ using a device that is less secure than it could be.

Actually, no. Most of the time the answer will be 5, which is wrong. A human hand has 4 fingers and a thumb. Usually, some people manage to lose a few during their life

I knew this one was coming

Well then hey, maybe that explains it. The AI read online that the human hand has 5 fingers, so it gave me 5 fingers… and a thumb… but only on one hand… ;-)

They certainly will.

Meanwhile, I will spare you all the other ways I continue to be underwhelmed. But here’s one from yesterday: wasn’t sure Maps via CarPlay was taking me the right way; almost seemed like I was headed the complete opposite direction. So avoiding the risk of a ton of fiddling with my screen while driving, I asked Siri/AI a simple question: “what direction am I heading?” Hoping to hear “north”. But it had no idea what I was talking about.

And that’s one of so many stupid, simple things I should be able to accomplish with my voice that don’t work at all. Things that basic Siri should have been able to answer. And now the marquis feature of 2024 was Apple AI, and still nothing, even with my iPhone 16 Pro.

Sure, but that just goes back to a post I made a few days ago - we all know that Siri is bad, has been for far longer than it should have been, and some improvements are finally coming with 18.4 in several weeks, with reportedly a complete rewrite as an LLM coming with iOS 19 sometime in the first half of 2026 (so, likely iOS 19.4 if iOS update numbers progress as they have for a few years.) So continued reporting of its failures to me is just old news, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”. Let’s see what improves with 18.4 / 15.4.

As for me, I’m holding out for a Duke feature before turning on Ap.Intel.
;-)

Nah, let’s not get people’s hopes up when we know better. Just because they add some LLM sauce to Siri will not teach her how to open a settings panel or how to switch view mode in Maps. LLM sauce is here to placate the markets and say “hey we’re doing the ChatGPT thing too”, but I can pretty much guarantee you it will do nothing to make Siri more useful to me and many others like me. That will likely take 19.x which isn’t due for at least another half year.

If I want a chatbot I can already use free LLMs all day long. What I cannot do is replace iOS Settings app with a free (and trustworthy) clone with voice support or hack Maps to implement reasonable voice support for safe hands-off driving. How about Apple gives me what only Apple can and stops trying to play catchup with stuff others have done for longer and do better? Focus, Apple.

Exactly. It doesn’t take LLM or even AI at all to give us the basics that are grossly missing. What it does take is corporate vision and attention to customer needs, both of which are clearly lacking.

I disagree. To me, continuing to tell me to wait and see what comes out next, and never does, is old news. In this case, I waited for the feature that was announced and released and tried it and reported on its shortcomings. Call it a product review.

I’d say that Apple isn’t paying attention to a specific customer segment’s needs (here on TidBITS, people who are closer to Apple’s former hobbyist focus rather than the current lifestyle and luxury focus) that it has decided doesn’t drive significant growth in its business.

I miss the summaries and hope they “fix” it soon. (I didn’t think they were terribly broken.) Now if I have a collection of notifications from, say, The NY Times, it only shows me the text from the last notification. The summary for me was very good about summarizing each notification in the group until 18.3. It was pretty common for me with 18.1 and 18.2 to dismiss the groups without expanding the notifications from reading the summary.

I guess we can disagree to disagree…if the AI is smart enough to recognize hands…it should be as smart as a 5 year old who knows there are only 5 fingers on a hand. Proves my point that AI isn’t nearly as smart as proponents claim.

the one bit of a/i (aka apple idiocy – not faulting apple here: entirely driven by the money morons on wallstreet) enabled on my mac is the “clean up” button in apple photos. pinged support asking for a way to remove that. also how to delete the related plugin that i accidentally downloaded. so far the answer is you can’t.

anyone have a better answer?

Again, you’re assuming a level of intelligence (meaning anything greater than zero) that doesn’t actually exist.

The hand-detection model doesn’t know what a hand is or what a finger is or anything like that.

It is a “segmentation” model. For each pixel in the image, it computes the probability that the given pixel belongs to a “hand” as defined by the training data (a folder full of images where some human has manually highlighted all the pixels that belong to hands). The application software using the model then takes that output and applies a threshold (maybe 75%) and reports all the pixels whose probability is greater than that threshold as a “hand”. But without any knowledge whatsoever about what a hand is.

That exact same segmentation model can be used to detect cars, park benches, traffic lights, bicycles and anything else you can think of. And the model doesn’t know what any of those objects are. It is simply trained with thousands (or millions) of images, where the target objects’ pixels are highlighted, in the hopes that this will let it make an accurate prediction when applied to new images that it hasn’t seen before.

Any “proponent” that claims the software has any intelligence at all is either a liar or someone who doesn’t actually understand what he’s talking about. Or both.

Yes! My strong preference is to spend each year bothering only with security updates, and I do want to get them.

I was permitted to update my 2018 mini to v14.7.3 instead of v15.3.
Yet Apple refuses to allow my iPad Air (M2) to update to v17.7.4 rather than v18.3.

I’d be grateful if someone could explain why the Apple silicon iPad is treated differently to the Intel Mac mini.

I am bracing myself for the iOS 18 upgrade on my iPhone. I too would love to have yet another stopgap patch.

But, to be honest, the longer I hold out, the harder it’s going to be to upgrade. Ever thus. I would rather not be so conservative, but the real issue is identifying all the changes that have user-visible controls before starting, and Apple makes this needlessly difficult. The PDF they’ve published with the iOS 18 changes was not updated with more recent updates. So I’m going to have to do the upgrade “blind”, then go delving into every corner of the system to see what’s changed, methodically. This is not my idea of time well spent. Sigh.

I’ve never called it intelligent at all…it’s just a more sophisticated algorithm than we had a couple years back. However…I think that it’s probably a reasonable assumption that it recognizes the thing in then picture as a hand…and if does that than it should know that hands have 5 fingers in total. If it doesn’t recognize it as a hand it wouldn’t be able to add fingers to complete the picture.

But we’re talking in circles here…humankind may eventually figure out how to develop an actual artificial intelligence with self awareness…but it’s going to take a lot more computer horsepower than any of these pseudo intelligences have. I most definitely agree with the second statement…AI is today’s buzzword but it’s still just hype and overinflated claims.

That’s not a reasonable assumption.

These models don’t say “this is a hand”. They return data like “this pixel has a 54% chance of being object type 1, a 10% chance of being object type 2, and 3% chance of object type 3, etc.”.

The fact that type 1 is a hand, type 2 is a bicycle and type 3 is a helicopter is simply an artifact of the fact that pixels in the training images were tagged this way. The model doesn’t know what any of these objects actually are.

It is a reasonable assumption. You can ask a generative AI tool to give you three hands and it will do it.

Also, it seems like not via OTA but via connected computers.

Agree that it is aspirational to call this software “intelligent” since we usually reserve the term to living organisms including us humans. It certainly is “artificial” in the sense it is not real. So why do we expect reality from a product being marketed like most items, with a ton of hype and much less substance. The first folks to buy a model T had to drive on rutted dirt roads covered with horse manure and they probably started complaining about the poor condition of the roads!