I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value that are actually still beyond the horizon. They either aren't reliable enough, aren't accessible to the tech, or exceed the sophistication of our existing trust models. For example, I'm planning a trip. Booking a multiday holiday - there's a real beast that is time consuming, complex and painful. I test out the AI tools. They fail. Hard. Hallucinations all over the place, false confidence, inability to act, inability of me to trust their actions.
It's just nowhere near practical utility yet. Not "nearly there" but "not nearly half way there". I got the top tier of Gemini AI. Can it rent me a car? "As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you".
So I end up pulling out the trusty old Garmin gpsmap with cycle/hiking maps, that survived drops from 1.5 meters at 30 km/h as I was gliding of a mountain with my bike.
This whole venue of technology is an exercise in ivory tower construction completely disconnected from ordinary people.
They never asked for one becase they never imagined being able to afford one.
The amount of administration organizing a normal household takes I suspect most would be glad to leave to someon/something they trust and that can be held accountable.
Today that someone needs to be a person (imo). But who knows, a startup may be plotting accountable digital assistans as we speak.
That quote has an unexpressed precondition to the effect of "In order for an organisation to be objectively well run..." or "In order for an organisation to equitably benefit all stakeholders at all levels..." etc
- don't travel frequently,
- don't have so many complex inquiries that require someone to research,
- don't have super complicated taxes to file,
- don't go eating out in fancy restaurants that require special skills to get reservations in,
- don't have so many meetings to attend,
- don't receive hundreds of emails per day,
- don't work on multiple projects at the same time,
- don't organise festivities and social gatherings all the time.
The one thing that would be useful - a kind of "chief of staff" that monitors your entire digital life and prioritises your every next step - is the antithesis to Siri and the like, which are merely reactive to your requests, not proactive in figuring out what needs your attention next. Let alone that that would be a total privacy nightmare, and a prime candidate for mass manipulation at scale.
They don't even seem to get the basics right, why would I want another layer on top?
eg: if my booking is wrong, they will cover the cost and compensate me. It would sort of just come down to buying premium travel insurance for everyone that uses it. And insurance for anything else they do. It has to be one of two things - they either believe the risks are worth it (so then there should be a financial model that can absorb the cost of insurance to do it), or in fact, the risks are too great. At some point, if they keep offering the tech on a "use at your own risk" basis, they are implicitly communicating that they themselves think the risks are too great - so YOU shouldn't trust it either.
That would be nice, but it's the wrong angle. The reason people like real secretaries is not because somebody is compensated when things go wrong. It's because things don't go wrong. I don't use this thing if I need to fear things go wrong, even if I'd be compensated.
Maybe it would provide the right incentives for the companies though.
Because the problem now took a whole afternoon to solved and sapped your creative energy instead.
When we talk about “the market”, the customer base, remember it’s a market that typically doesn’t know how to or care to even install an adblocker.
It used good models and did a lot of searching, including searches in other languages. It got nothing right, riddled with fake places and times. It also found some weird and unique places I never would have considered.
I had a blast, brought me back to traveling pre-internet, requiring a level of spontaneity I had forgotten we used to depend on. 100% recommend it.
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-a...
I am also under the impression that the LLM tech is plateauing before bringing the promised productivity. Great as a coding assistant, great a summarizing a text, translating, great a helping plan a trip...
But for the rest, e.g. act as a life assistant, it is still far off with no hope to reach the desired performance level.
I would not be surprisd to see OpenAI and the likes to start reverting to Siri v1 strategies, i.e. "if this then that" kind of agent routing.
Now the big (BIG) caveat is that I used Claude Code on my Max 20x plan from within VS Code. I have a fairly decent harness that I'd built and was sure to prompt it to run several subagents, including one that grounded walking times with Google Maps directly.
I'd say this is FAR beyond what the average person would do ("Hey Siri, plan me a trip to Prague") but also it shows that the models can do it with the right harness and guidelines. This wasn't that hard for me to do, so it seems to be more of a feature buildout ("the travel expert" AI) with a few markdown files than anything.
All told: web search for grounding times/locations, map grounding for walking paths and times, an adversarial agent to keep the model(s) honest, and a little bit of prompting and you've got a really great travel planner.
In short: the average person won't do this, but if I can build it in a few hours any of the 100% of people working at Apple/OpenAI/Anthropic who are smarter than me can build it and bake it into Siri (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc).
The laundry list of object removal, spacial photos, better speech to text etc is always just the latest open models just being slapped in there and branded as Apple.
Ultimately the meat of this presentation was the work of people outside Apple.
Where I do want AI is for really complex queries, like "find me a time and money efficient itinerary through Europe visiting places I haven't been before. Present options and I'll tell you what I don't like about each of them then we'll narrow in on an optimal solution"
Have a conversation with the average Ai power user (outside of tech / coding) and this is the level the conversation will be on.
A lot of these "problems" seem to stem from people just not wanting to interact with other people at all. Do we really want to become like Asimov's "Solarians"?
If new Siri still sucks, well, it's sucked the entire time. The worst of it is the security aspect where the setting to let you use Siri without authenticating hasn't worked since they added it! (still broken, iOS 26.5)