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Apple's Siri-Ous Problem + How Starlink Took Over the World + Is AI Making Us Dumb?

Hard Fork

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  • Roomba’s Troubles
    • Kevin Roose owned a Roomba, a robot vacuum.
    • Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, Roomba’s maker, faced regulatory hurdles, impacting the company. Transcript: Kevin Roose R.I Bruce Roos. So I read recently, you know, Amazon wanted to buy the maker of the Roomba. Yes. But then that was basically blocked by the Biden administration as part of their campaign to block all acquisitions. Yes. And so Roomba said this week, Kevin, that they may have to shut down. Oh, no. It could be curtains for the robot vacuum. Casey Newton Oh, no. That’s horrible. Will the Roombas that people have in their houses just stop working? Kevin Roose You know, that’s the fear. Sometimes, you know, these companies go out of business and they do get bricked. But the CEO put out a really interesting statement. He said, this really sucks. Casey Newton Is that a vacuum joke? That’s a vacuum joke. Kevin Roose Not a good one. That’s a vacuum joke. Casey Newton Yeah, I noticed that Roomba was falling on hard times because my robot vacuum just started going around my house picking up loose change. Kevin Roose I’m Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I’m Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, Apple falls even further behind in artificial intelligence. Then, the Times’ Adam Citariano joins us to explain how Starlink took over the world. (Time 0:00:46)
  • Apple’s AI Delay
    • Apple’s AI features, announced at WWDC, faced delays, including Siri’s upgrade.
    • This is unusual for Apple, known for timely releases, raising concerns about their AI progress. Transcript: Casey Newton Casey. Hey, Kevin. How are you? Doing great. Excited to be here in New York. Yes, we’re here in New York in the New York Times studios here, which are, I think it’s fair to say, a little more spacious than our home studios in San Francisco. Kevin Roose They’re a lot more spacious, although I think I do smell vodka. Is this where Ezra Klein records? Casey Newton We’ll have to ask him later. We are just returning from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, where we were honored with a iHeart Podcast Award for Best Tech Podcast. Very exciting. Kevin Roose For the second year in a row. And you know, Kevin, this brings us 20% to our EGOTI. That’s where you win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an iHeart Podcast Award. Yes. Casey Newton We’ll get there soon. Give us a couple years. Stay tuned. But today, Casey, we’re going to turn our attention to Apple, because one of the biggest stories over the past few weeks in tech is what is going on with Apple’s generative AI rollout. Kevin Roose Yes, Apple, of course, has been making a big push into AI by bringing AI features onto its devices under the banner of what it calls Apple intelligence. While we’ve gotten a few features, like notification summaries, there are tons of other more advanced features that the company announced last summer that still haven’t been released. Casey Newton That’s right. And last week, we got a very clear indication that the company is running into some roadblocks. So on Friday, Apple said in a statement given to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, the longtime Apple blogger, that their long-anticipated update to Siri was going to be even further Delayed than we thought. So this was all over my feed. People were saying Apple is not going to release the new Siri maybe as late as 2027, according to some reports. And for a lot of people, this seemed like a big disappointment. Kevin Roose Yeah, in particular, Kevin, because Amazon, which also makes kind of smart gadgets, had come out recently and shown off an upgrade to Alexa, which seemed to do a lot of what Apple had Promised to do with Siri, but more. And unlike Apple, Amazon says that’s coming out within the next few weeks. Casey Newton Yeah, so let’s talk about what happened here, because I think there’s still a lot we don’t know, but we already do know some things about what caused this delay and what it might mean. But just to rewind a little bit, last June, we were at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino for WWDC, and that was when the company unveiled a bunch of AI-related changes to their products, Including Siri, which was, they said, getting an upgrade to what it’s calling Apple Intelligence. They showed off a version of Siri that was pretty cool. It not only could do sort of the basic commands that Siri can do now, but was way more capable at sort of stitching together these sequences of requests from across different apps. They showed off demos like, you know, a friend texts you their new address, and you can just say to Siri, like, add this address to person’s contact card, and Siri would do it. Incredible. Incredible stuff. Kevin Roose Imagine all of the engineering that goes into adding an address to a contact card, and Apple said, that’s coming later this year. Casey Newton That wasn’t the most impressive demo, to be fair. They also showed off Siri responding to requests like, when is my mom’s flight landing? And in this demo, Siri was able to kind of go into your email, find which email your mom had sent you her flight details on and kind of like cross-check that with the latest flight information To sort of give you an update based on real-time data. Kevin Roose And I have to say, last June, that actually was a pretty provocative thing to promise because at the time, nothing really could do that. And I would say, even today, there’s no product that can do that. So, yeah, last June when Apple said it was going to do that, I said, OK, well, big if true. Casey Newton Yeah, well, and I was very excited about it at the time because one of the complaints that we’ve had about these generative AI tools is that they don’t really work well with the data that Is already being created as part of your daily life. So there is not a single AI that can sort of interface with your email, your calendar, your text messages, maybe some of your social media feeds to sort of pull together information from These disparate sources. And Apple is in a pretty good position to do that because it controls the operating system on your iPhone. Kevin Roose Personal data that is that sensitive creates enormous privacy and security concerns. And so there was a lot that Apple was going to have to work out in order to ship that in a way that was safe and did not cause a big privacy scandal. (Time 0:02:11)
  • Apple’s Uncharacteristic Delay
    • Apple’s delay is unusual, given their reputation for on-time product launches.
    • The delay fuels the perception of Apple falling behind competitors in the AI field. Transcript: Casey Newton Yeah, this is very unlike Apple. They don’t like pushing back things once they’ve announced them. And I think it’s especially bad considering their reputation as a company that is falling behind on AI. I think that perception that they were behind is part of what led them to announce all this AI stuff at WWDC last year because they don’t want to be known as the laggards when it comes to AI. Kevin Roose Yeah. And in fact, Kevin, they were putting out ads last year that basically suggested that this stuff was already ready. You know, they did this one with the actress Isabella Ramsey, where she asked help for remembering someone’s name. Like, you know, what’s the name of a guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at this cafe? And, you know, there’s a possibility that somebody saw that and they thought, hey, I also had a meeting with that guy at that cafe. What’s his, I’m going to buy one of these new iPhones and figure it out. And if you did, you’ve been sorely disappointed. And Apple actually had to go and pull that ad. Casey Newton Yeah, so it’s a little embarrassing for them to have to delay these launches. But Casey, what do we know about what has been happening inside Apple as they have tried to get this AI stuff ready for public consumption? Kevin Roose Well, so as usual with Apple, a lot of what we know comes with the great reporter Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. And among the things that he has reported is that the software chief over at Apple, Craig Federighi, along with some other executives, have just expressed concerns that the features Are not working properly or as advertised in their personal testing. And this gets to, I think, an actual technological challenge that Apple faces that I have sympathy for them over, which is that large language models are what they call probabilistic Systems. And that is as distinguished from a deterministic system, right? In a deterministic system, you say, if this, then that, and it works the same way every time. Your calculator is a deterministic system. Large language models are not like that. They’re predictive. They are making guesses. And so what they’re delivering to you is a kind of statistical likelihood. Why is that a big deal? Well, if you’re saying to Siri, hey, set an alarm for 8 a.m. And instead of using the old deterministic model, it’s now running that through an LLM. It might not actually set the alarm for you at 8 a.m. Every single time, right? So my guess is that as they started to try to build these very specific use cases, they were getting it all working like, and this is a made up number, but like 85% of the time, which was maybe Enough to give them the confidence last June that they were going to get all the way there. But fast forward to March 2025 and that missing 15% or whatever it is, is driving everyone insane. Casey Newton Yeah, I think that’s plausible, especially because the stuff that they have shipped so far in Apple Intelligence, like the summaries of the text messages, it, you know, it’s pretty Bad. It’s not as good as you would think, given the state-of language models that are out there. (Time 0:08:26)
  • Apple’s AI Challenges
    • Apple faces technological challenges with LLMs being probabilistic rather than deterministic.
    • They also have product issues, like poorly summarizing text message notifications. Transcript: Kevin Roose But Kevin, I think they also have a product problem, and the text message notifications are such a great example of why. So let me tell you a little something about the group chat that I spend most of every day in. A lot of my group chat, like so many other group chats, is just people sharing social media posts with each other, right? It’s like, oh, here’s a meme, there’s a meme, here’s a joke, there’s a tweet, there’s a thread, there’s a blue sky post, right? And the way that Apple Intelligence summarizes those tweets in particular it will say link share to x.com or white text on black background right keep in mind you used to just be able To see the tweet you used to be able to see the screenshot and apple said no no no let us summarize this for you this is um a website click to learn more right that’s a product problem right That is not a problem with the LLM. That is somebody who doesn’t understand how people are actually communicating to each other. So I think it’s just really important as we sort of walk through this to say that Apple has this sort of baseline kind of scientific research problem and they just have a product problem For how do you make software that people love to use? (Time 0:11:09)
  • Amusingly Bad Summaries
    • Casey Newton enjoys Apple’s flawed text message summaries because they are funny.
    • However, he wouldn’t tolerate similar errors in critical functions like setting alarms. Transcript: Kevin Roose But I’m also a masochist. So, Kevin, let’s say that you’re Tim Cook and you’re sitting on top of your unfathomable riches and your massive control over one of the world’s most powerful companies. What do you direct them to do in the next six months to a year as they’re polishing this stuff up? Is there stuff that you would just say, you know what, screw it, release it today? Or what would you have Apple do? Casey Newton So the first thing I would do is probably what they are doing, which is to really harden this thing against serious attacks and vulnerabilities, because that is a place where I think It is not okay for Apple to start shipping stuff that is half-baked, is when it comes to people’s personal information. A lot of people put their most intimate, you know, contact details and credit card information and passwords on their iPhones. You really don’t want that stuff getting out because AI allowed some kind of new prompt injection. But I think once that’s done, I think they should just start this process of unrolling this stuff, maybe before it’s at the level of polish that they would traditionally like. I think they need to start experimenting a little more, getting a little comfortable with the fact that maybe this is not for every iPhone user, and maybe that’s okay. Kevin Roose Yeah, I do think it would be interesting to sort of have, you know, an advanced user mode that enabled more of these AI features by default and let everyone else just wait a little bit longer. Let me ask you about one other thing when it comes to Apple and AI, Kevin, which is that during their presentation at WWDC last year, one of the highest profile announcements was that They were going to add ChatGPT into the next version of iOS and they were going to connect it to Siri. Now, I will tell you that when that feature came out, I dutifully connected my ChatGPT to Siri. I logged into my ChatGPT account so I wouldn’t hit any usage limits and I could have access to the full features. And you know what I find? I never use it at all. I use the ChatGPT app all the time, but I don’t use Siri at all. So my question is, are you using ChatGPT with Siri at all? Casey Newton No, because I also have the ChatGPT app and I’ve made it like a single button press on my phone to get there. So just it’s as easy for me to get to the ChatGPT app as it would be to get to the Siri instantiation of ChatGPT. Kevin Roose So what do we make of that? Because this was presented as like a really big deal. Yeah, it was. Casey Newton And people at OpenAI were very excited about it. You know, ChatGPT is going to be on billions of people’s iPhones soon. I think it is very hard to dislodge people’s habits. If you are someone who tried Siri for the first time many years ago and thought this thing doesn’t really work well for me, I think it’s going to be very hard for you to adjust to a world in Which Siri is all of a sudden more capable. I think this is the problem that Amazon is going to have with the new Alexa Plus, too. They’re telling people, oh, this thing that was good at setting kitchen timers and alarms and telling you what the weather was is now going to be good at all these other kinds of things. But in the meantime, people’s habits are already set. They’ve been using this stuff for years. And so I think it’s just going to be very hard to reprogram the humans to trust these tools that were previously very limited. (Time 0:18:42)
  • Starlink’s Importance
    • Despite various business challenges, Starlink is a key part of Elon Musk’s empire.
    • Starlink’s global reach and control over internet access give Musk significant power. Transcript: Casey Newton Well, Casey, it’s been a rough few weeks for the business empire of Elon Musk. Oh, no. Is he okay? I think he’s going to be okay. He’s still paying the bills. But I think it’s fair to say it’s been a rocky road. What’s been going on? So X had outages on Monday. You wouldn’t know that because you don’t spend a lot of time on that network. I don’t. But that wasn’t the end of his troubles. Another SpaceX rocket blew up last Thursday. Kevin Roose And not in the sense that it got a bunch of retweets. Casey Newton No, no, it literally blew up, rained debris down on Florida and the Caribbean. And the big news that probably people have heard about is what’s been going on with Tesla. Tesla’s stock is falling precipitously. It’s down nearly 40 percent for the year. Some of that is fueled by increased competition from Chinese electric vehicle makers and others. But also there have been Tesla protests breaking out around the world. And on the upside, though, President Trump did do some free sponsorship for Tesla on the lawn of the White House the other day. Kevin Roose Yeah, I think this is the first time we’ve seen a car commercial at the White House. But of course, it became immediately indelible when President Trump got into a new Tesla and said, everything’s computer. Yes. Which is one of the best reviews I’ve ever heard of a Tesla. It’s true. Casey Newton Also a great tagline for a tech podcast. Kevin Roose Hard fork. Everything’s computer. Casey Newton So we could spend today talking about Tesla and the many issues that are going on there, but I think it’s better to talk about another part of Elon Musk’s empire that doesn’t get as much Attention as Tesla, but that I think is becoming much more important. Kevin Roose I think it is inarguable that what we’re about to talk about is actually much more consequential than what happens to Elon’s car company. Yes. Casey Newton So Starlink is the satellite internet branch of SpaceX, and it’s been making a lot of news recently. The Washington Post has reported on Starlink’s ongoing efforts to insert itself into a $2.4 billion deal that the government signed with Verizon to build a new communication system Used by air traffic controllers. My colleague Cecilia Kong at The Times reported that the Trump administration was also rewriting some rules for a federal grant program that could open up some rural broadband funding To Starlink. And Starlink also signed deals this week with India’s two largest telecom companies to expand its reach there. It is also, very relevantly to me, a frequent United Airlines flyer going to be starting to roll out on United Airlines flights as sort of the main in-flight internet option. Kevin Roose Yeah, so, you know, I’m somebody who has read a fair bit about Starlink over the years, but it seems like just within the past few weeks, something has accelerated that is bringing it To a lot more places. And it does seem like that something is that Elon Musk is one of the most powerful people in government right now. Yeah. (Time 0:26:33)
  • Starlink Cost and Usefulness
    • Consider Starlink for internet access in areas with unreliable ISPs.
    • Subscriptions start at $75 per month, comparable to standard broadband. Transcript: Casey Newton Adam Citariano, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. So today we’re here to talk about Starlink, one of the lesser known, but I would argue more important parts of the Elon Musk business empire. You have been writing a lot about Starlink for the past couple of years. Could you maybe just give us like a brief explanation of how Starlink works for people who may not be familiar with it? Adam Satariano Yeah, Starlink is satellite internet. And so imagine this constellation of satellites orbiting the Earth and beaming down internet to anywhere that you are. So this could be in a city or this could be in the Arctic. This could be on an airplane. It could be on a freighter ship. Its biggest sell is that it’s getting to places that are really hard to reach otherwise. Kevin Roose And give us like a sense of like what it looks like. Like, am I right that it looks like kind of like a little satellite receiver dish? Adam Satariano Yeah, on the ground, it looks almost like a pizza box, smaller, almost like a laptop. It’s this receiver dish. And then within a radius of that, you get a very strong connection. And it’s been growing like crazy in recent years. It’s now in, I think, last count I saw over 120 countries. And it seems like they’re adding new countries all the time. So you can, its customers are regular people, can pay a subscription to Starlink, but, you know, their biggest ones are going to be governments. Casey Newton What does it cost? Say I’m like, you know, I go around in an RV or I like to camp in remote places and I want a Starlink terminal. What does it cost me to buy one and then like get the service month to month? Adam Satariano So the subscriptions start about 75 bucks month, but it varies from country to country. That’s not a fixed number. But in the UK, where I live, for instance, it’s about 75 bucks. Kevin Roose So pretty competitive with what an American would be used to paying for for their monthly broadband service. Yeah, exactly. Adam Satariano And I think for areas in areas that had pretty strong typical ISPs, it’s like not a huge value add. But if you’re in a place where it’s more spotty, I think there’s a lot to be said for thinking about it, not to sound like an advertisement for them. (Time 0:31:00)
  • Global Concerns about Starlink
    • World leaders worry about Elon Musk’s control over Starlink, a critical resource.
    • Musk’s unpredictable behavior and political influence exacerbate these concerns. Transcript: Casey Newton One of the main arguments of your piece back in 2023 was that people were getting worried around the world that Elon Musk was amassing such sort of unilateral power over the availability Of satellite internet through Starlink. And that he could, you know, abuse this power, turn off internet at sort of his whim. It would just make him much more powerful, give him this new axis of control. And that was before he became the sort of most powerful non-elected bureaucrat in America. That was before Donald Trump was elected. And I’m curious if you could just catch us up on like, what is the discussion about Starlink that is happening now when Elon Musk occupies such a position of political influence? Adam Satariano Yeah, the concerns are even more pronounced now, but they ultimately come back to the same idea, which is that so much power and control over this, what has become a really critical resource In infrastructure, is controlled by a very unpredictable and volatile person. And you are seeing that manifest itself in different parts of the world. In just the past few weeks, there are things that have been happening. We can pick a few countries. So let’s look at Italy, for instance. Italy has been negotiating a deal worth in the ballpark of like 1.5 billion euros to use Starlink for some defense and intelligence capabilities. There was some domestic opposition to it just because about why not use a more local provider of such a thing. But it was moving along. But because of Elon Musk’s political positioning and some of the comments that he’s made, particularly as it relates to Ukraine, and he started getting involved in Italian politics, You know, he’s just being who he is. It really, you know, threw a grenade into that deal. And now it’s teetering on not being able to be done because a lot of political and government officials there just don’t trust him and don’t want to be in business with him. A similar thing happened in Poland where some of the comments that Elon Musk had made about Ukraine caused the Polish foreign minister to speak out. And it just creates this back and forth. Casey Newton Yeah, this was a really fascinating exchange. And I think we should actually pause for a minute to just recap in more detail what happened, because I think it really does speak to the concerns that world leaders have right now. So just this past weekend, Elon Musk was talking with Radoslaw Siroski, who is the Polish foreign minister. And they were doing this, as you might expect, on X. And they had the following exchange. Elon Musk said, quote, my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off. And then Sikorski says Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish digitization ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider, we will be forced to look for other suppliers. Basically sort of a sort of vague threat that if you don’t stop threatening us, we’re going to go elsewhere. And Elon Musk responds, be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost and there is no substitute for Starlink. So again, these are pretty high level kind of diplomatic negotiations that are going on in the form of dunks on X. Yeah. Also just like cartoon (Time 0:37:20)
  • AI and Critical Thinking Study
    • A study by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research explored AI’s impact on critical thinking.
    • The study found that increased trust in AI correlates with reduced critical thinking. Transcript: Kevin Roose Well, Kevin, you know, one of our goals with this show is to make people feel smarter about artificial intelligence. Yes. But recently, a study that we saw asked the question, what if AI is actually making us dumber? See, this is the kind of hard-hitting research we need. Yeah, I agree with you. So this study was put together through a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research. And we truly were so fascinated by it because as enthusiastic as we sometimes feel about the uses of AI, I think both of us have had the sneaking suspicion that maybe it is not making us Better critical thinkers. Casey Newton Totally. So I am a person who relies on AI now a lot for tasks in my work and in my personal life. And I do like to think that on a macro level that AI has made me more efficient and capable. But I also take seriously the possibility that something real is happening to my brain that I should be paying attention to. And I’m so glad that researchers are now starting to look at what is actually going on inside our brains when we use AI. Yeah. Kevin Roose Do you remember in like the sort of late 80s, early 90s, and there were those PSAs on TV that would say, this is your brain on drugs, and it would just be an egg frying in a pan? Casey Newton No, because I’m less than 40 years old. Kevin Roose I’m sure you do. Look it up on YouTube. It was an iconic commercial. And you have to ask yourself, if AI was a frying pan, and our brain was an egg, what would be happening to that egg if they made a PSA in 2025? Anyways, so look, we have talked about this problem in the context of education before, right, Kevin, when we’ve talked to educators on the show. This is one of the questions that we’re asking is, you know, how are our students going to ever develop critical thinking skills if they’re just defaulting to tools like chat GPT? What this study says is, hey, guess what? This is not only going to be an issue for, like, students, Kevin. It’s also you and me. So now, Kevin, you’re probably wondering, what do these researchers study? What do these researchers study? Thank you for asking me. Tell me about this study. So the researchers surveyed 319 people. This is a sort of they had diverse ages, genders, occupations. They lived in different countries. What they had in common, though, was that they all used tools like ChatGPT at least once a week. And the researchers asked them to each share three real examples of how they had used AI at work in that week. And then the researchers did a bunch of analysis of what the subjects had shared with them. In particular, Kevin, the researchers asked the participants, did you engage in critical thinking when you were performing these tasks? How much effort do you feel like you were putting into it when you were using AI and when you weren’t using AI? And how confident were you that the AI that you were using was doing this task correctly? The idea here was to get a window into very real work settings, so not some sort of hypothetical lab test, but actually go into people’s jobs and say, okay, you’re using this tool at work, And how did you feel about it? Casey Newton And what did they find? (Time 0:50:53)
  • Impact of AI Trust
    • Trusting AI more can lead to less critical thinking, impacting job performance.
    • Overreliance on AI might shift job roles to AI oversight instead of core tasks. Transcript: Kevin Roose So, number one, when people trust AI more, they use fewer of their critical thinking skills, right? And this sort of makes intuitive sense to you. If you ask ChatGPD a question and you basically know the answer, you may not be scrutinizing it quite as hard, right? At the same time, there is now the risk that if ChatGPD does make a mistake and you were over confident in it, then all of a sudden that mistake is going to become your mistake. But if you extrapolate forward, Kevin, what makes this interesting is that the more that people are trusting in AI, and if you assume AI is going to get better, you probably are going To trust it more over time, it sort of changes the nature of your job fundamentally. And you are no longer doing the tasks you were hired to do, and you are doing more of what these researchers are calling AI oversight. Casey Newton Yeah, I mean, this is similar to something I’ve heard from software engineers who are using AI coding tools in their jobs. And I had one of them tell me recently that they feel like their job has changed from coding to managing a coder. And that just strikes me as something that’s going to potentially happen across many more jobs. (Time 0:53:57)