January 13, 2025 | Read Online

Apple Intelligence: 7 Months Later, and Users Are... Not Impressed.

PLUS: These AI chess glasses that win any game without people knowing...

Welcome, humans.

A developer just showed off his AI chess glasses that feed him perfect moves mid-game—and his opponents had no idea. As someone who's spent way too many weekends trash-talking friends over Monopoly, this is both incredibly clever and...terrifying?

We couldn't help but wonder: With Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses getting more powerful (and more subtle), are we about to enter an era where every casino's going to treat regular glasses-wearers like they're counting cards? RIP to all the legally blind folks just trying to see the blackjack table.

Here's what you need to know about AI today:

Apple Intelligence has mostly been a BIG bust so far.
Zuck thinks that coding AIs will soon be equivalent to mid-level engineers.
AI companies are paying YouTubers for unused video footage.
OpenAI is making robots… and hiring…

Advertise in The Neuron here.

Apple Intelligence: 7 Months Later, and Users Are... Not Impressed.

If you've been watching any football lately (or honestly, just existing near a TV), you've probably noticed the endless parade of Apple Intelligence and Galaxy AI commercials competing for attention between your regular doses of Skyrizi and Wegovy ads.

Remember back in June when we first reported on Apple Intelligence—Apple's shiny new suite of AI features? We (along with pretty much everyone else) thought this could be the moment AI finally becomes useful for everyday folks. Narrator voice: It was not.

Here's the thing: users straight-up don't like Apple Intelligence. And that's if they can even use it—you need an iPhone 16 series, 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max running iOS 18.1 or later just to get in the door. Here's Perplexity on how to turn on Apple Intelligence (link).

Of those lucky (or unlucky?) few who've tried it, 73% say these AI features add "little or no value", according to a recent study of iPhone and Galaxy users. Yes, even those colorful Genmojis that Apple's been flexing for seven months straight.

Just hop over to Reddit for some brutally honest reviews about Apple Intelligence's battery-draining features and how Siri is somehow still playing catch-up:

"I was expecting Siri to be not dumb but that hasn't happened yet".
"Siri is dumber than ever but shiny. But now I don't get an answer without asking if I want to use ChatGPT first—and I mean for really simple questions."
"If AI was solely made by Apple, I swear mankind would be safe on how dumb the AI is..."

Remember how excited we were about AI in Apple Mail? That feature that was supposed to be your personal email butler, summarizing, organizing and drafting responses to everything? Yeah... turns out it's more like that overeager intern who keeps reorganizing your desk when you don't want them to.

To be fair, it's not all doom and gloom. Some features actually work pretty well:

Photo editing (specifically removing unwanted items) is chef's kiss.
Email writing/proofreading on Mac is solid.
ChatGPT integration through Siri is... fine (though we'll stick to our home screen widget—see how to do this here).

And before Samsung fans get too smug, Galaxy AI isn't exactly winning hearts and minds either, according to user reviews.

Looking ahead: Brace yourself for an AI-pocalypse of "AI-on-your-device" ads during the Super Bowl. But Apple's real problem isn't getting eyeballs—it's making features that actually solve real problems. And so far it's not doing an amazing job at that.

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Prompt Tip of the Day.

We've been playing around with Gemini Deep Research (DR) lately and created this neat little prompt that helps figure how DR can be most helpful in your day-to-day tasks.

"I'm a [job title] working in [industry]. My typical day involves tasks like [list tasks], and I often need to research things like [types of research]. I've heard about Gemini Deep Research, which can browse a large number of websites, analyze information, cross-reference sources, and create detailed reports. It continuously refines its searches, connects me to original links, and even generates multi-step research plans. Based on these features, how could I use Deep Research to save time, improve my workflows, and get better insights? What specific tasks could it automate or enhance in my daily work?"

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Product Hunt is a really great way to stay up-to-date on the latest AI tools that hit the market—here is their list of top AI voice agents, for instance.

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Around the Horn.

Mark Zuckerberg said on Rogan that this year, Meta will develop AIs that can essentially do the work of mid-level engineers and that AIs show intelligence but not consciousness.
Check out this new AI model "SVFR" that can upscale and colorise low res, old film clips.
OpenAI, Google and others are paying YouTubers for their unused video footage to train their AI models.
OpenAI is developing its own suite of robots—open roles here.