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PS: Unintentionally made my list dude-only. Sorry about that. Add the next Jane Jacobs/Kiki Smith/Klári von Neumann to that list.

Worst yet.

@SchallerDomenic Hahaha, Apple so: "Tööööörrrröööööööö!!"

@thomaspaulmann Hah! That's exactly what I would like. 1h of my time back, please.

Each demo was backrooms-stale-air-empty-eyed-gaze weirder than the one before. Like what.

@_ralRo @SchallerDomenic @tim_cook Jupp. Ich bin auch sprachlos.

Ein kleiner Teil in mir will glauben, dass das alles AI-generierten Figuren waren und es deswegen so ein Uncanny-Valley Gefühl ausgelöst hat.

I don't know. Einfach weird.

@LPirro93 No, you're not getting old. In my opinion, this was really, really uninspired.

Been an Apple customer for 26 years myself. There was nothing about today that would have resonated with me way back in 1999.

(And I wasn't even a Jobs-fan, tbh.)

Aber hallo. Was war denn das?

Bin seit 26 Jahren Apple-Kunde und dachte mir nach Goatee-Daddy #2 und Stressika aus der Buchhaltung einfach nur noch: Wir leben offensichtlich nicht auf dem gleichen Planeten.

Ich wünsche mir auch ganz ehrlich Jobs nicht zurück. Sondern mit dem Kapital muss doch was geiles gehen.

Anstelle diesen völlig banalen Konzern-Nasen, gebt doch ein paar Studenten jeweils die $840K/Jahr Gehälter. Da wird schon was gutes rauskommen, bin ich mir 100% sicher.

So wie damals mit Jony Ive in den späten 90ern.

Aber das? WAHNSINN.

@XColorado325 Same. I just spent two weeks in an Apple Foundation Model deep-dive (and like it)

...but my jaw is on the floor on how much I don't like these people. Says more about me than them, but still. Wow.

@oncologycorner @Apple As an Apple customer since 2000 (PowerBook G3 Pismo and 12" Powerbook G4 FTW!) this chart shows how I feel about these people.

I'm sorry. Never been a hater until now. Didn't even I had it in me. But this is terrible.

@PurpleDragArt Seriously. I'm watching this show in horror. What happened at Apple?

@orbit1900 For real. Currently, Stressica from HR is trying to sell me on context-awareness in Safari. WTF?

PPS: And here's the full listing for each experiment, including the hypothesis, method, architecture and individual evals like this one: alexisrondeau.me/tada/research/… (Click on a table-row to expand)

PS: For anyone interested, a more detailed project onboarding is here:

Ah, scratch the "Doesn't use LoRA" surprise. Experiment 056 is built ON-TOP of 046. I forgot to make the diagram-generator aware of this kind of experiment heritage.

Alright!

The autoresearch agent came up with an unexpected way to push quality to from 40% to 44%:

"First, generate one more option than we actually need, then throw away the one we can most afford to lose, keeping the rest."

Suprises:
1. It's much simpler than the LoRA adapter route
2. It produced four responses that were significantly better than their eval targets
3. I hit an Anthropic API usage limit for the first time (Yay!)

And, man, I have to say: As an experimenter autoresearch is really, really fun to work with, guide and learn from. I wish more people would have this experience in their domains.

But basically I'm using frontier models to train a local ("homestead"?) model as to impart some of that good brain stuff but minus the overwhelm. Like a teacher, hopefully.

LOL, yeah, this one also not a keeper.

An old friend of mine shared this nugget of wisdom from art school with me:

"Good from far, but far from good."

Okay! Adding a domain-specific LoRA adapter moved the needle the most.

I bootstrapped an autoresearch loop that initially went through a bunch of experiments that tested a bunch of prompt/sequence/selection/critique and reflexion combos. Those didn't really result in much lift.

PS: If you haven't seen this yet, Apple provides the "Foundation Models Adapter Training Toolkit" over at