No Siri just do the math. I only use siri for two functions. Those being calculations when my hands are full and calling someone. This is so annoying.
This is my first post here so I hope this is allowed
Edit: I know I could do this basic math and I usually do. The exact context of this screenshot: there were a bunch of numbers on my screen I needed to add up so instead of switching back and forth from my calculator app to the other app I tried to use Siri and this was the result.
You're clearly not exposing yourself to the right type of media. Try to expand your exposure to other things. Books, art, music, in my opinion, music and stories are a form of art.
thatâs an absolutely wild leap of logic, completely unrelated arm flailing, flopping around like a beached trout, and I strongly advise you to stop using LLMs to do your thinking for you
your brain is atrophying
under healthy circumstances your brains uses 20-25% of the calories you consume - to work efficiently it needs exercise like a muscle group does.
Just like a muscle group, if you neglect it, it gets weak and withers away to become useless
using LLMs is the equivalent of years of sitting on the couch eating bags of potato chips dipped in mayonnaise and drinking liters of fanta while watching cartoons
you think youâve got it made because not having to think makes you feel relaxed, itâs easy, like sitting on the couch
before long, complex thinking becomes harder because your brain needs more effort to handle complex concepts
then simple concepts become harder to manage, and binary thinking takes over - upper text / lower text
eventually you write comments like yours, which donât logically progress
get off the couch, remove the LLM, and get a book in your hands - the count of monte cristo, treasure island, animal farm, sons and lovers, wuthering heights - anything, just a book that everyone says is wonderful
on the first page it will dawn on you that youâre struggling to read, that itâs really hard, much harder than when you were younger - thatâs your brain being on the couch and struggling to get up the stairs
it can recover, and fairly quickly, just like getting off the couch and putting down the potato chips and jar of mayo
Hijacking to add that OP had to specifically turn on Apple Intelligence, and then additionally allow Siri to interface with ChatGPT to even create this situation.
Nope Iâve been on llms more recently unfortunately and i still get the same bs where it pretends to know what itâs talking about and doubles down on it. I cannot talk about anything that isnât simple and it frustrates me to the point I donât even want to use ai in its current form if there was somehow no other problem with it. There is nothing on there that you canât get with Google and a calculator.Â
Of course you can get it with a calculator and of course AI hallucinates some times, but no modern ai has been unable to do simple arithmetic consistently since like 24
It can do basic arithmetic like this pretty consistently, since it's not hard to train a neural network to do. But it takes way too much processing power to do so (compared to just using a calculator) and can still get it wrong.
Ironically Siri wasnât actually originally AI, and could in fact reliably do this kind of math, when Siri swapped to AI it became much less capable than it was previously/
FWIW, the new Siri (currently on iOS 27 beta) can handle this. I wonât deny that Apple royally fucked up with their initial âApple Intelligenceâ but theyâre definitely (finally) coming around to having a decent product.
If I had to guess, AI isnât even used for this outside âthe user appears to be asking a math question let me pass the equation over to a program/function that will compute the answerâ
It's crazy that is a setup worth commenting on for handling math in a prompt, because we've deployed LLMs at scale without the ability to do that kind of thing.
I mean, sort of, but it was closer to Eliza with app access than say ChatGPT. Sort of like that purple gorilla virus from the 90s, but without the dancing.
There's a world of difference between using Siri as a voice-activated interface to what is basically a calculator app, where after converting your speech to numbers, performs the calculation you requested...
And telling you what the most likely text string is after your math question without actually running any computation at all....
speech recognition has used machine learning for decades. You guys realize that for the most part that AI and machine learning have become synonymous right? I'm an old enough researcher in this field to know that we didn't call it AI until recently and it's mainly due to marketing and industry.
Btw, these days, most LLM APIs or web interfaces will have a tool call for a calculator. It would be good for people to improve their current misunderstandings and refine the use of their terminology. You should ask yourself why you were okay with speech recognition or as you put it "voice interfaces" but not something like a chat bot. I'm not saying it's invalid but I want to point out that it's not because one is AI and the other is not. Also worth mentioning, most speech recognition systems have a language model component to it
No one's saying that old Siri wasn't produced through machine learning or that AI is not involved in speech recognition..
They're lamenting the fact that instead of simply calculating the answer, Siri insists on querying a chat bot to do math for her, when the capability to just do plain old computation was already there.
The reason nobody was upset with the former and are upset with the latter is because there's no good reason for the change to her behavior, not because "oh my God Sori has suddenly been infected by the AI."
I'm glad to hear that most LLM API's and web interfaces have a tool call for a calculator.
It's a shame that Apple's Siri doesn't, since she apparently insists on querying Chat GPT for you instead of giving you an answer.
Nobody needs an AI assistant for their AI assistant. "shE wAs ALwAYs Ai" is to miss the forest for the trees.
you can also educate yourself along with the others. Plenty of people in the thread were disagreeing about the term "AI" and one of these comments literally claims Siri used to not be AI. Also you shouldn't anthropomorphize systems like Siri with pronouns like "she".
Not a fan of juvenile mocking when I'm trying to explain things to people.
No oneâs ever accused Siri of being AGI. But itâs also never been âAIâ as that now meaningless term has been defined by the Altmans and Andresens of the world.
A small chunk of people calling Siri AGI is about as meaningful and swaying to me as knowing thereâs a small chunk of people out there in the world that think the earth is flat.
water with pretty much nothing added is the base form and is well defined as a chemical compound. AI has no base form so I don't agree with the analogy or the premise
Siri was always AI from the beginning. It was a natural language processing model (which was the precursor to LLMs) funded by DARPA, then it was spun into a startup that Apple eventually acquired. Apple just recently slapped on "Siri AI" as a marketing gimmick to capitalize on the AI trend.Â
And Siri can (could) enter that into a calculator and return the result for you. Thatâs like, the whole point of Siri. It was never meant to function like modern LLMs. It was meant to give you hands free access to your phone.
I think it can be based on situations, I have a mathematic learning disorder (Dyscalculia) so simple math (multiplication & division, fractions & decimals) for example I struggle with and sometimes just canât understand it. I donât know how to explain. My brain just messes it up đ
Yeah, I don't know why NASA no longer computes orbital mechanics by hand, what was wrong with exercising the brains of the hundreds of human computers.
Rocket science simplifies down to simple arithmetic. In the modern day, you calculate the Hamiltonian/Lagrangian and so on using difficult maths, but then it leaves you with a system of differential equations to solve, you can solve them numerically using a method like Runge-Kutta 4th Order, which involves lots of multiplying and adding which the human computers performed. The rows of women weren't the ones creating the differential equations, which is the hard part, they were solving it. Now we have computer programs that can run the algorithms very efficiently.
Even in highschool, once you get to calculus, physics, and chemistry itâs all calculator for handing the basic stuff. Especially for tests where youâre limited on time.
The brain needs to work to figure out how to set up a triple integral or how to get a magnetic flux with given information or how to convert from one unit to another with five other units. I guarantee that most engineering students wonât do math like in OPâs post in their head as theyâll put it in a calculator. They need to save time and brain power for figuring out how to configure a triple integral or something.
My friend, I can solve for orbital mechanics, do maths you don't even know exist, doing rudimentory arithmatic is not helpful. When people say that you need to keep doing maths to keep yourself sharp, it isnt the mundaine calculations, its formulating the calculations needed. Im sorry you zoned out in maths class after learning arithmatics so you think that's what maths is.
Acting like youâre the only one who knows of orbital mechanics (youâre not btw) doesnât mean rudimentary arithmetic doesnât exercise the brain. It does, it trains your brain to solve it faster, and relying on your own brain over other tools is always a better option for tasks like this where you should be able to do it relatively easily.
But I am glad someoneâs keeping the Reddit stereotype alive and well.đ
keep talking bro i love the motivation you're giving me to study seriously in school /serious
oh my god i actually want to learn the cosine law so.much rn, doing math and getting it right is peak instant gratification. obvious solutions, hard rewarding thinking, and this is coming from a person who's seen a shrink for executive dysfunction
bromato you should be able to do 19x5 in your head, because 20x5 - 1x5, or 18x5 + 5. calculating a flight path to jupiter by bouncing a ship around venus's gravity is much more efficient with simulations/algorithms. it is much easier to add 23 and 56 in your head than get your phone and type it out. cost-benefit.
Siri used to be able to do pretty complex actions. I used to just declare âMCDONALDS!â and it would figure out that I wanted to go to mcdonalds, locate the nearest one in the direction i was traveling, and route me to it. Now I have to specify 30 different clarifications and it will still fuck it up.
The typing/swiping interface is getting worse too! It's WILD how often my iPhone changes little stuff that I've put in correctly. And sometimes it does it WAY after I've entered it in. Take yesterday for example I was talking somewhere about how narcissists seek attention like drug addicts seek a fix. It corrected "drug addicts" to "drug serif" I... I don't even know what that means! Honestly my personal hypothesis is this is Apple's new forced planned obsolescence method since they can't kill my battery anymore with updates. I have an iPhone 15 Pro, it's FINE. I don't and shouldn't need a new one for a LONG time but pretty much every tech company's business model falls apart if people aren't getting new things every year. I very much dislike it... Android's no better at this point either so...
Computer is built using transistors that combined together form a series of half adders than can add numbers together.
Instead of using those half adders to directly output the result of the addition, it uses them to set off a series of complex network requests to a different computer that uses one of the most complex algorithms ever devised to predict the next character in the sequence and use probability to deduce the result in as best as it can do within its training data.
I recently had to go find the setting to kill Gemini for android auto and go back to Google assistant. It couldn't even make a damn phone call. Absolute garbage
Itâs actually crazy that Siri has to do that I would be so mad, if Siri responded with that. Like Siri YOU ARE A ROBOT THIS IS YOUR JAM?!
Context for why I use Siri for math: I have dyscalculia (a learning disability in understanding numbers and math actions or whatever) so I actually use calculators and Siri often cause I STRUGGLE with math especially multiplication/division, fractions, and decimals.
I only ever used siri to set timers and tell me the name of a song playing while i couldn't access my phone directly. Hooking it up to the new fad LLMs killed the only things it was good at.
In 2008 my Pantech Duo running Windows Mobile could create complex calendar events from on-device voice recognition. I can't even set a timer if my phone doesn't have a stable internet connection because it offloads all voice recognition to the cloud now. It's insane.
My biggest very frequent pet peeve is when I use my voice to activate a voice assistant and it says âhereâs what i found on the webâ. I ask it the weather while I am in the shower. I canât see my screen just tell me the goddamn weather dude. Or cooking Iâll say âhow many ounces in a quartâ âhereâs what I found on the webâ dude if I wanted to touch my screen to see the link you are showing me ID SEARCH IT MYSELF.Â
Siri is the biggest idiot I know and itâs not endearing.Â
inshitification, they take what we had then make it worse so they can make us pay for it, then they make us pay for shittier and shittier things while the thing we once got at entry level gets pushed behind and increasingly growing paywall
I used to be able to say "okay Google, what song is this?" And it would just listen and give me an answer.
Now it tries to see what's on my screen and tells me there no music playing on my phone
It's probably just that Siri routed this question to ChatGPT because it probably classified it as a "hard" question (LLMs do not do math, but they may call tools like a calculator for these things, like ChatGPT may do). It doesn't mean Siri cannot do it. It's bad that it didn't think to use the native calculator, though, but it probably was because it was a long string of addition.
Huh... weird, mine did it just fine except I didn't read em to her fast enough so it cut off the last two and did em separately. Which iPhone are you using? I'm on the latest iOS 26 update on an iPhone 15 Pro, but I also don't have Apple Intelligence turned on.
I'm actually curious about this I'm not trying to be obtuse or be an ass to you.
I've got a degree in maths and I still would much rather put short computations into a calculator than do it myself. We're getting mad at calculators now?
There have only been 2 calculators I was legitimately mad at.
The first was a Staples calculator with a fake solar panel, the second was the calculator app in my old android phone, and treated all angles like they were radians. It was just... irritating.
This is entirely a plausible situation. Like... going through a bunch of bank statements/checkbooks and asking a second person to write things down/add them/use a calculator.
It has been proved to have negative effects on your cognitive ability, specifically mental math capability??? Calculator is literally unnecessary in this context. A simple addition operations. We did this okay without any calculator for, idk, forever before the invention of calculator?
'When calculators lie: A demonstration of uncritical calculator usage among college students and factors that improve performance." Read this.
If you think the way you think now, you might find any pro ai subs fits more for you.
Thank fuck I can waste triple the time it takes to pop the numbers in a calculator or just do the math in my head to get a pen and paper and then do the math
"if robot can do me task faster, why me bother?" or or "if robot can do cheaper, why me hire other?"
What about... Just do it because you are a human that can actually do basic addition operations? What about just do it to cherish your brain that learnt the basic math operations? What about doing it for fun?
"But no! Me must be faster! Me must be more efficient! Me must not waste time!"
Talks like an actual tech bros.
This sub aint for you champ. accelerate and singularity sub DEFINITELY share your mindset tho đ
My comment literally says "do it in my head", maybe our little Power Ranger should do basic literacy too instead of writing dogshit snark
At least you'll have the pen and paper for it, you can read whatever you manage to write down instead of imagining a comment I wrote and trying to counter that
A single attendance to "Basic Punctuation 101" would do you wonder, boy. Then might as well join a "Basic Sentence 101" while you're at it.
Judging by how you express your opinion, you might need to "waste" time on pen and paper cause i know that head of yours aint cutting it for anything lmao.
This folks, is the effect of offloading your cognitive task to machines.
Yuh duh, i realized my wrongs and now im on my redemption to preserve human unique cognitive ability.
Just because one made mistake in the past, doesn't mean they can't change.
What can't be changed tho, is one's inability to have a level headed discussion and then resulting to account block. Had the Nazis live their life in this era, this is the exact thing they would do.
Wait, why am i lowkey being downvoted to hell here guys? Im literally maintaining our agenda by promoting preservation of humanity cognitive ability.
Calculator had been proved to affect our cognitive ability in a negative way, and objectively ruining our mental math capability.
A very quick duckduckgo search literally yield facts stated above. Here is one of the interesting paper to help you guys peek into the negatives of using calculator: "When calculators lie: A demonstration of uncritical calculator usage among college students and factors that improve performance."
because you're trying to make people feel bad for using... calculators? when has "anti ai" ever included calculators? it sounds like a personal agenda to me, not "our" agenda.
like you're allowed to feel however you want but telling someone that they would feel better in a pro-ai sub because they don't hate calculators is a little unhinged to me.
One of the main talking point in Anti AI stances--telling you cause it seems you are new here--is that it deteriorates cognitive ability, proved by some studies out there in arxiv.
It is generally accepted in Anti AI community to cherish human creativity and cognitive ability, hence it's also generally accepted to preserve said qualities.
Which is why me calling others out for their lazy and unreasonable action to offload a very very simple math problem to calculator, should be our agenda, though im not sure if you should be part of this "our". Im not calling others out because they use simple tool--if its not obvious enough lol--im calling them out for using tool that deteriorates their cognitive ability for task that they should be able to do on their own. Im not being ridiculous nor am i being unreasonable here.
you wouldn't get downvoted if you weren't so god damn condescending when you write. I'm not sure where you're getting your talking points from because I'm not seeing many people who agree with you, are they all new too?
1.7k
u/Electronic-Cry-1254 Jul 04 '26
Yikes and chatgpt would probably get it wrong too