The future of 'documentation'

In the late 1990s, right back at the start of my squiggly career, I was a 'Technical Author' - writing tests for mobile phone software. (Not writing software tests - literally, instructions for the people like me who would have to run the tests. (eg. "Press Menu > 1 > 1 : You should be in a 'Compose New SMS' screen".)

I liked the idea of writing - in particular, the idea of writing something that would help people make the most of consumer technology (phones - this was pre-smartphone, PCs, software etc.) User manuals at the time were typically a joke - written in technical jargon that you could only understand if you already understood how the things worked. ¹ So my plan at the time was to get into that side of "technical authoring"; making complicated things simple.

After a few meetings and chats with various people in the field, the first realisation I had was that the reason was that the people writing the "user" documentation were spending >90% of their time writing the technical documentation for engineers; their job was literally the opposite of communicating complex things in simple ways for non-technical people.

The other thing I realised was that the future of this kind of 'documentation' wasn't going to be printed on a piece of paper in the box that the technology came in; it was going to be on the website, where it could be constantly updated, revised etc.

Well - that wasn't entirely incorrect. In the last few weeks, I've needed to find manuals for a few things; we've moved into a new house, and I've needed to understand things like an extractor fan that had stopped spinning, a water pump that controls the heating, and some flat-pack furniture from the old house I needed to reassemble. For all three, I found what I was looking for online - and for all three, it was in the form of a PDF of the printed piece of paper that presumably originally came in the box.

But still - I think its true as a more general trend. Or at least, it has been.

"Documentation" might not have quite made the leap from the static paper-based things to a truly dynamic, searchable, interactive version - but the vast majority of the time, the web will still get you the answers to your questions. Maybe thats a Reddit thread. Maybe its an obscure electricians' forum where someone has asked for help for exactly the same extractor fan problem that I've had - and someone else has provided it.

But the thing that occurred to me this morning, as I was playing with a local LLM and asking it for help about some technical details around how to configure it, was that there is an opportunity for these models to be "self-documenting" that seems to be being missed. Meta's Llama model seemed to struggle with some questions about configuring itself (sending me off on a weird path of writing python scripts, editing .zshrc configuration files - before I did a google search and realised I could do what I wanted to do with two lines of code in the same window that I was 'talking' to the Llama model in.

A fairly small LLM, trained on the model's own documentation should surely be able to get you to an accurate answer much faster and easier than the current 'best option' of Google/Reddit/Stack Overflow searches - which can just as easily get you to outdated/obsolete advice as to the "right" answer.

Sure - LLMs hallucinate; but only when they are trying to provide an "answer" that they don't have enough information to provide and are forced into a 'best available information' situation - which a well-trained model with a single use case should not have a problem with.

1. Honestly - I think this is still true, for the most part. For example, the manual for a robot hoover we recently got tells you to push a button that is *not labelled on the actual robot* - only in the manual itself, in text so small I had to get my daughter to read it for me. (OK - my eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but this was literally text on a diagram about 1mm high.) I'm sure it made perfect sense in the version on the designer's 5K screen - but the actual version that the user had to rely on was almost useless. ↩

AI and "Apple Intelligence"

(Title based on a Threads post from Daniel Jalkut.

What Is Apple Doing in AI? Summaries, Cloud and On-Device LLMs, OpenAI Deal - Bloomberg

But the company knows consumers will demand such a feature, and so it’s teaming up with OpenAI to add the startup’s technology to iOS 18, the next version of the iPhone’s software. The companies are preparing a major announcement of their partnership at WWDC, with Sam Altman-led OpenAI now racing to ensure it has the capacity to support the influx of users later this year.

Nah- I'm not buying it. For one - OpenAI and Microsoft are "true" partners; Microsoft's Azure compute + OpenAI's models + Microsoft's apps/OS ¹ are getting deeply intertwined. An Apple + OpenAI partnership seems like a strategy to be permanently one step behind Microsoft.

But it seems inevitable that there's big Apple + AI news coming. Siri needs a significant upgrade. The new iPad Pro announcement made a big deal about having "AI compute" power². "AI features" announcements at WWDC 2024 seems like the safest bet in tech.

So, what might be coming?

• Siri was a pretty early bet on the future - but possibly too early, given the advancements in machine learning/deep learning since Siri was first released. But "Siri" is more of a brand than a technology - there are "Siri" features that don't seem to have anything to do with the voice assistant.
• Meanwhile, while Siri might seem to be stuck in a rut, Apple's own proprietary ML/AI technology has been coming along. Apple Music has had a 'karaoke' feature where you can turn down the vocals - which I had wondered whether it was an AI-powered thing or just that they get separate stems; the latest Logic Pro which lets you split vocals, drums, bass and 'everything else' seems to suggest that its AI rather than a 'special access to the masters' situation. Given Apple's insistence on owning any technology that they rely on, this seems like the most likely approach. Whether Siri as a brand is dead or not… We'll see. (Worth noting that Siri came out before the film 'Her' - while OpenAI's latest release seems clearly... 'inspired' by the film, Siri looks more like the inspiration for the film.)
• That said - it seems that Apple needs to catch up a lot, and fast. So a partnership with a technology leader does make sense. So... with who?
  • Meta? Meta's AI push has been for 'open' models (as opposed to - ironically - OpenAI's proprietary approach) that anyone can use. Apple's strength is in using on-device computing power (because they have a fair amount of it - it also fits with their 'privacy first' approach.) Maybe Apple would be licensing these models - but I suspect that the Apple/Meta relationship isn't strong enough to make it likely that Apple would want to put their future in Mark Zuckerberg's hands.
  • Google's AI journey has been... interesting. They seem to be leaders in terms of the underlying tech - but struggling to actually execute; OpenAI/ChatGPT/Copilots seem to be conclusively winning the PR/branding fight - perhaps they need a partner who can make a better product (away from the issues of competing with Search as a business model) that can better reflect the power of the underlying tech than Google's efforts to date. The Transformer architecture that led to the LLM explosion came out of Google, as did the Tensorflow software framework. While everyone else is fighting over nVidia's GPU chips, Google have been making their own TPUs for nearly a decade. Google is arguably the only GPU-rich business at the moment, and there is a general vibe of the AI industry being Google vs. Everyone Else - having a big partner might be exactly what they need right now. Maybe most importantly, Google pays Apple a lot of money for search engine prominence. The question is how much of the old Android/iOS friction still exists on Apple's side, while Google's opportunity is to make an AI-powered "Google Android" a distinct product from... lets call it the "Samsung Android" ecosystem - which doesn't make as much sense if Apple gets benefits that cheaper Android phones don't.
  • Microsoft? If Apple could get a more... lets say "grown-up" business partner without the volatility of OpenAI, then that could be interesting... And if the 'everyone vs Google' view of the market is right, then it seems to be in Microsoft's interests too. But it seems that Microsoft's clear positioning of 'Copilot+ PCs' as going head-to-head with Macbooks would be unlikely if that was in the pipeline.
  • There are other AI companies (eg. Anthropic) - but I'm not sure how many of them are scalable enough (read: access to the compute resources that would be needed to potentially switch on for every iPhone/iPad/Mac owner in the world overnight.)

If I had to make a bet, my money would be on a Google partnership, with something like the Gemma model running locally on iPhone/iPads etc. as 'Siri 2.0' and access to Gemini for the kind of tasks that need access to 'full fat' LLMs and more computing power.

1. Also- GitHub CoPilot ↩

2. Yes, iPads/iPhones/Macs have had 'neural cores' for a few years - but the new iPad seems to be stepping this up significantly, but with no news on what its actually going to power. Worth noting - if you're developing AI/ML/LLM-type software on a Mac, you're using the GPU - not NPU chips. So far, they seem to be locked away for Apple's use (which includes Apple's APIs if you're building apps for the app store - but not if you're running something like TensorFlow in Python.) ↩