One pipe dream for another
Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
281–290 of 992 posts
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#282It's shocking/hilarious how much/many people believe that there are any economic prospects in generative AI. By definition, if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand. There's also a reason it's called a singularity, it sucks everything in that touches it but otherwise has very little influence on anything else.
This is such a weird take, at $dayjob we're selling a product right now that's based on generative AI to end users who largely have no idea or care that it's an LLM behind the scenes. The previous version of this product used NLP via spacy and it was pretty bad because even with lots of tuning wrangling the kind of unstructured text we consume just didn't work in general.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP. Apple is just not that elite of a brand, I don’t see how selling million-dollar vehicles would significantly change their brand (assuming an Apple logo hood ornament).
> I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.
Building supercars has always been a cottage industry that anyone can get involved in but nobody can dominate in the way Apple has certain classes of electronic product. There's a lot of choice, few buyers and it's not high margin compared with mass produced electronics at industry-leading markup even if engineers at the popular companies aren't more obsessed with beauty and speed than the bottom line.
What Rimac did was partner with big automotive OEMs for research joint ventures and sell a tiny number of cars and a relatively large amount of battery and drivetrain tech to other OEMs. Difficult to imagine anything less like Apple's business model than that.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
A self-driving car is not something that Apple has any relevant expertise at building. They can't even make siri work well. They had zero hope to make a self-driving car.
That's far from true. They have world class expertise in design and supply chain management. That would transfer over to the car market a lot easier than it would to pretty much any other trillion dollar market.
Shipping a billion iPhones and shipping millions of cars only reasonable each other at a surface level. Apple does not have much expertise in maintaining the same supply chain and logistics, and certainly not in design.
They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the iPhone was far, very far better It wasn't that far ahead when it first launched. Very basic functionality. But a few versions later it was the end of Nokia and Blackberry. https://www.mobilegazette.com/2007-review-07x12x12.htm "No handset polarised opinions during 2007 more than the Apple iPhone. Although it has many good points, the list of bad points is equally impressive. The iPhone lacks 3G, the camera is o…
People seem to forget that on launch, the iPhone was basically a feature phone.
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Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#286I really hope Apple continues its privacy-first ethos and offers an on-device LLM. It would also be great if they could use Handoff-like technology to let my (almost always nearby, almost always plugged-in) laptop do the thinking, instead of depleting the battery of my phone. I'd surely buy a bunch of HomePod minis if I could tie them into a local LLM.
I am sure Apple leadership agrees with your overall idea of on-device, but don’t see how this could compete with big GPUs in a data center for “actually doing a good job.” Apple is a distant last place in everything to do with AI today, so I’m skeptical that they can suddenly make an impact with both hands tied around their back (in other words 1/100th the TDP, one iPhone chip on battery vs farms of GPUs).
I’d honestly more appreciate the ability to choose “best quality with theoretical decrease in ‘privacy’” over “best that you can do without hurting the tiny iPhone battery but perfect privacy.” I’d always pick the first one if given the choice.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.
I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work
I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard.
But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#288This reminds me of the oil curse. After a country discovers it has lots of oil, it nukes every other sector of their economy. Why? Because there's nothing you can invest your money in which would give you a larger return than oil. It sucks the lifeblood out of every other sector.
Apple just didn't invest in its electric cars enough to let them develop it fast enough, and now with China coming online, the window of opportunity has past.
Same reason why Google didn't productize its deep learning R&D.
The only company which has ever ben able to escape from this trap is Intel--when the Japanese chased them out of the memory chip market, they switched to microprocessors. And now, when ARM chased them out of microprocessors, they are switching over to building fabs. The chip architects I know over there are watching their budgets being switched over. Only the paranoid survive.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel Microsoft's desperation to put LLM's into every product suggests mismanagement. Same as Microsoft's past efforts to Bing everything. Adobe seems to be the only one with an empowered product team that's consistently finding sensible and profitable uses for machine learning.
It is hilarious that people are trying to portray MSFT's moves in AI as "desperate" lol
MS got the score of the century. They're selling the shovels and access to the mines.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#290[deleted]