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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

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Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#411

Post by hnav »

mrcarruthers wrote: post #126
closewith wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.

You'd think so... GM has stated that they're doing away with CarPlay and Android auto in favour of their own thing, which will most likely suck on large ways. Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.

Their own thing is Android Auto(motive) developed by Google.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#413

Post by wes-k »

input_sh wrote: post #367
bradgessler wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried talking to Siri? Compare that to ChatGPT and you'll see that it's much better. The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases, which when connected to "plugins" means we'll all have our own personal assistants. That's worth something.

Why would they want to run LLM queries every time someone asks Siri for the normal shit people ask their voice assistants: weather, timers, controlling music; on a scale of every iPhone user out there. It'd just be waisting compute money with no obvious way of recouping the cost. Doubt many people would be interested in paying for Siri.

They already run compute for siri for voice to text. So they could in theory still provide an LLM backed siri service for free for their customers/users.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#414

Post by starbugs »

consumer451 wrote: post #127
pton_xd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now everyone's diving straight into the "full AGI by 2025" hole. Which, to be fair, would solve the "full self-driving" problem as a pure side-effect, I guess.

I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.

> I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.

You mean this one? He actually says self driving and LLMs are both headed towards AGI there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEm81F3vjy0

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#415

Post by selimthegrim »

vineyardmike wrote: post #202
spaceguillotine wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically this was something Apple used to be good at but they killed off all the fun things with apple branding on them, now all you get is two campus exclusive shirt designs. I'd love some retro apple "lifestyle" gear, throwback porsche racing jacket would be clutch right now with the yoots

I never understood why each of the flagship Apple stores don’t have custom merch. I’ll admit that I’ve stopped at plenty of Apple stores while traveling, simply because they’re nearby. They’re usually in very nice locations for tourists (5th av, grand central station, etc) and I can totally see them dramatically improving brand appeal and catering to fanboys with localized tee shirts or Apple Watch bands or polishing…

I would totally buy a (corrected!) Apple Pascal T shirt after the poster.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#416

Post by bee_rider »

whycome wrote: post #264
babyshake wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a recent YC podcast about Vision Pro where SLAM and the overlap with autonomous vehicles was explained.

Ohhh. I thought the commenter was using some sort of slang about the quality of their work. For others out of loop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_an...

Yes, I also don’t work I computer vision but played with it just a tiny bit—I think somebody saying they worked in SLAM and are moving to a Vision Pro project is not a huge leak or anything. It is like a chemist saying they work in lithium ion batteries and are making the same move. A very broad and fundamental concept.

Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#417

Post by Animats »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #328
zer00eyz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc. The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of u…

It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good. Bell Labs was part of the public good - and why they employed multiple physicists and materials scientists whose employment involved basically researching whatever they wanted as long as it had some link back. Shannon was hired after his…

> It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good.

It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#418

Post by kjkjadksj »

jcgrillo wrote: post #324
ryandrake wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether the…

I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.

There’s no crash, just vine swinging to the next. A couple years ago it was blockchain. Expect a new stupid rain dance in a few years.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#419

Post by fragmede »

johndhi wrote: post #394
selimthegrim wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

This was funny and I meant to update it but instead down voted it and now can't find how to undo that. Sorry!

there's a undown button to the right of the username if the timer hasn't expired

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#420

Post by 015a »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14
riddlemethat wrote: post #3

This is a smart move. Apple seems so far behind in generative AI it's making Google look innovative.

> Apple seems so far behind in generative AI Apple is a best-in-class second mover. With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.

Yeah its kind of insane how many times Apple can pull this trick yet we still get people saying "they're late, they look like morons, Apple is finished".

Apple can arrive last to a product market. They can take six years of iterative releases to refine their vision on a product market. They will still dominate that market. Cue the "they can't keep getting away with this" meme, because this happens with EVERY PRODUCT THEY RELEASE and these people still keep thinking this time will be different.

The whole "Siri sucks" thing is also hilarious, because you have to ask: So? So what? Apple, Google, and Amazon invested billions upon billions into these systems (Amazon especially). Then LLMs came around and are absolutely eating their same lunch ten times faster. Apple, again, looks like a genius (intentionally, or far more likely, not). They didn't over-invest. They're not laying off a thousand people from the Alexa division [1], or removing a ton of Google Assistant features [2], or releasing hardware no one is buying. They built exactly enough of a voice assistant to be competitive throughout the 2010s, and now its time for the next generation of all these things anyway.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-alexa-job-cuts-generative-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034262/google-assistant...

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