Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by staticman2 » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #183

staticman2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of contradicting yourself. If a high token count tells you all you need to know about how smart a model is Ultra 1.5 would be just as good as Pro 1.5. The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.

You can make up for a lot of smartness by having a smarter model generate all the text you put in that giant context window.

Could you point me to evidence what you just wrote is true?

I just asked mistral 7b to provide 5 sentences that end with Apple. It couldn't do it. I then provided 5 examples generated from ChatGPT 4 and asked it to generate 5 more. It still couldn't do it. 10 ChatGPT examples- still couldn't do it.

You seem to be saying the models can generalize on the entire context size, that I should keep provided examples up to the token limit because this will make the model smarter. Is there evidence of that?

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

#452

Post by FirmwareBurner » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

ein0p wrote: post #245

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, repairing a recent-gen out of warranty MacBook at Apple is nearly as expensive as servicing a car. Why wouldn't Apple want those margins from premium cars as well?

You probably haven’t had your car serviced in a while. My BMW is currently is at the dealer, to replace water pump and thermostat. The invoice is $4.5K. The winning strategy for a newcomer is not to charge for repairs, but to create a car that doesn’t need repairs or maintenance.

I have serviced a car, but not a BMW since I don't shit money.

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

#453

Post by xcv123 » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

chucke1992 wrote: post #247

timetopay wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though. For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched. Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds. One of the Apple Watch's major compet…

iPhone has basically defined a category of mutli-touch screen devices. It essentially created the whole foundation how all the mobile phones went. It was a completely new consumer category of devices. Apple Watch was a success because it used iPhone as a moat. iPad was built upon iPhone's foundation. Apple is - by and large - "an iPhone company".

> It essentially created the whole foundation how all the mobile phones went. It was a completely new consumer category of devices.

I was already using smart phones, handhelds, tablets, etc, for years before the iPhone. Apple entered an existing category.

The iPhone wasn't even the first capacitive touchscreen phone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Back in 2007 it was not seen as a completely new category or truly original. It was a variation within an existing category. At the time we did not think it was revolutionary, but of course it became the new standard.

Before they became an "iPhone company" they were an "iPod company", and that was also an existing category when it launched.

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

#454

Post by krunck » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

thefourthchime wrote: post #242

croes wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>privacy-first ethos Apple doesn't have a privacy first ethos, it's more of an All your-data-are-belong-to-us. They just don't like to share the asset of their users data, that's not privacy.

That's not true you can have complete end to end encryption. By default. iCloud is not encrypted, but you can encrypt it and nobody but you can get access access your data. It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.

Who can confirm this though?

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

#455

Post by i_have_an_idea » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

kjreact wrote: post #395

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good. Also bad. From the article: > many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen EV startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.

> So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen tech startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI. I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build…

I get what you're saying, however I don't think that's true:

> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle

Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.

It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.

Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.

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

#456

Post by kazinator » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #29

MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.

Phones are just networked computers though.

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

#457

Post by smoldesu » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

intrasight wrote: post #397

smoldesu wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of Apple's hardware, the fastest way to inference is to ignore the built-in Neural hardware and use Metal Compute Shaders. Suffice to say that simply shipping dedicated silicon is not equivalent to accelerating everything well, or supporting it upstream.

SMOB (simply matter of bytes) as they say. Will they finally invest in AI software? My take from this announcement is that they will. Dedicated silicon with a dedicated hardware stack shouldn't be so hard for Apple. They can throw considerable resource at the problem.

It would be great to see, if they pull it off. I suspect that Apple's desire for control and curation (as well as limited liability) will prevent them from making an effective "one size fits all" model, though. Considering that local AI isn't a paid service or a system-seller, it makes more sense for Apple to double-down on software support rather than trying to Sherlock the world with their own model.

Time will tell what the future holds, but I sincerely believe it's too late for Apple to ride the AI bubble. The iPhone is their last stand; they need to deliver a competitive AI experience, ideally one that's open and supports older hardware models. Their work is cut out for them.

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

#458

Post by MetaWhirledPeas » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

> I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.

Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes from a lack of resources, not something Apple is worried about.

I find it really interesting that you (and those who did not contradict you) choose to form this opinion. I suspect Apple shares it. But to me it's a missed opportunity combined with a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably the lack of this very characteristic that makes Elon so successful. He never lets FUD get in the way of his goals.

There are some companies out there who don't seem subject to these artificial limitations, at least, at certain points in their history. For a while Mitsubishi made both cars and televisions. Panasonic made both batteries and bicycles.

I think what really separates winners from losers when it comes to developing a product and selling it is the willingness to set aside artificial limitations and really commit to beating the competition. Core competencies matter more for companies who are no longer interested in growing. Apple definitely wants to keep growing. So if Apple really was putting R&D money into cars and then quit, then I see this as a failure of Apple leadership. Apple can make a great car, and people would buy it.

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

#459

Post by dkjaudyeqooe » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

PheonixPharts wrote: post #389

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

I do a lot of open source LLM research/dev work on a Mac Studio. While it doesn't quite compete in terms of speed with a GPU for standard transformers models, I can run pretty huge models locally. When I'm working with llama.ccp, the speed and model size I can run is very impressive. I can also run Stable Diffusion XL in reasonable time frames on an iPad Pro . The current gen Mac book Pro can perform almost as well a…

I feel like there's going to be a lot of movement towards the CPU with AI compute, and Apple's processors show the possibilities.

GPUs happened to have a lot of throughput lying around so they got put to work, but already the importance of having lots of memory to hold huge models even just for inference is clear. I also think the future AI will have a lot more going in 'conventional' compute rather than just large arrays of simple tensor ops or the like.

CPUs will increasingly gain specialist hardware to accelerate AI workloads, beyond what we have now and less monolithic too, in that it'll probably have a variety of kinds of accelerators.

That will combine well with big main memory and storage that is ever closer to the CPU to enable very fast virtual memory. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see CPUs with HBW storage as well as HBW memory.

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

#460

Post by bbor » Tue, Feb 27, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

NOOOOOOOOO it’s been literal DECADES. I am literally heartbroken. “Did you know Apple has a secret car project” has been a fun fact for my entire life, and I’m just supposed to walk away like it never happened?

Sorry for the not-professional comment but jeez. Dark days.