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Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

machinelearning.apple.com

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Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#471

Post by skohan »

rfoo wrote: post #345
pjmlp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic linking has always been cool for writing plugins. It is kind of ironic that languages that praise so much for going back to early linking models, have to resort for much heavier OS IPC for similar capabilities.

Which languages? IIUC Go and Rust resort to OS IPC based plugin system mainly because they refused to have a stable ABI. On the other hand, at $DAYJOB we have a query engine written in C++ (which itself uses mostly static linking [1]) loading mostly static linked UDFs and ... it works. [1] Without glibc, but with libstdc++ / libgcc etc.

Doesn’t rust’s static linking also have to do with the strategy of aggressive minimization? Iirc for instance every concrete instantiation of a dynamic type will have its own compiled binary, so it would basically be impossible for a dynamic library to do this since it wouldn’t know how it would be used, at least not without some major limitations or performance tradeoffs

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#472

Post by caseyy »

lolinder wrote: post #453
caseyy wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has never been big on living at the cutting edge of technology There was such a time. Same as with Google. Interestingly, around 2015-2016 both companies significantly shifted to iterative products from big innovations. It's more visible with Google than Apple, but here's both. Apple: - Final Cut Pro - 1998: iMac - 1999: iBook G3 (father of all MacBooks) - 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the…

The iMac refined a form factor that dated back to at least Commodore. The iBook came after decades of iteration by other companies on laptops. The Cube was just a PC with a more compressed form factor. The iPod came a few years after other commercial digital media players. Etc, etc. Note that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with their approach or that they didn't make real improvements. I'm just saying tha…

It depends on the definition of "new". With some definitions, we may claim that nothing is ever new — we may say computers started with the Antikythera mechanism and abaci, or maybe before. With other definitions (like "new" as in a "new for most people") we will see that Apple has brought about many new things. So we need to agree on the definition.

I used the definition of new somewhere between "new for most people", "newly popular", and "meaningfully advanced from the previous iteration". With such a definition, I think you can agree with me.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#473

Post by KerrAvon »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #437
steve1977 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also to use the names everyone else is already using. That would be a very un-Apple thing to do. They really like to use their own marketing terms for technologies. It's not ARM, it's Apple Silicon. It wasn't Wi-Fi, it was AirPort. etc. etc.

See also: FireWire, iSight, Retina, FaceTime, etc.

None of these really fit the pattern. Apple invented FireWire, called it FireWire, and other companies chose to call it different things in their implementations (partly because Apple originally charged for licensing the name, IIRC). iSight is an Apple product. FaceTime is an Apple product. Retina is branding for high-resolution displays beyond a certain visual density.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#474

Post by KerrAvon »

caseyy wrote: post #467
vile_wretch wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of your choices and what you consider iterative/innovative are strange to me. For 2009, a chassis update for the iMac and a spec/camera bump for the iPhone doesn't seem particularly innovative especially in comparison to say the HomePod in 2017 or Satellite SOS in 2022. Also small correction but iTunes (as Soundjam MP) was originally third-party software and Final Cut was acquired by Apple.

Yes, it's not perfect. About iTunes: I did not know that! Thank you. About iterative/innovative: I considered hardware and software that became household names or general knowledge to be significant innovations. It is not rigorous, I tried to include more rather than less. Still, on some years these companies mostly did version increases for their hardware and software, like new iOS and macOS versions, and that was i…

You're missing Apple Silicon, which has had a huge impact across the entire industry even if random soccer dad doesn't know about it -- if any one thing is responsible for Intel's marketshare collapsing in the future, the M series of processors is it.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#475

Post by steve1977 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #473
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also: FireWire, iSight, Retina, FaceTime, etc.

None of these really fit the pattern. Apple invented FireWire, called it FireWire, and other companies chose to call it different things in their implementations (partly because Apple originally charged for licensing the name, IIRC). iSight is an Apple product. FaceTime is an Apple product. Retina is branding for high-resolution displays beyond a certain visual density.

"Apple invented FireWire" is maybe not fully accurate (but actually a good example of the point here).

Wikipedia: FireWire is Apple's name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. Its development was initiated by Apple[1] in 1986,[3] and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group, largely driven by contributions from Sony (102 patents), Apple (58 patents), Panasonic (46 patents), and Philips (43 patents), in addition to contributions made by engineers from LG Electronics, Toshiba, Hitachi, Canon,[4] INMOS/SGS Thomson (now STMicroelectronics),[5] and Texas Instruments.

What might be interesting in this regard is that Sony was also using its own trademark for it: "i.LINK".

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#476

Post by KerrAvon »

lolinder wrote: post #453
caseyy wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has never been big on living at the cutting edge of technology There was such a time. Same as with Google. Interestingly, around 2015-2016 both companies significantly shifted to iterative products from big innovations. It's more visible with Google than Apple, but here's both. Apple: - Final Cut Pro - 1998: iMac - 1999: iBook G3 (father of all MacBooks) - 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the…

The iMac refined a form factor that dated back to at least Commodore. The iBook came after decades of iteration by other companies on laptops. The Cube was just a PC with a more compressed form factor. The iPod came a few years after other commercial digital media players. Etc, etc. Note that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with their approach or that they didn't make real improvements. I'm just saying tha…

In the consumer space, I'm not sure I can think of any examples from anyone ever that are examples of cutting-edge research at the time. It's hard to build consumer products on the bleeding edge. You'd be releasing phones today using CHERI, for example, which is not quite ready for prime time.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#477

Post by ihumanable »

duxup wrote: post #173
tonynator wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who dislike censorship and enjoy hacking avoid iPhones for obvious reasons.

I feel that way, have an iPhone.

Yea, same.

I have literally no desire to hack and fuck around with my personal cell phone, doing so would take away time from the hacking I actually want to do.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#478

Post by w10-1 »

I think we as tech people lost the forest for the trees.

Apple (unwisely I think) is allowing UI's to just generate responses.

The wow-neat! experience will wear off quickly. Then even as a miss rate of 0.1%, there will be thousands - millions - of cringe-worthy examples that sully the Apple brand for quality.

It will be impossible to create quality filter good enough, and there will be no way to back these features out of the OS.

For targeted use-cases (like coding and editing), this will be useful. But these features may be what finally makes contempt for Apple go mainstream, and that would be a shame.

Internally at Apple, they likely discussed how much to limit the rollout and control usage. I think they decided to bake it into API's more to maintain developer mindshare than to keep users happy.

The one feature that could flip that script is interacting with Siri/AI in order to get things done. The frustration with knowing what you want but not how or whether it can be done drives a lot of tech angst. If this only meant ordinary people could use their existing phones to their full extent, it would be a huge win.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#479

Post by pertymcpert »

aixpert wrote: post #429
dingclancy wrote: post #236

It’s interesting that a sub-ChatGPT 3.5 class model can do a lot of things on-device if you marry it with a good platform and feed it personal context. GPT-4o, living on the browser, is not as compelling as a product compared to what Apple Intelligence can do on the iPhone with a less capable model.

their 3 billion parameter model can't do shit, Only some basic grammar check style rewrite and maybe summarization

Have you tried it much?

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#480

Post by breuleux »

brandall10 wrote: post #418
zer0zzz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is steamdeck sold at cost? From what I know Apple has a rule that everything must be sold at 40% margins. That is prob the main reason.

It's been speculated that base config macbooks essentially act as loss leaders for higher end configs, so overall, probably sales across the line net somewhere around that. The cost of the upgrades themselves can get to multiple times the actual market cost.

I feel like this is very obviously what they are doing: they have a small margin on the entry config where people are a lot more price-aware, and jack up the upgrade costs to get a fat margin on configs bought by orgs and power users who generally care less about how much it costs. Frankly, I'd do the same thing.
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