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OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

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Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#161

The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end. The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's a…

> The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Be more specific though: what form factor will such a device be in? A coffee maker? A phone? Glasses? Cars? A building? The AI wave seems to be hoping a whole load of hardware revolutions, such as holographic displays, will just appear out of the ether because it fits with their vision of how things should be.

I don’t see why the device has to be in a significantly different form factor than current phones. AI alleviates one of the major problems phones have right now, which is that typing on them is slow.

If you can type a half-assed message, and have AI fill in the blanks, or reliably transcribe your voice, that’s a huge improvement to the phone in its current form factor. No reason the screen or interfaces have to undergo a radical transformation

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#162

The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end. The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's a…

iPhone should've been a successful formfactor, it's not the form factor that's the problem it's the lack of apple datacenters that can train and inference for a popular service. Instead Apple went all in on edge inference which as we all know is absolutely stupid and probably will never be that relevant.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#164

The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end. The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's a…

This could be true... but only if there is an actual specific problem that they can put their finger on that requires the device to be AI-first. What is that problem exactly?

It's also not obvious to me that a concerted effort by Apple (unlike what we've seen so far, admittedly) wouldn't eventually be successful in converting the iPhone to something effectively indistinguishable from a platform designed from the ground up to be "AI-first".

Designing things from the ground up is hard by the way. It's not just the design itself; it's the ecosystems around them which are really hard to get going. Apple has the world's biggest flywheel in motion there already.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#166

This is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months. Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.

While I agree the AGI thing is mostly bullshit the whole market is aware that models aren't the end-all-be-all and people will not be making huge profits out of them, all the other big players have other side businesses they can use to upsell the models, OpenAI doesn't and they need to figure something out.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#167
post #63

I find it amusing that IO a company with no product and no history is valued and bought at $6.5B.

The dotcom bubble gave insane valuations to "companies" that literally had a static html page and no product or service.

Maybe that's a reason to stop doing it.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#169
post #142

These product-focused moves feel like a tacit admission that AGI is further away than they’ve been preaching. If it was close at hand, spending precious resources on anything other than pursuing AGI wouldn’t make sense.

If we’re talking about the singularity robot takeover fast takeoff, maybe that’s true. But Sam and others have said they see AGI is an uneven process that may not have a clear finish line. The intelligence is spiky and some parts will be superhuman while other parts lag.

Sounds like excuses

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#170
post #142

These product-focused moves feel like a tacit admission that AGI is further away than they’ve been preaching. If it was close at hand, spending precious resources on anything other than pursuing AGI wouldn’t make sense.

If we’re talking about the singularity robot takeover fast takeoff, maybe that’s true. But Sam and others have said they see AGI is an uneven process that may not have a clear finish line. The intelligence is spiky and some parts will be superhuman while other parts lag.

Note that they started saying that recently after their earlier projections didn't pan out. The "uneven process without a clear finish line" angle was Altman recently trying to reset expectations, which means it doesn't contradict OP's thesis that this move towards product is further admission that AGI is going to be much messier than they initially predicted.
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