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Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

bloomberg.com

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Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#11

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bigyabai wrote: post #7
tiahura wrote: post #6

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro…

Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#12

Post by mips_avatar »

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#13

Post by bigyabai »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #11
bigyabai wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro…

Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.

Great news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#14

Post by benoau »

tiahura wrote: post #6

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#15

Post by burnt-resistor »

mips_avatar wrote: post #12

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#16

Post by paulpauper »

Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#17

Post by paulpauper »

aunty_helen wrote: post #10
tiahura wrote: post #6

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time? Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.

Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#18

Post by paulpauper »

bigyabai wrote: post #7
tiahura wrote: post #6

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro…

Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#19

Post by dangus »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #15
mips_avatar wrote: post #12

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.

Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.

While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.

Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#20

Post by anon7000 »

aunty_helen wrote: post #10
tiahura wrote: post #6

Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.

Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time? Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.

> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money

It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall

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