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Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

adlrocha.substack.com

81–90 of 402 posts

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#81
post #2

This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.

Yea, they nailed that with the Newton, Apple Pippin, and the Apple Vision Pro

How amazing is that Apple car

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#82

> I am actually of the opinion that without some kind of bailout, OpenAI could be bankrupt in the next 18-24 months, but I am horrible at predictions I find this intriguing.. Does anyone here have enough insight to speculate more?

It's probably one of the biggest headlines right now. OpenAI has about $96 billion in debt and they don't have a revenue generating product yet.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#83

> I am actually of the opinion that without some kind of bailout, OpenAI could be bankrupt in the next 18-24 months, but I am horrible at predictions I find this intriguing.. Does anyone here have enough insight to speculate more?

I don't think I have unique insight on this but the common belief is they are desperately trying to reach AGI or a least have some halo model that will allow them to rise over the other companies. The problem is they have a hilariously large monthly burn paying for compute. If they don't produce something, they are in trouble if investors stop offering capital.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#84
post #75
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are making the mistake of noticing that local models have been 12-24 months behind SotA ones for a good portion of the last couple years, and then drawing a dotted line assuming that continues to hold. It simply.. doesn't. The SotA models are enormous now, and there's no free lunch on compression/quantization here. Opus 4.6 capabilities are not coming to your (even 64-128gb) laptop or phone in the pop…

Don’t underestimate the march of technology. Just look at your phone, it has more FLOPS than there were in the entire world 40 years ago.

And I think it's very likely that with improved methods you could get opus 4.6 level performance on a wrist watch in few years.

You needed supercomputer to win in chess until you didn't.

Currently local models performance in natural language is much better than any algorithm running on a super computer cluster just few years ago.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#85

Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is a problem with the code it’ll answer correctly in terms of suggestions but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting things that require a lot of context or “expert knowledge” If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally o…

> it’s not great at using all tools

Glad it wasnt just me - i was impressed with the quality of Gemma4 - it just couldnt write the changes to file 9/10 times when using it with opencode

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#86

> I am actually of the opinion that without some kind of bailout, OpenAI could be bankrupt in the next 18-24 months, but I am horrible at predictions I find this intriguing.. Does anyone here have enough insight to speculate more?

1) Put data on X/Y chart 2) Find ruler and pencil 3) Draw line

Doing this you will make all kind of fun predictions.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#87
post #73

Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is a problem with the code it’ll answer correctly in terms of suggestions but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting things that require a lot of context or “expert knowledge” If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally o…

similar vibes as "640k ought to be enough for anybody"

Well you can do a lot with 640k…if you try. We have 16G in base machines and very few people know how to try anymore.

The world has moved on, that code-golf time is now spent on ad algorithms or whatever.

Escaping the constraint delivered a different future than anticipated.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#88
post #57

Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware. Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the ho…

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

iMessage is AFAIK only really a big thing in the US.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it but... well I think of App Store as... a store. I don't have to go there. I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available in the App Store, but I rarely go there. I'm fine with advertising being there. I wish it was better but I'm not offended that there is paid promotion in a store.

Where do you install apps from then? I get an app recommendation from a friend, I go to the App Store and search for it. I have to be super careful about which link I'm actually clicking on and which app I'm installing, because the App Store is riddled with spam and malware. I wouldn't mind, except that Apple charge 30% of everything with the justification that they are keeping the ecosystem free of spam and malware.…

I install a new app maybe once every 6 months. I agree that the app store is trash, littered with ads and casino games for kids.

I just don't find it hard to find the app I want, when I want something specific, and install, and then _get the hell out of that shithole_.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#90
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are the best product in their category, and all are only huge sellers because Apple anti-competitively privileges them in its ecosystem.

What’s better than AirPods and AirTags? I want them

The parent poster is saying (and I agree) that Airpods and Airtags are only superior because Apple anti-competitively privileges their integration with iPhones. It's not that they are better at the hardware level by itself.

And since iPhones form the largest single company's device network in the rich countries, that is a pretty big advantage.

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