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

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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

mh- wrote: post #64
Gigachad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still aren't going to be putting 200gb ram on a phone in a couple years to run those local models.

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…

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by jpalomaki »

sky2224 wrote: post #97

Honestly, I think part of the reason Apple hasn't jumped deep into AI is due to two big reasons: 1) Apple is not a data company. 2) Apple hasn't found a compelling, intuitive, and most of all, consistent, user experience for AI yet. Regarding point 2: I haven't seen anyone share a hands down improved UX for a user driven product outside of something that is a variation of a chat bot. Even the main AI players can't ad…

Put proper LLM into Siri. Encourage developers to expose the functionality of their apps as functions, allow Siri LLM to access those (and sprinkle some magic security dust over it).

Boom, you have an agent in the phone capable of doing all the stuff you can do with the apps. Which means pretty much everything in our life.

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

#103

Post by danaris »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #72
grtteee wrote: 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.

Will this strategy work every time ? Maybe for AI it will work (market is competitive and Apple just purchases the best model for its consumers). But this approach may not work in other areas: e.g. building electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cell technology, quantum computing etc. Essentially Apple got lucky with AI but it needs to keep investing in cutting edge technology in the various broad…

But Apple doesn't just try to do everything.

They do the things they think they can do very well.

Why would they try to build electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cells, or quantum computers, if their R&D hadn't already determined that they would likely be able to do so Very Well?

It's not like any of those are really in their primary lines of business anyway.

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

#104

Post by bigyabai »

jbverschoor wrote: post #99

So Apple’s AI acceleration and memory architecture is accidental, but nvidia’s is not?

Nvidia has research papers on accelerating Machine Learning as far back as 2014: https://research.nvidia.com/publications?f%5B0%5D=research_a...

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

#105

Post by blcknight »

amazingamazing wrote: post #22

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…

There is a cognitive ceiling for what you can do with smaller models. Animals with simpler neural pathways often outperform whatever think they are capable of but there's no substitute for scale. I don't think you'll ever get a 4B or 8B model equivalent to Opus 4.6. Maybe just for coding tasks but certainly not Opus' breadth.

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

#106

Post by bigyabai »

rvz wrote: post #21

Apple never competed in the "AI race" in the first place, because they already knew they were already at the finish line. This was really unsurprising [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371

> This is an obvious moat for Apple who can offer a cheaper alternative for training, inference AI server farms.

According to Bloomberg, Apple's inference server farms are a flop: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...

  the chips [...] are not powerful enough to run the latest frontier models like Gemini, which the new Siri will be based on

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

#107

Post by crote »

rtpg wrote: post #19
Gigachad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consumers AI has anti hype right now. It's off-putting to see consumer products slapped with a hundred AI labels. I see people talk about how you can turn off all of Apple Intelligence with one toggle rather than hundreds on Samsung. Firefox is also marketing how easy it is to disable AI.

I think a lot of people are not hype about AI in their toaster, but... I don't think people are generally turned off form deeper integration in their OS itself. Especially when for some people this is representing ideas similar to how programmer-types get excited about Shortcuts. Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff

> Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff

Sure, but is this actually happening? Last time I tried, Atlassian's heavily-pushed AI couldn't even turn a Jira ticket number of Confluence into a clickable link. Similarly, Windows has been actively moving away from providing locally-installed applications in the Start menu search towards offering random internet garbage.

I'm all for using a LLM to make something like Siri able to understand both "Siri, turn off the lights" and "Siri, make it dark!" - but that's not what's being pushed onto consumers, because there is no way anyone is going to pay $100/month for any version of that.

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

#108

Post by pjmlp »

What I don't get about Apple is when everyone else was giving up on yet another VR attempt, moving into AI, they decide AI isn't worth it, and it was the right time for a me too VR headset.

So no VR, given the price and lack of developer support, and late arrival into AI.

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

#109

Post by camkego »

Maxion wrote: post #88
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I totally buy this as someone located in the US, but what is everybody else using? It can’t be WhatsApp? Is everyone sending all their connection graphdata to Meta?

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

#110

Post by bdavbdav »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #33
m463 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.

That's also literally years behind the competition. https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/09/android-ps-new-rece...

But everyone talks about it like it was Apple, and isn’t that what matters (to Apple)?
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