I didn’t understand what they were doing with Apple Foundation Models until this. It made it sound like they were training their own. Good strat tho!
> It made it sound like they were training their own.
They are.
Apple Foundation Models
91–100 of 244 posts
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
Maybe I’m alone in thinking this but I think the long term victor will be the one that works out pricing best.
Fable might well be a better model but it’s too expensive for everyday AI use. Definitely if we’re talking about the kind of stuff you’re going to want to do on your phone. Even for coding, I’m not going to reach for Fable (well, when I can…) for 95% of the work I do.
I don’t believe a mature AI industry is going to have a one size fits all, single winner.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#93What I'm curious about is whether this is actually on-device. Apple's framework caps local models around 3B params last I looked, and Claude is way bigger than that. So either there's some hybrid setup I haven't seen documented, or this is mostly a Claude SDK in FM clothing. Anyone tried it on a plane?
Read the linked article? It is absolutely a cloud service. Neither Apple nor Anthropic is suggesting otherwise
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
>I think Evans is completely wrong.
I wish there was a case where I find Evans is wrong. As far as my memory served me, I failed to record a single one.
I disagree that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are "well" behind. If anything the frontier model advantage seems to be at best 6 - 9 months. And that the Chinese model are all doing well.
One of Steve Jobs's line, "It is a feature, not a product." Even if Apple were a generation behind or 1 year behind frontier model. The advantage of default is enough to hold a lot of its user.
To put it simply, even if OpenAI or Anthropic were better, there is zero chances they would topple Apple in hardware sales, user or ecosystem. On the other hand, even if Apple's AI were 6 - 9 months or a generation behind, most user would settle for it and damage OpenAI / Anthropic.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
I use both Claude and Codex and don’t see any meaningful difference between the two. My use case is modeling semi complex physical processes (energy and manufacturing) in code for simulations. I also have to do a good fair of automation via scripting in Python or PowerShell for manipulating data as well as legacy code analysis (C, Fortran, COBOL). Given I provide the models with the information and documentation they need, both perform very similarly. I recently did a full codebase review (for design patterns and vulnerabilities) and both Codex and Fable agreed 100% about the most critical findings. I do very little front end development, although some of my automation scripts have TUIs and again no problem with either Claude or Codex generating them for me. At this point I go with the less expensive, which seems to be Codex. With the $100 plan I rarely hit the limits. With Claude I max out my plan in about 4-6 hours of work.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous) Truly fascinating ecosystem and community in general, as experiences differ so wildly. Anthropic's models seems far behind OpenAI to me, especially when you get into "Pro" territory, and there doesn't se…
I agree with what you're saying. I have a Claude plan for work and I prefer using Claude more than any other LLM I've tried. Having recently tried the Codex 100€ plan with GPT-5.5 in high/xhigh, I don't think it's worse that the Opus models, just different. I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is…
> I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is often a bit too literal.
Yeah, exact prompting matters a lot, seemingly more than people think. There is definitely tradeoffs between how literal the models takes the prompts, on one hand it's useful for the model to ignore their own instinct when you know better, so they don't go chasing geese randomly, but on the other hand it's useful sometimes when they self-direct, when you misworded something and it's obvious you meant something different because of the context, and similar things. They're basically good at different things.
Really agree every model isn't equal and they aren't as interchangeable without adjusting how you prompt them as people seem to think.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sorry, so your position now is that “being completely invisible to the users” is “controlling the UX”?
I think you're taking the written words a bit too literally here. Read it with a more lax filter and less literal word-meaning, and I think the original comment will become a bit clearer.
You know what, I've been a bit too snipe-y in my previous comments, and it led to to discussion devolving in unproductive ways.
I'd genuinely like to understand where you're coming from more.
I think we're all in agreement that this framework is very much about letting developers swap the models easily, and treat them as commodities. That seems pretty obvious.
I do however still don't see how this has anything to do with controlling the UX (or the new Siri for that matter! The new Siri doesn't use Anthropic models, and there are no extensions point for it to do so — that's pretty much the whole reason why it won't be available in the EU).
Help me see your point of view!
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly. That's the point! That's the whole "white-labeling" part, and what the commentator earlier is talking about. You're very close in understanding the context here!
I’m sorry, so your position now is that “being completely invisible to the users” is “controlling the UX”?
It's Apple, so it's some revolutionary big brained play, and not just yet another llm sdk.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#99This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.
Re: Apple Foundation Models
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
I use both Claude and Codex and don’t see any meaningful difference between the two. My use case is modeling semi complex physical processes (energy and manufacturing) in code for simulations. I also have to do a good fair of automation via scripting in Python or PowerShell for manipulating data as well as legacy code analysis (C, Fortran, COBOL). Given I provide the models with the information and documentation they…
Did you find much of a difference between Fable and Opus?