Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 370 posts

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#131

Post by budsniffer952 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

Cell phones are commodities, so how does Apple maintain that cash flow? It's almost like there is more to it than that...

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#132

Post by benoau »

sssilver wrote: post #41

I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming". I would love to replace my monitor with Apple Vision Pro for programming and productivity. I would gladly pay $1000 for that. But at $4000 it really needs to put me in a Microsoft Flight Simulator cockpit.

> I will never understand the decision-making process that led to "Let's build an awesome VR headset that can't do gaming".

FOMO, someone else being successful in VR (and now in glasses) is a nightmare scenario for Apple because it's not their platform. They've got a lot to fear from someone else owning the platform, having written the playbook on how that platform would be controlled and exploited at everyone else's expense.

Imagine if Apple doesn't make their glasses: Meta keeps selling truckloads of them, as they get more powerful the smartphone becomes an optional accessory and then an unnecessary one, eventually they become an alternative to a smartphone and an app platform for third party devs.

It's the same story with VR, Apple does nothing and risks Meta or Steam building a viable platform where people want to use software instead of on their iOS devices, until the hardware can replace iOS devices entirely. (although VR is certainly more of a moonshot)

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#133

Post by PaulRobinson »

awakeasleep wrote: post #12
bananamogul wrote: post #2

I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.

Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#134

Post by bensyverson »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #101
dan_gee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think of all the shops that will soon be composed of people that simply can't even get out of bed, if their LLM is not available. I'm biased because I don't use AI, but I don't understand why you wouldn't fire these LLM-addicted people and replace them with people who can code or write an email without the use of an AI assistant.

They won't. They'll just pay more for the LLM. I use LLMs all the time, but I'm also a highly capable and experienced engineer that can definitely work without. I have just found that the LLM is a force multiplier, like I haven't had before.

Same, though the types of jobs I’m working on now require the speed I get from LLMs. If I had to take my current projects and switch to hand-coding I’d have to extend the timelines and practically add a zero to the price.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#136

Post by njovin »

altmanaltman wrote: post #113
cmiles8 wrote: post #78

Apple looks better and better as every day passes. Other players going deeply into debt to build out massive infrastructure, VCs pumping up the model ecosystem that is now a total commodity. Apple’s just been sitting there with solid cashflow waiting for all this to implode and then have on-device models with their own chips. Apple will own the end device while the rest of the world is fighting over a pure commodity.…

No Apple was not sitting there and waiting as if its some grand plan. They tried their VR device which they don't even talk about now. They were late to AI and yes if the bubble bursts they will be at a better position but it's not some grand master strategy. Even inside apple there's been a lot of talk about how badly the company handled AI. As for laughing all the way to the bank, I am sure memory manufacturers and…

A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on.

Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product.

The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#137

Post by rdedev »

GTP wrote: post #88
ofjcihen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does. That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense. If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.

I don’t have numbers, but I would like to point out that he's missing a crucial number as well. The fact that maxing out a subscription's limit makes a user generate an amount of tokens that costs much more than the subscription itslef isn't enough to back his claim. What we need to know, is the average use of subscriptions. Think about Gyms. My gut feeling is that, if we run the numbers, we see that by maxing out a…

It could have worked if they weren't leveraged to their necks on spending. All based on the assumption that they can make something like 10x or higher in a few years.

Another point against your gym analogy. When people don't have that much disposable income why would they subscribe to something they semi regularly use? And if it becomes more expensive why would they not cancel it?

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#138

Post by sajithdilshan »

skippyfish wrote: post #44
sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

This is quite a short sighted analysis. I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. The future of AI would be on-device models which are as powerful as current frontier models and also I can imagine companies have their own deployments of inference of…

> I do think the valuations are quite and they would need to meet the reality, but don’t think there’s gonna be a crash or we’d ever go back to pre-AI era. It would more or less would be a correction to valuations. Something to consider: would your description also apply to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s? The internet was real, the ideas for internet business were real, and we were not going to the previous reali…

But there’s a difference between fearing mongering with a crash and a long term correction. The correction would make all the startups/companies that created a wrapper around frontier models go away, but the ones that truly solved a problem would remain.

Also I remember reading that Anthropic is on its way to be profitable in 2028

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#139

Post by bee_rider »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #51

That article is a bit incoherent. I think it is pretty clear at this point that Apple has gone all-in on being the ideal edge silicon for AI. This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out. They are in one of the only parts of the obvious future AI market where there isn't really a fight for greenfield turf with other…

I don’t think they need to go all-in on anything related to AI.

> This leverages their core competencies, requires only modest investment, and will likely pay out no matter how the AI market eventually shakes out.

This looks more like a call or a small raise or whatever (I don’t play poker).

Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

#140

Post by satvikpendem »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #71
epistasis wrote: post #24

> If Anthropic and OpenAI believed customers would actually pay the real cost of AI tokens, they wouldn't have to give away 20 to 40 times the amount of tokens to subscribers. One logical gap in the SemiAnalysis 40x cost of tokens versus subscription: I don't know anybody actually maxing out their account limits. Sure, if you're somehow always running stuff, you can max it out, but subscriptions like this allow peopl…

I'm of the opinion that the market will need to expand, horizontally. That's what's happening, with low-cost LLMs. I already know lots of "regular folks" that are totally hooked on LLMs (mostly ChatGPT, at the "regular mensch" level). They usually use the free tier, but a lot of them are doing the $20/month Pro tier. If anyone is in my age group, they remember when ATMs were free. It was the "heroin dealer" business…

LLMs are rapidly becoming commodities with open weight and Chinese models. Frontier providers won't be able to raise prices forever, indeed we already see evidence of decreased prices from such competition.

And ATMs can be free still, if you use a bank that refunds all worldwide ATM fees, such as Charles Schwab.

Post reply on HN