And people said that Apple was going to get left behind by not going full throttle on AI. Seems like they took the right approach
Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
181–190 of 370 posts
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cell phones are commodities, so how does Apple maintain that cash flow? It's almost like there is more to it than that...
Cell phones may be commodities, but iPhones are not.
Yeah, as an android user myself I switch brands all the time, but the iPhone users in my life all bought iPhones 15ish years ago and have kept doing it ever since.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity? I'd qualify this with for now . It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed…
> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result Tbh, I hope it does. Prices are outrageous, and I'm a firm believer in personal computing/having access to powerful hardware, privately and locally, is hugely important. On a more selfish note, I miss the days of being able to build an outrageously powerful desktop for myself for relatively cheap. For now I'm still holding onto my AM4 motherboard w/…
64 GB! you are lucky :) sitting there with 16GB, a GPU that already shows the signs of strain, and AM4 Ryzen 5 5600G. (MacBook Air M1 equivalent in single-threaded tasks.) apparently the CPU requirements slowly crept up across the line. and then there is looming AVX512. why "looming"? because at some point enough people will move to it that software will require AVX512.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Here's some criticism: https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i (see the full thread)
I'm not qualified enough myself to judge Zitron's reporting, nor this criticism. But George Pearkes is a reasonably respected financial analyst.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would be a better way to frame it if we were strictly talking about VR. But my point was to show Apple is not some infallible genius company, they make plenty of mistakes. Why are we assuming being behind on AI is not a mistake but rather amazing foresight is the issue? We are only considering yeah the bubble bursts and apple is like oh yeah dude we told you hahahaha, but what if the bubble doesn't burst? What if there isn't a bubble and it just evolves naturally into something less exciting and fundamentally useful? Wouldn't it be fair to say Apple was wrong in that case? Why are we congragulating them for a hypothetical right and not worried about the hypothetical wrong, both of which are possibilities.
Yes Meta spent 80 billion sure, but did you know Meta never had a loss-making quarter in their entire history as a public company?
My overall point is that its not as clear cut as Apple is smart for willingly not being good at AI and they will win in the end.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's the opposite. None of the players in XR wanted to be Apple'd, least of all Apple. That is, create a base product that someone else would refine in order to drink their milkshake. Apple delayed the AVP multiple times hoping to avoid getting sniped by Meta and Google et al., each time requiring a partial rebuild as the underlying tech advanced. They would have loved to have been able to get something out w…
Think Apple fell for the trap of assuming they would eventually solve the glasses form factor and then fell for the second trap of convincing themselves that passthrough VR was the same as their real XR vision.
I think that's a good shorthand. Apple needed cool glasses that could do useful xR in ways that weren't just useful to gamer geeks.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#187That 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…
They've been investing in NPUs for a long long time. Since the first iPad Pro at least (2018). Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory, so if anything them going "all in" on that has been a nice side effect.
> Apple Silicon is a natural fit for tensor/matrix operations due to unified memory,
This is a common misconception. This is NOT true: memory designed for CPU performs horribly for GPU tasks. Mac/Strix Halo/NVIDIA Spark are performing horribly compared to a desktop video card with GDDR.
I spent quite a few weekends optimizing ROCM kernels for strix halo, i WISH I had GDDR instead of high-frequency CPU RAM; the bandwidth would be SO MUCH better.
I'm quantizing weights not to make computation faster, not because I'm out of memory, but because memory cannot move fast enough to be processed and it's cheaper to load quantized version, convert into bf16 compute, and discard; This happens every single time a token is generated for the whole model over and over.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They certainly were not late to AI, unless you narrowly define AI as “LLMs”. See [1] as a single example among many. [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1609/aimag.v19i1.1355
Given the context of this conversation, one would naturally assume we are talking about commercial public-facing LLMs and not AI as a field.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it though? He's more of a gushing torrent of anti-AI propaganda. He has an agenda too, it's just the opposite one.
his agenda is less existential and backed by less money and power than Sam A and Dario's
While that's true - it does not impute Ed's position with greater accuracy or authority. I don't know if Ed is wrong, but I get this vague sense that he is being led on by his emotions.
I am sympathetic to some of his criticisms that the enthusiasm and financial commitment has run far ahead what can be delivered. But I don't quite share his intensity over the doom and gloom. There probably will be a correction. It will probably sting. But I don't expect it to be the near wipe-out that Ed's passionate voice seems to steer towards.
Re: Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
#190Apple 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...
Cell phones are not commodities