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

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

#281

Post by satvikpendem »

simonw wrote: post #200
satvikpendem wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function: > People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826

I expect everyone understood that. The obvious second effect is that if you have a leaderboard people will compete to top it, by running dumb loops or whatever. That impacts how much you can learn, and costs you more money than you wanted to spend.

Not everyone did understand that, you'll see some comments expressing that they've never heard that perspective before, interestingly enough. But yes Goodhart's Law applies.

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

#282

Post by mholm »

simonw wrote: post #200
satvikpendem wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function: > People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826

I expect everyone understood that. The obvious second effect is that if you have a leaderboard people will compete to top it, by running dumb loops or whatever. That impacts how much you can learn, and costs you more money than you wanted to spend.

The excessive spending was part of the point. The market is watching AI spend very closely. AI spend is a proxy for AI absorption. Expanding your MS contract to include Copilot for your rank and file doesn't move the meter much. Letting your engineers run up 100k/month shows extreme absorption. The share price increase potentially pays for the entire token bill once Wall Street goes through your earnings.

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

#283

Post by satvikpendem »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #246
satvikpendem wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function: > People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826

That is a truly commendable steelman. But let's be honest, there's basically no chance that was true. Management is frequently stupid enough to not think through the second order effects of their policies, and that is likely what happened this time as well.

At least at my workplace this was exactly what we were told, that it's a short term methodology to get people acclimated to thinking about what in their work could be automated, as honestly most do not think that way, they're not like engineers.

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

#284

Post by satvikpendem »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #243
satvikpendem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026, with step changes like Fable and Sol. Maybe it was the case in 2025 and before but the field has improved rapidly that it doesn't make sense to listen to people with AI experiences prior to that who haven't touched it since. Does AI make mistakes, sure, but increasingly fewer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4905136…

My dude. People like you have been making this same claim for literally years now. We've been getting it for every single model that came out ever since 2023. It's never yet been true. Don't act like it's the fault of your interlocutors when they are skeptical of a claim you make, instead pay attention to the fact that you are following up many people who falsely claimed the same thing. It's perfectly rational to be…

I don't know about "people like me" but I personally only felt the change myself in early 2026, before that I was like many people quite skeptical. Hence why I have the opinion I do, if it could change my mind I'm sure others could too. And anyway the state of affairs is not the same as 2023 so it always bears repeating one's experiences with the topic every year for an actually accurate assessment. Otherwise it's just he said she said as we're engaging in right now.

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

#285

Post by satvikpendem »

dan_gee wrote: post #171
satvikpendem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026, with step changes like Fable and Sol. Maybe it was the case in 2025 and before but the field has improved rapidly that it doesn't make sense to listen to people with AI experiences prior to that who haven't touched it since. Does AI make mistakes, sure, but increasingly fewer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4905136…

> As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026 This is pretty rude!

Well that's my personal opinion. You might have a different one but I largely found it to be a waste of my own time, because it's just based on personal experiences.

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

#286

Post by bigyabai »

CMay wrote: post #240

Ctrl+F: "national security". Didn't see national security mentioned a single time in all the current comments or in the article. Speculations about profit are great and there are many companies that will largely be irrelevant across all the major metrics which will not be in a good position, but there are always these people lost on the profit picture of anything. Does anyone realistically believe that all of these s…

Okay, I disagree with most of Ed's takes but this is also a pretty wild refutation.

National security is a canard for covering up national investment. The US doesn't need to have it's hand in the pockets of private businesses, but by making a murky NATSEC claim they can manufacture interest for investments and under-the-table cooperation. This is exactly how we saw companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft get roped into PRISM, in exchange for alignment on political objectives and upholding the security theater of obviously-backdoored shitware like BitLocker. Departments like the NRO have had their own in-house AIs for decades, they're not beholden to any of these firms for access to cutting-edge inference. SENTIENT predates the conception of OpenAI as an organization.

If you disagree; look at China. Why would China Open Source their frontier models if there was a genuine national security threat in doing so? Because there is no threat, it's a tacit refutation of the United States' fearmongering and a direct attack on the credibility (and profitability) of the America's frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. While Anthropic and OpenAI send representatives to grovel in the Oval Office to release a model, China greenlights anything, just like a real neoliberal free market would. The US' federal interventionism is causing China's AI to recoup all of the ground that America loses in credibility.

Fact is, China's hosting is no less trustworthy than America's hosting. OpenAI and Anthropic are certainly just as backdoored and data-hungry as China's hosted services are, I'd be shocked if both weren't populating a vector database of my characteristics for "marketing" purposes or somesuch. But I still trust China more as an American citizen, because their ability to prosecute, blackmail or manipulate me is much weaker than my domestic government. There's no fear when I send a request to Z.ai or Qwen because neither of them are begging for federal interventionism on a weekly basis. They have nothing to ask my government for in exchange for my data.

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

#287

Post by btown »

Barbing wrote: post #144
btown wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an interview with the senior product manager of Apple Silicon that more-or-less says the same thing: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/07/06/apple-silicon-exec-expl... > He also described a shift toward running AI locally rather than in the cloud – a move motivated by privacy, security, and the rising cost of inference as agents consume more tokens. However, Brooks envisions a hybrid future in which agents decide…

> auditably-private cloud computing Do those of you who have read the white paper have confidence in this claim (as I’d hope)? Blog: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

The top threads here have commentary: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41937664

IMO - while nothing is a guarantee against a state-level actor that can compel both hardware-level bypasses and put such bypasses under a gag order, it's a well-thought-out system under those constraints. The idea of a self-auditing and self-healing fleet that requires simultaneous compromise of software and enclave hardware is a meaningful level of defense in depth against literally everything else.

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

#288

Post by sodapopcan »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #275
sodapopcan wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, you're taking this up way too many notches for me to want to continue this convo. But as I said, I have no interested in defending Zitron in general, I made no claims about him being groundbreaking, and I don't even take him too seriously. I was responding to your points around AI's usefulness and how the discussion is almost always localized around "AI as a software development tool" here on HN. For me he's j…

So saying you like his vibes and feels is cool, thanks, genuinely. FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology. The comp for that doesn't suck either.

That, and he has numbers to back up the possible downfall. My issue with AI is how it's used in art and content generation. I resisted it for code for a while, but eventually came around.

> FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology.

I did a bit of that but I'm no longer employed and have been taking a break from programming for a few months.

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

#289

Post by simonw »

duhhhhh1212 wrote: post #245
simonw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, tokenmaxxing was obviously stupid. Setting a limit is what happens when the adults in the room stop being stupid.

It's hard to read this take seriously, when you promoted a company spending $1k per engineer per day on LLM usage.

You mean Strong DM? I stand by what I said about them at the time: they're an interesting case-study in extreme AI-assisted software development, and they have a bunch of ideas that are worth learning from even if you're not going to spend that (absurd) kind of money.

One of the hot topics since then has been how to validate software without reviewing every line of code by hand, which is exactly the kind of thing they were exploring before anyone else.

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

#290

Post by gorgolo »

adolph wrote: post #91
d4ng wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is on-device AI the future? What is your reasoning behind this? Look at the proportion of things we compute on someone else’s computer relative to what we compute on our own device. Why would this change for LLMs?

I think the reasoning is similar to why Amazon notification emails are very generic: user data is used for various purposes that a growing number of users and 3rd parties have concerns about. In addition to on-device, Apple is making efforts to secure computations that need to occur off-device, see: https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

I don’t think users (as in the general population) have a good track record of being judicious with how they share data. In the past with social media etc it was consistently the opposite, if the price is lower or free people tick any box and hand of all their personal data. Might turn out the same here too no?

Not arguing against on-device LLMs, I also wish it were so.

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