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Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

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11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#11
post #6

I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $? Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?

I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.

What realistic environment requires 10,000 Macs?

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#12
Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#13

Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.

Sounds like a job for a state of the art model...

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#15
post #6

I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $? Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?

The tinfoil hat answer is they want to ensure fewer people can run local LLMs instead of paying OpenAI for their models.

But the monthly subscription isn't that expensive?

(demon rises up. "muahahaha, you don't pay here with money")

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.

What realistic environment requires 10,000 Macs?

I mean an agent probably only uses one mac at a time. But they're obviously training tons of agents concurrently.

Re: Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

#19

I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.

A vibe coded distro is a real monkey's paw type of wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499854
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