It’s bizarre to me that this headline isn’t from years ago. I think Apple’s conservative/cautious approach to slow, methodical, incremental change may now pu them in a game of catch up.
Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
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Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account. iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.
Name some "new exciting features" iPhones gained in the last 5 years that made their way into music videos like the iPod did
I’m excited to shoot my own music videos with my iPhone now.
Last weekend my grade school friend visited and we took a boat out on Puget Sound. We followed two orca whales for 45 minutes and I shot multiple videos of them in 4k 60fps. They look beautiful and played seamlessly on my TV without any crappy ads. I shared them with our two families easily through airdrop and later through iCloud when we got back to land.
That evening my son was dancing and signing he favorite songs with my friend’s son so I shot a “music video” of them and shared it again.
Both these experiences were exciting to me. It felt insane to do such things with a pocket computer Apple hasn’t screwed up in nearly 20 years.
Like I said, it’s the whole product experience that’s the point. Apple has earned enough of my trust to believe one will come and even if not, I’m satisfied with what I have today and will have tomorrow.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#113Apple could easily acquire Mistral and become competitive fast. And I hope they do. The more AI the better.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#114Tim Cook is a "Keep things ticking along" CEO, not a "Change course to a new destination" CEO. Initiatives like this will probably require different leadership to succeed.
Exactly, Tim Cook is a finance guy - he knows the numbers and how to keep Apple profitable. What he lacks is product vision. His one opportunity (ironically, vision) fell flat.
The Apple Car fiasco happened on his watch too.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#115Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#116I thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research. I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI. Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away.
The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro…
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
I imagine they recognize the need for increased memory bandwidth and will bump that up significantly -- they are well positioned to do so.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#118I thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research. I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI. Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
You might enjoy the Aussie saying “pissing into the wind”.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#119I thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research. I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI. Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away. The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option
To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control.
I haven't seen anything out of Apple suggesting that Apple's leaders understand that a plan of the first kind or the second kind is necessary.
Most people who have written about the topic in detail put Anthropic as the least bad option because out of all the groups with competitive offerings, their leadership has written in the most detail about the need for a plan and about their particular (completely inadequate IMHO) plan.
I myself put Google as the least bad option -- the slightly less awful option, to be precise -- with large uncertainty because Google wasn't pushing capabilities hard till OpenAI and Anthropic put it in a situation in which it either had to start pushing hard or risk falling so far behind it wouldn't be able to catch up. Consequently, I use Gemini as my LLM service. In particular, Google risked finding itself in a situation in which it cannot create a competitive offering because it doesn't have access to enough data collected from users of LLMs and generative AIs and cannot get enough data because it cannot attract users. While it was the leading lab, Google was proceeding slowly and at least one industry insider claims credibly that the slowness was deliberately chosen to reduce the probability of an AI catastrophe.
I must stress that no one has an adequate plan for avoiding an AI catastrophe while continuing to push capabilities, and IMHO no one is likely to devise one in time, so would be great if no one did any more frontier AI research at all till humanity itself becomes more cognitively capable.
Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
#120Serious question: Did Apple employees need rallying? Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was. If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
> current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, my understanding was that they actually are barred from doing just that