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Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

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Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#121

Post by presbyterian »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #77
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user. Basically everyone around me is the same.

Agreed, I’ve been a loyal iPhone user for a long time, and very few people I know use iMessage. I use it with my parents because they don’t have any other messenger, and they don’t even really know it’s iMessage, they just think of it as texting. Everyone I know is using something else for messages, whether it’s Discord, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, or occasionally Telegram or Snapchat.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#122

Post by sroussey »

charcircuit wrote: post #120
blcknight wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cognitive ceiling for what you can do with smaller models. Animals with simpler neural pathways often outperform whatever think they are capable of but there's no substitute for scale. I don't think you'll ever get a 4B or 8B model equivalent to Opus 4.6. Maybe just for coding tasks but certainly not Opus' breadth.

I think you are underestimating the strength a small model can get from tool use. There may be no substitute for scale, but that scale can live outside of the model and be queried using tools. In the worst case a smaller model could use a tool that involves a bigger model to do something.

Small models are bad at tool use. I have liquidai doing it in the browser but it’s super fragile.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#123

Post by sroussey »

seaal wrote: post #95
blitzar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s not great at using all tools Glad it wasnt just me - i was impressed with the quality of Gemma4 - it just couldnt write the changes to file 9/10 times when using it with opencode

https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-31B-it/commit/e51e7dcd... There was an update to tool calling 3 days ago. I haven't tested it myself but hope it helps.

Hmm.. is there an updated onnx?

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#124

Post by zarzavat »

blcknight wrote: post #105
amazingamazing wrote: post #22

Gemma4 in my view is good enough to do things similar to Gemini 2.5 flash, meaning if I point it code and ask for help and there is a problem with the code it’ll answer correctly in terms of suggestions but it’s not great at using all tools or one shooting things that require a lot of context or “expert knowledge” If a couple more iterations of this, say gemma6 is as good as current opus and runs completely locally o…

There is a cognitive ceiling for what you can do with smaller models. Animals with simpler neural pathways often outperform whatever think they are capable of but there's no substitute for scale. I don't think you'll ever get a 4B or 8B model equivalent to Opus 4.6. Maybe just for coding tasks but certainly not Opus' breadth.

The only thing that we are sure can't be highly compressed is knowledge, because you can only fit so much information in given entropy budget without losing fidelity.

The minimal size limits of reasoning abilities are not clear at all. It could be that you don't need all that many parameters. In which case the door is open for small focused models to converge to parity with larger models in reasoning ability.

If that happens we may end up with people using small local models most of the time, and only calling out to large models when they actually need the extra knowledge.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#125

Post by hiq »

bdavbdav wrote: post #113
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

US centric view, which I believe to be wrong. UK is predominantly WhatsApp, and the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones. Income is a much tighter correlation than messaging platform. Rack up those market shares by phone value and the scales tip even harder.

> the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones

According to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... it's closer to 50/50.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#126

Post by realusername »

eastbound wrote: post #26
grtteee wrote: post #2

This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.

> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”. My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.

Siri is one step below that for me, it still doesn't understand my accent, I feel like its voice recognition didn't improve from 2010...

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#127

Post by bitpush »

gambutin wrote: post #100

That’s actually by design. Apple never jumps on the tech hype bandwagon. they wait until the dust settles before making their well-thought-out moves. Every time they’ve jumped the hype train too quickly it hasn’t worked out, like Siri for example.

How do you rate Vision Pro? It was not the first one, but it was certainly the best one. Total dud though, while Meta Ray Bans are selling like hot cakes (irrespective of what you think of the company)

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#128

Post by bitpush »

rvz wrote: post #21

Apple never competed in the "AI race" in the first place, because they already knew they were already at the finish line. This was really unsurprising [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278371

Your linked comment argues the opposite.

> Won't be surprised for the re-introduction of Xserve again but for AI.

This means, Apple is gonna spend a lot of money standing up data centers (CapEx). And the article in question is essentially saying that Apple is smart not to spend any money.

It sounds like there's a bit of wishful thinking on - Whatever Apple is doing is 4D chess. Apple not spending any money - That's genuis. Apple re-introducing Xserve racks - genius.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#129

Post by oefrha »

pram wrote: post #12

I've had it turned off since Sequoia, and this I truly appreciate. It hasn't nagged me once to turn it or Siri on, and it isn't mandatory. When I open up JIRA or Slack I am always greeted with multiple new dialogues pointing at some new AI bullshit, in comparison. We hates it precious

Apple keeps nagging me to upgrade to godawful Tahoe. Every time there’s a system update (which includes Safari, Safari TP, CLT etc. updates) Tahoe is always default checked. Even when I specifically click on a Sequoia point update, the Tahoe update is always checked instead of that point release. This has way more destructive potential than “try our new AI feature” in apps.

To add insult to injury, the one AI feature that I may want to evaluate—Claude Code integration in Xcode—is gated behind Tahoe upgrade, even though it has absolutely no reason to do so, given that every other IDE integrates AI features just fine on any recent OS.

Edit: Oh and I’m not getting bombarded in Slack at all, maybe because my company doesn’t pay for any of the AI stuff there. Last time I got a banner or something like that was months ago.

Re: Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning

#130

Post by bitpush »

nl wrote: post #17

> Then Stargate Texas was cancelled, OpenAI and Oracle couldn’t agree terms, and the demand that had justified Micron’s entire strategic pivot simply vanished. Micron’s stock crashed. Well.. no. The Stargate expansion was cancelled the orginally planned 1.2MW (!) datacenter is going ahead: > The main site is located in Abilene, Texas, where an initial expansion phase with a capacity of 1.2 GW is being built on a camp…

Apple's reality distortion field is really really strong. People love to claim Apple is doing 4D chess, when in reality Apple has certain strengths but AI is anything but.

Which is why they were completely caught offguard with botched rollout of Apple Intelligence. Even when they were playing to their strengths, things have not gone for them (Apple Vision Pro). Liquid Glass has had mixed reception, and that's often explained away as "Apple is setting up a world for Spatial Computing by unifying design language" and when the lead designer was fired it was like "Thank God Alan Dye is gone, he was bad for Apple anyway".

So essentially, Apple can do no wrong.

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