141–150 of 674 posts
This is good for Siri, in many ways. But I was kind of hoping we would see a time soon when phone hardware became good enough to do nearly 100% of the Siri-level tasks locally rather than needing Internet access.
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago? Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 year…
Is the training cost really that high, though? The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1]. AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2]. If a non-profit and a chip…
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago? Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 year…
> without burning 10 years of cash flow. Don't they have the highest market cap of any company in existence?
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What antitrust rule do you think would be breached? I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).
Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly. It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winn…
This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just someones opinion).
The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic abuse.
Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?
This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Si…
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And you don't think they will include an abstraction layer?
An abstraction layer doesn’t prevent Google from seeing the data. Last year the story was that Apple would be running a Google model on their (Apple’s) own server hardware.
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I think that's the thing: Apple is good at very little, but they seem like they're good at "everything else" because they don't do much else. Lots of companies spread themselves really thin trying to get into lots of unrelated competencies and tons of products. Apple doesn't. Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refini…
This is some magical thinking. Even if Samsung took all their manpower, all their thought process and all their capital, they still couldn’t produce a laptop that competes with the MacBook (just to take one example), because they fundamentally don’t have any taste as a company. Hell, they can’t even make a TV this year that’s less shit than last years version of it and all that requires is do literally nothing.
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago? Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 year…
The moat is talent, culture, and compute. Apple doesn't have any of these 3 for SOTA AI.