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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

#141

Post by gorgmah »

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…

When that happens, you'll have fomo from not using opus 5.x. The numbers that they showed for Mythos show that the frontier is still steadily moving (and maybe even at a faster pace than before)

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

#142

Post by treetalker »

blitzar wrote: post #81
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, they nailed that with the Newton, Apple Pippin, and the Apple Vision Pro

How amazing is that Apple car

Depending on price I would or would not buy an Apple car; but I am quite interested in options for a car that (1) is electric; (2) doesn't spy on me and sell my data; (3) doesn't take video of me and my passengers and do weird things with it; and (4) doesn't support Republicans / white supremacists / Elon Musk.

And I imagine that like-minded consumers are a pretty large market.

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

#143

Post by erichocean »

blitzar wrote: post #85
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…

> 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

> it just couldnt write the changes to file 9/10 times when using it with opencode

You might want to give this a try, it dramatically improves Edit tool accuracy without changing the model: https://blog.can.ac/2026/02/12/the-harness-problem/

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

#144

Post by matwood »

instalabsai wrote: post #67
DaedalusII wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>get letter from bank >"to fix this, please install our app" >search BankName >comes up with other banks, BankNames US app (not the country you are in) >revolut etc (cant use in the country you are in) >ten minutes later even worse when its your telecomm telling you to install their Official App so you can pay your bills or they will cut your cellular service, and you cant find it

As someone who recently moved to NL from the US I encounter this issue about once a week and it’s blocking me from doing serious things like paying for parking, taxes, utilities or government services, all of which have apps that are only available on the Dutch app store. I have a separate Dutch Apple ID I can switch to, but each time I log out I risk accidentally deleting all my data.

> all of which have apps that are only available on the Dutch app store.

This isn’t really on Apple though. Blame the companies/developers for geo gating their apps. It’s a simple checkbox in the store to make it available for other countries.

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

#145

Post by rickdeckard »

I think the article is missing a whole aspect on how Apple is ensuring to not face actual competition while they're "playing it safe":

Even if the investment is overblown, there is market-demand for the services offered in the AI-industry. In a competitive playing field with equal opportunities, Apple would be affected by not participating. But they are establishing again their digital market concept, where they hinder a level playing field for Apple users.

Like they did with the Appstore (where Apple is owning the marketplace but also competes in it) they are setting themselves up as the "the bakn always wins" gatekeeper in the Apple ecosystem for AI services, by making "Apple Intelligence" an ecosystem orchestration layer (and thus themselves the gatekeeper).

1. They made a deal with OpenAI to close Apple's competitive gap on consumer AI, allowing users to upgrade to paid ChatGPT subscriptions from within the iOS menu. OpenAI has to pay at least (!) the usual revenue share for this, but considering that Apple integrated them directly into iOS I'm sure OpenAI has to pay MORE than that. (also supported by the fact that OpenAI doesn't allow users to upgrade to the 200USD PRO tier using this path, but only the 20USD Plus tier) [1]

2. Apple's integration is set up to collect data from this AI digital market they created: Their legal text for the initial release with OpenAI already states that all requests sent to ChatGPT are first evaluated by "Apple Intelligence & Siri" and "your request is analyzed to determine whether ChatGPT might have useful results" [2]. This architecture requires(!) them to not only collect and analyze data about the type of requests, but also gives them first-right-to-refuse for all tasks.

3. Developers are "encouraged" to integrate Apple Intelligence right into their apps [3]. This will have AI-tasks first evaluated by Apple

4. Apple has confirmed that they are interested to enable other AI-providers using the same path [4]

--> Apple will be the gatekeeper to decide whether they can fulfill a task by themselves or offer the user to hand it off to a 3rd party service provider.

--> Apple will be in control of the "Neural Engine" on the device, and I expect them to use it to run inference models they created based on statistics of step#2 above

--> I expect that AI orchestration, including training those models and distributing/maintaining them on the devices will be a significant part of Apple's AI strategy. This could cover alot of text and image processing and already significantly reduce their datacenter cost for cloud-based AI-services. For the remaining, more compute-intensive AI-services they will be able to closely monitor (via above step#2) when it will be most economic to in-source a service instead of "just" getting revenue-share for it (via above step#1).

So the juggernaut Apple is making sure to get the reward from those taking the risk. I don't see the US doing much about this anti-competitive practice so far, but at least in the EU this strategy has been identified and is being scrutinized.

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7905739-chatgpt-ios-app-...

[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/chatgpt-extensio...

[3] https://developer.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

[4] https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/craig-federighi-says-apple-ho...

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

#146

Post by baq »

mh- wrote: post #64
Gigachad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still aren't going to be putting 200gb ram on a phone in a couple years to run those local models.

A lot of people are making the mistake of noticing that local models have been 12-24 months behind SotA ones for a good portion of the last couple years, and then drawing a dotted line assuming that continues to hold. It simply.. doesn't. The SotA models are enormous now, and there's no free lunch on compression/quantization here. Opus 4.6 capabilities are not coming to your (even 64-128gb) laptop or phone in the pop…

Pretty sure there’s at least a couple orders of magnitude in purely algorithmic areas of LLM inference; maybe training, too, though I’m less confident here. Rationale: meat computers run on 20W, though pretraining took a billion years or so.

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

#147

Post by lnsru »

russelldjimmy wrote: post #112
camkego wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally buy this as someone located in the US, but what is everybody else using? It can’t be WhatsApp? Is everyone sending all their connection graphdata to Meta?

It’s WhatsApp. No one thinks about sending data to Meta. The world is much bigger than the HN bubble, where almost no one thinks about privacy implications.

Absolutely this. No one cares about privacy. 99,9% population has no clue how tech works. “Oh, it’s an app on my phone.” That’s what typical consumer understands. How text travels from one phone to other is something magical.

Got WhatsApp, because there is no other channel to communicate with customers. It’s literally used by everyone without exceptions. Really scary.

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

#148

Post by adrianN »

idle_zealot wrote: post #138
zarzavat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and only calling out to large models when they actually need the extra knowledge When would you want lossy encoding of lots of data bundled together with your reasoning? If it is true that reasoning can be done efficiently with fewer parameters it seems like you would always want it operating normal data searching and retrieval tools to access knowledge rather than risk hallucination. And re: this discussion of lar…

I would call brains with the needed support infrastructure small.

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

#149

Post by Someone »

DaedalusII wrote: post #65
colechristensen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it but... well I think of App Store as... a store. I don't have to go there. I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available in the App Store, but I rarely go there. I'm fine with advertising being there. I wish it was better but I'm not offended that there is paid promotion in a store.

>get letter from bank >"to fix this, please install our app" >search BankName >comes up with other banks, BankNames US app (not the country you are in) >revolut etc (cant use in the country you are in) >ten minutes later even worse when its your telecomm telling you to install their Official App so you can pay your bills or they will cut your cellular service, and you cant find it

I don’t see what that has to do with (increased) advertising on the App Store (IMO search there never has been good) or the comment you replied to in which colechristensen said: “I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available”.

I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store because, instead of making 10 or 20 to do list apps and hoping to get them to rank high by a combination of sheer luck and SEO tricks, scammers may only make one, and pay to get that to the top of the list.

In super markets product placement is affected by two factors: how much producers are willing to pay for a good spot (e.g. by offering lower wholesale prices if the product gets a more visible place) and vetting by the store owner.

I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store. Apple doesn’t want to do much vetting, making advertising the only thing that may help (and yes, it would be awesome if there were a store that did do much vetting, but that requires a world where many different stores exist, and we aren’t there (yet))

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

#150

Post by harrouet »

Thing is, Apple never considered racing against LLM runners. Apple's success comes from human-centered design, it is not trying to launch a me-too product just because it increases their stock price. iPod was not the first MP3 player. iPhone was not even 3G at launch -- in the middle of 3G marketing craze.

They sure got lucky that unified memory is well-suited for running AI, but they just focused on having cost- and energy-efficient computing power. They've been having glasses in sight for the last 10 years (when was Magic Leap's first product?) and these chips have been developed with that in mind. But not only the chips: nothing was forcing Apple to spend the extra money for blazing fast SSD -- but they did.

So yes, Apple is a hardware company. All the services it sells run on their hardware. They've just designed their hardware to support their users' workflows, ignoring distractions.

With that said, LLM makes the GPU + memory bandwidth fun again. NVidia can't do it alone, Intel can't do it alone, but Apple positioned itself for it. It reminds me how everyone was surprised when then introduced 64-bit ARM for everyone: very few people understood what they were doing.

Tbh there are NVidia GPUs that beat Apple perf 2x or 3x, but these are desktop or server chips consuming 10x the power. Now all Apple needs to do is keep delivering performance out of Apple Silicon at good prices and best energy efficiency. Local LLM make sense when you need it immediately, anywhere, privately -- hence you need energy efficiency.

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