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

adlrocha.substack.com

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

#161

Post by jeroenhd »

Gigachad wrote: post #59
eastbound wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago. The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.

Apple's AI stuff also uses cloud features, though you can't use them on other platforms. The problem with Apple's new cloud features is that they generally just suck. I'm surprised iCloud works so well with how hard they're fumbling basic stuff like this.

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

#162

Post by drcongo »

rtpg wrote: post #19
Gigachad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consumers AI has anti hype right now. It's off-putting to see consumer products slapped with a hundred AI labels. I see people talk about how you can turn off all of Apple Intelligence with one toggle rather than hundreds on Samsung. Firefox is also marketing how easy it is to disable AI.

I think a lot of people are not hype about AI in their toaster, but... I don't think people are generally turned off form deeper integration in their OS itself. Especially when for some people this is representing ideas similar to how programmer-types get excited about Shortcuts. Decently accessible automation and discovery, without having to go figure out a bunch of stuff

Sentiment among my teenage kids and their peers is that AI can fuck right off. It's way over the line into actual hate of anything AI.

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

#163

Post by puelocesar »

camkego wrote: post #109
Maxion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage is AFAIK only really a big thing in the US.

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?

People who care about privacy (very very few) use signal, everyone else uses Whatsup

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

#165

Post by dathinab »

dathinab wrote: post #158
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.

except you don't want knowledge in the model, and most of that "size" comes from "encoded knowledge", i.e. over fitting. The goal should be to only have language handling in the model, and the knowledge in a database you can actually update, analyze etc. It's just really hard to do so. "world models" (for cars) maybe make sense for self driving, but they are also just a crude workaround to have a physics simulation t…

as a concrete outdated case:

TLS cipher X25519MLKEM768 is recommended to be enabled on servers which do support it

last time I checked AI didn't even list it when you asked it for a list of TLS 1.3 ciphers (through it has been widely supported since even before it was fully standardized..)

this isn't surprising as most input sources AI can use for training are outdated and also don't list it

maybe someone of OpenAI will spot this and feet it explicitly into the next training cycle, or people will cover it more and through this it is feed implicitly there

but what about all that many niche but important information with just a handful of outdated stack overflow posts or similar? (which are unlikely to get updated now that everyone uses AI instead..)

The current "lets just train bigger models with more encoded data approach" just doesn't work, it can get you quite far, tho. But then hits a ceiling. And trying to fix it by giving it also additional knowledge "it can ask if it doesn't know" has so far not worked because it reliably doesn't realize it doesn't know if it has enough outdated/incomplete/wrong information encoded in the model. Only by assuring it doesn't have any specialized domain knowledge can you make sure that approach works IMHO.

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

#166

Post by drcongo »

oasisaimlessly wrote: post #117
bdavbdav wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But everyone talks about it like it was Apple, and isn’t that what matters (to Apple)?

I've never heard anybody (mis)attribute that to Apple.

I would have, and I work in tech. I'd guess that most people who use iOS have zero idea of what Android can and can't do, because they never use it and probably never will so what's the point of trying to find out.

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

#168

Post by brikym »

treetalker wrote: post #142
blitzar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(5) Doesn't support a dictatorship with camps.

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

#169

Post by jstummbillig »

shermantanktop wrote: post #87
swazzy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

similar vibes as "640k ought to be enough for anybody"

Well you can do a lot with 640k…if you try. We have 16G in base machines and very few people know how to try anymore. The world has moved on, that code-golf time is now spent on ad algorithms or whatever. Escaping the constraint delivered a different future than anticipated.

People get hung up on bad optimization. It you are the working at sufficiently large scale, yes, thinking about bytes might be a good use of your time.

But most likely, it's not. At a system level we don't want people to do that. It's a waste of resources. Making a virtue out of it is bad, unless you care more about bytes than humans.

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

#170

Post by Fricken »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #134
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Vision Pro is the best AR/VR product ever created.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't come up with a killer app.
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