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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

#191

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #186
swazzy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the difference is that with LLMs, in a lot of cases you do see some diminishing returns. I won't deny that the latest Claude models are fantastic at just one shotting loads of problems. But we have an internal proxy to a load of models running on Vertex AI and I accidentally started using Opus/Sonnet 4 instead of 4.6. I genuinely didn't know until I checked my configuration. AI models will get to this point w…

I mean to me even difference between Opus and Sonnet is as clear as day and night, and even Opus and the best GPT model. Opus 4.6 just seems much more reliable in terms of me asking it to do something, and that to actually happen.

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

#192

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #191
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is that with LLMs, in a lot of cases you do see some diminishing returns. I won't deny that the latest Claude models are fantastic at just one shotting loads of problems. But we have an internal proxy to a load of models running on Vertex AI and I accidentally started using Opus/Sonnet 4 instead of 4.6. I genuinely didn't know until I checked my configuration. AI models will get to this point w…

I mean to me even difference between Opus and Sonnet is as clear as day and night, and even Opus and the best GPT model. Opus 4.6 just seems much more reliable in terms of me asking it to do something, and that to actually happen.

It depends what you're asking it though. Sure, in a software development environment the difference between those two models is noticeable.

But think about the general user. They're using the free Gemini or ChatGPT. They're not using the latest and greatest. And they're happy using it.

And I am willing to bet that a lot of paying users would be served perfectly fine by the free models.

If a capable model is able to live on device and solve 99% of people's problems, then why would the average person ever need to pay for ChatGPT or Gemini?

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

#193

Post by lugu »

pjmlp wrote: post #108

What I don't get about Apple is when everyone else was giving up on yet another VR attempt, moving into AI, they decide AI isn't worth it, and it was the right time for a me too VR headset. So no VR, given the price and lack of developer support, and late arrival into AI.

It is the same pattern, late on VR, late on AI. Those two tech have a pricing problem. I would guess that Apple is working to create the conditions to make these tech cheap enough to sell it to everyone.

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

#194

Post by andrewl-hn »

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?

A lot of SMBs use Instagram to connect to their clients, so Instagram build-in messenger is a default option for a lot of people (especially women) in many parts of the world.

Some places have regional messengers that are very entrenched, like Line in Japan or KakaoTalk in Korea.

WhatsApp is a default option in a large number of countries including most of Middle East, parts of Europe, Brazil, most of Africa, Southern Asia. To me it is surprising, too, because out of all messaging options WhatsApp seems like the least developed and least ergonomic.

And yes, this does mean that most people share whatever data Big Tech wants. They use Meta to talk to each other, auto-upload their photos to Google, click "accept" to every cookie banner so that thousands of no-name companies around the world know where they are and what they are doing at all times.

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

#195

Post by ajdegol »

Fricken wrote: post #170
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it was $1000 too expensive to take off. It’s also too heavy, they should drop the front screen and ruthlessly save weight.

Chicken and egg problem, if no-one buys it, no-one will develop any killer apps.

Whether it’s pleasant to have any screens that close to your eyes - or ever will be - is maybe the bigger question for VR.

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

#196

Post by TheDong »

Someone wrote: post #149
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

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…

> I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store

So my grandmother searching "Powerpoint" and getting malware instead of the microsoft app is good actually?

Let me compare some search terms and see if ads are giving me "better" results:

* ublock - surfshark vpn

* wordle - spammy adware word game

* slack - spammy adware game

* microsoft word - spammy spyware office app (not the one made by MS)

* every bank I could think of - different financial app

Like, this isn't a good user experience. The ads aren't relevant, even when you type in a hyper-popular app's name exactly, something like 80% of the time a competitor has sniped the top spot.

For the "microsoft word" search, the spam app had an identical logo to word, and I have no doubt many people have been fooled. If you look at the reviews, some of the 1 star reviews are detailed complaints, and all the 5 star reviews are inhuman sounding "This helped me do my job" and "great app" reviews.

> I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store

Sorting roughly by popularity and reviews, and also doing a little more to combat fake reviews, seems like it would be better. It at least would mean that if I searched "bank name" my bank's app would come up, since for every bank I tried the first non-ad result was in fact the bank in question.

It would save grandmothers around the world who just click on the first result.

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

#197

Post by planb »

discordance wrote: post #51
hapticmonkey wrote: post #13

Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware. Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the ho…

~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!

Services revenue is mostly just 30% from App Store Sales. This means every time a user clicks a pro account for ChatGPT or Claude on their phone, Apple makes more money than they could make with a self deployed model.

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

#199

Post by teekert »

oliver236 wrote: post #198

The whole premise is that if you don't get to AGI first then you loose. The idea is that Anthropic with AGI could build a better version of Apple, or whatever it wants. This was the conversation like 1 year ago. What has changed?

Nothing changed, it's new ground, we are searching it with a search light. From some vantage points our view on things may feel quite complete, even insightful. Then we look at if differently and feel lost. It's a process we are in together.

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

#200

Post by jbverschoor »

bigyabai wrote: post #104
jbverschoor wrote: post #99

So Apple’s AI acceleration and memory architecture is accidental, but nvidia’s is not?

Nvidia has research papers on accelerating Machine Learning as far back as 2014: https://research.nvidia.com/publications?f%5B0%5D=research_a...

Apple's website from 2017 https://machinelearning.apple.com/research?page=1&sort=oldes...

That's also the year where they released on-chip acceleration for certain things, so they probably started a year or 2 before working on that tech? Not as accidental as assumed.

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