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Apple Foundation Models

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Re: Apple Foundation Models

#191

Post by lacy_tinpot »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #99
tedggh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.

They tried to do that with operating systems and the browser.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#192

Post by aesthesia »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #14
daniel_iversen wrote: post #4

Is this Apple encouraging developers to go through their api abstraction layer to use LLMs so that when they launch their own (which I think we’ve heard they’ve been spending lots of money on training and might be somehow involved with Siri or current Apple AI?) that they can easily help devs make a seamless transition? Or is it just a developer nicety or something else?

A dark, but not totally unfair take: It makes it easier for Apple to take payment for the models others provide, and even allows Apple, if they want to, to use the data to build a dataset for training their own models based on how users use third party models. It's only on Apple devices this API is used, so they split up the market by not letting developers use the same system if they want things to work on iOS, lock…

From the linked docs page:

> Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses. Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing. Your app decides when to use Claude and when to use Apple's on-device model: pass whichever model you want to each session.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#193

Post by zitterbewegung »

tedggh wrote: post #72
harrouet wrote: post #49

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

It is much better. Imagine if the whole Manhattan project could have been outsourced and costs you nothing. I expect in a short time that open source models will be almost or almost parity by 2030 and running on consumer devices.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#194

Post by throwaway98797 »

alecco wrote: post #150
ksec wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Evans is completely wrong. I wish there was a case where I find Evans is wrong. As far as my memory served me, I failed to record a single one. I disagree that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are " well " behind. If anything the frontier model advantage seems to be at best 6 - 9 months. And that the Chinese model are all doing well. One of Steve Jobs's line, "It is a feature, not a product." Even if Appl…

Even their own employees get frustrated if they can't use Claude or Codex. 6-9 months is a big difference and I think it's closer to 9 than 6. And never mind the harness etc are also many months behind.

people use outlook when gmail exists.

employees will always suffer.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#195

Post by HPsquared »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #193
tedggh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

It is much better. Imagine if the whole Manhattan project could have been outsourced and costs you nothing. I expect in a short time that open source models will be almost or almost parity by 2030 and running on consumer devices.

Market phenomena like this are a bit like the Manhattan project in that you pay for it, and make use of it, whether you want to or not. It's functionally very similar to the government doing something.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#196

Post by wuliwong »

harrouet wrote: post #49

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

I think there is an opportunity for a new hardware company to enter the market. I know this is just hypothetical but I believe that AI is revolutionary enough where a new approach to hardware and UI/UX will enable far more value to be derived from AI. I think the incumbents like Apple will stick to their familiar platforms and could get beaten out by a new competitor that is AI native to the core. Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#197

Post by Danox »

jayd16 wrote: post #161
godzillabrennus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could buy 1TB of unified memory in a Mac for $1k-$2k in total hardware costs. Apple would basically be able to extinguish the entirety of the market cap for Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others all at once. In 10 years, I hope my MacBook Pro can run today's frontier models and has 1TB of unified Memory.

They want you to buy four 256GB Studios and link them with ThunderBolt.

Yes, particularly if that memory is designed and engineered by Apple in house like Apple Silicon in house and manufactured by TSMC on shore somewhere in the United States.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#198

Post by scotty79 »

scosman wrote: post #89
rock_artist wrote: post #16

While I'm happy with Apple introducing this abstraction. my main concern was with local models. I'd love using Gemma4 as an example. but thinking of a user. if 10 Apps each uses same model and downloads it, the phone will be bloated. I still didn't understand if Apple provided a way for multiple apps uses same on-device model (without tricky namespaces and permissions). I didn't see anything suggesting that's the cas…

I think that's what they are trying to avoid. If you need on-device intelligence, their pitch was "The model the device already has is best", and if you need something more specific an adapter (aka, a fine-tune/lora) is best. They were wrong when their on-device model was way behind. They still might be right in the long term. While multiple app I use might need Gemma 4 E4B, I use dozens of apps and app devs can choo…

But models aren't universally best, especially small ones. For text Gemma is great. For vision qwen3.6 is amazing.

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#199

Post by Danox »

Gareth321 wrote: post #102
pprotas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic (or realist?) in my thinks this abstraction layer is Apple's way of making sure that users give their own Apple Intelligence credit for the underlying LLM functionality, even if another company is actually providing the LLM.

This is clearly because they plan to monetise AI in the future, and they don't want competition.

They have competition, Microsoft and Nvidia, Google and Huawei long term…

Re: Apple Foundation Models

#200

Post by Danox »

saagarjha wrote: post #44
coldtea wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Apple just designs and writes the SoC, CPU, graphics unit, neural unit, compiler (Swift), OS, graphics layer, 3D API, core libs from graphics to persistence, filesystem, broadband chip, and a few more things besides...

Notably good models are not on that list.

AI models in the end are just commodities the computer using public is not going to pay for them directly, in short, they’re not gonna bail out OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic.
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