Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

adlrocha.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 402 posts

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

#211

Post by drooopy »

smt88 wrote: post #57
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…

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

That must be an american thing because I guarantee you that it doesn't mean anything for the rest of the world.

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

#212

Post by bawana »

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 think security is the issue-ai is good at circumventing this. For example , ai can read paywalled articles you cannot. Do you really want ai to have ‘free range’.?

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

#213

Post by saberience »

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?

Everyone in the UK and Western Europe uses WhatsApp as their primary messenger.

The only time I ever open iMessage is when I get an SMS 2FA verification code or something similar.

Also, in the Middle East everyone also just uses WhatsApp or Telegram.

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

#214

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #192
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

But even other tasks, like research etc, where dates are important, little details and connections are important, reasoning is important, background research activities or usage of tools outside of software development, and this is where I am finding much of the LLMs most useful for my life.

Even Opus makes mistakes with dates or not understanding news and everything correctly in context with chronological orders etc, and it would be even worse with smaller and less performing models.

Scheduling, planning, researching products, shopping, trip plans, etc...

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

#215

Post by iSnow »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #72
grtteee wrote: post #2

This is the classic apple approach - wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing (aka let others make sunk investments), envision a solution that is way better than the competition and then architect a path to building a leapfrog product that builds a large lead.

Will this strategy work every time ? Maybe for AI it will work (market is competitive and Apple just purchases the best model for its consumers). But this approach may not work in other areas: e.g. building electric batteries, wireless modems, electric cars, solar cell technology, quantum computing etc. Essentially Apple got lucky with AI but it needs to keep investing in cutting edge technology in the various broad…

>wireless modems

They (Apple) bought out intel's wireless modems and are using them instead of Qualcomm's chips. IIRC, they aren't the best in class when it comes to raw throughput, but quite good in terms of throughput vs power consumption.

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

#216

Post by smt88 »

drooopy wrote: post #211
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

That must be an american thing because I guarantee you that it doesn't mean anything for the rest of the world.

It is, and the iPhone doesn't have overwhelming market share in any other large market, which is my point.

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

#217

Post by smt88 »

Maxion wrote: post #88
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

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

Yes, and the US is by far Apple's most important handset market. The other iOS-majority countries are small markets for Apple.

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

#218

Post by smt88 »

russelldjimmy wrote: post #111
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

No one uses iMessage in my country. Yet iPhones are sought after. Some of us just really like iPhones for the experience - not everything is a conspiracy. People can have different tastes and are more free to choose than people on HN like to believe.

What country?

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

#219

Post by smt88 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #77
smt88 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user. Basically everyone around me is the same.

> Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user.

A single anecdote isn't data. You're not a typical consumer.

The only major market where iPhone outsells Android (number of handsets) is the US, and it's because of iMessage. Android is 70% of the world market and dominates LatAm, Africa, and Asia.

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

#220

Post by Tuna-Fish »

Gigachad wrote: post #58
colechristensen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local models seem somewhere between 9 and 24 months behind. I'm not saying I won't be impressed with what online models will be able to do in two years, but I'm pretty satisfied with the prediction that I won't really need them in a couple of years.

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

HBF is coming fast, with the first examples expected to be sampling to users this year.

The storage technology of Flash memory can be optimized to be as fast and more energy-efficient than DRAM at large linear reads, there was just little demand before because doing so costs you ~half of your density and doesn't improve your writes at all. All the flash memory manufacturers realized that this is a huge opportunity for model weights and are now chasing this.

Or in other words, after the initial price peak stabilizes in a few years, it will be reasonable to put ~500GB of weights into a device for ~$100 in memory costs.

Post reply on HN