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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

#291

Post by kergonath »

SirMaster wrote: post #289
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.

Apple waited on smartphones? I thought the original iPhone was basically first. Do you count blackberry and palm pilot as Apple waiting to see?

> Apple waited on smartphones?

They were not waiting for smartphones, but they did wait for the technology to enable them. They had been working on prototypes for a couple of years before releasing the first iPhone, and smartphones were not really a new thing at that point. What made it possible is improvements in digitisers and batteries (and they were not the first users of the capacitive digitisers in the first iPhones, they were the first to use it at that scale for a full screen), as well as progress on the software side, which took some effort.

It was the same for the first iPod. They jumped when they got a hard drive they thought was small enough to fit in a product they believed was good.

So yeah, they tend to wait and see, but they consider technologies, not only final products.

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

#292

Post by KerrAvon »

throwaw12 wrote: post #159
shermantanktop wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you can do a lot with 640k…if you try. it is economically not viable to try anymore. "XYZ Corp" won't allow their developers to write their desktop app in Rust because they want to consume only 16MB RAM, then another implementation for mobile with Swift and/or Kotlin, when they can release good enough solution with React + Electron consuming 4GB RAM and reuse components with React Native.

Strangely enough, AI could turn this on its head. You can have your cake and eat it too, because you can tell Claude/Codex/whatever to build you a full-featured Swift version for iOS and Kotlin for Android and whatever you want on Windows and Mac. There's still QA for the different builds, but you already have to QA each platform separately anyway if you really care that they all work, so in theory that doesn't change.

Of course, it's never that simple in reality; you need developers who know each platform for that to work, because you must run the builds and tell the AI what it's doing wrong and iterate. Currently, you can probably get away with churning out Electron slop and waiting for users to complain about problems instead of QAing every platform. Sad!

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

#293

Post by [deleted] »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #33
m463 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quietly they are doing things on-device. The OCR + copy/paste is genuine goodness - modestly functional.

That's also literally years behind the competition. https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/05/09/android-ps-new-rece...

[deleted]

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

#294

Post by pstuart »

Traster wrote: post #287

People can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the core logic behind OpenAI's valuation was essentially that AI would work like search. Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity that sucked everything in and suddenly network effects meant it was the centre of the universe. There seem to be 2 big problems with that though. The first is that for search, queries are both demand for the product an…

For actual searching, it seems like RAG would be the way. Instead of rebuilding models, focus on curating datasets and sources.

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

#295

Post by toyetic »

Traster wrote: post #287

People can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the core logic behind OpenAI's valuation was essentially that AI would work like search. Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity that sucked everything in and suddenly network effects meant it was the centre of the universe. There seem to be 2 big problems with that though. The first is that for search, queries are both demand for the product an…

I think a large part of its valuation was it's ability to compete with search but thats understating it a bit. Unlike search it could/can be the platform users primarily interact with (ala a social media replacement) while having huge impacts on enterprise work and automation. I think its the combination of the ability for effectively one company to compete on every front in the modern web ecosystem thats contributed to the valuation.

It's also important to note the valuation is not just based off of its possible concrete economic implications in these areas but also future "unknown" possibility ( I.E. whatever "agi" means to investors ). Thats not to say I believe it's possible to achieve this but rather a huge part of Sam Altman's job is increasing valuation through unfounded claims of AGI's possibility and possible impact.

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

#296

Post by Eric_WVGG »

SirMaster wrote: post #289
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.

Apple waited on smartphones? I thought the original iPhone was basically first. Do you count blackberry and palm pilot as Apple waiting to see?

Apple was considered very late to the smartphone game at the time.

Windows CE was introduced on PDAs around 1996, and was on phones by 2003, so the iPhone was arguably between four and eleven years late depending on how you define the space.

Microsoft’s dominance was a safe bet because they had never really failed to dominate any market at that point in history. Also nobody imagined that the size of the mobile market would eclipse laptops, so “Windows CE already won” wasn’t an absurd statement at all.

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

#297

Post by ghaff »

adrithmetiqa wrote: post #79
smt88 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"10 years behind" would be an improvement for Siri. It's actively broken much of the time in a way that Google Assistant or Alexa never has been.

I would argue that they are as bad as each other. I have to repeat most voice commands to Siri and Alexa than getting it right first time. No experience with Google.

Voice assistants were going to be this revolutionary new category. I think Amazon was going to populate a whole office tower in Boston with Alexa engineers at one point. There have been incremental improvements here and there but, to a first approximation, none of it has really worked out.

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

#298

Post by chasd00 »

Traster wrote: post #287

People can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the core logic behind OpenAI's valuation was essentially that AI would work like search. Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity that sucked everything in and suddenly network effects meant it was the centre of the universe. There seem to be 2 big problems with that though. The first is that for search, queries are both demand for the product an…

that's been my feeling for a while now. Google just has to keep up while OpenAI and Anthropic go bankrupt. I can see MSFT and Amazon eventually consuming OpenAI and Anthropic respectively when the money runs out but I still think Google is the eventual winner. I also have been pointing out that Apple making a deal with Google vs trying to do it on their own is another vote in that direction.

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

#299

Post by DaedalusII »

nozzlegear wrote: post #68
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

That letter from the bank would probably include a QR code linking directly to their app oui?

[dead]

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

#300

Post by chasd00 »

toyetic wrote: post #295
Traster wrote: post #287

People can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the core logic behind OpenAI's valuation was essentially that AI would work like search. Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity that sucked everything in and suddenly network effects meant it was the centre of the universe. There seem to be 2 big problems with that though. The first is that for search, queries are both demand for the product an…

I think a large part of its valuation was it's ability to compete with search but thats understating it a bit. Unlike search it could/can be the platform users primarily interact with (ala a social media replacement) while having huge impacts on enterprise work and automation. I think its the combination of the ability for effectively one company to compete on every front in the modern web ecosystem thats contributed…

I've almost forgotten about AGI, that was suppose to be the reason for the valuations and all the hope/fear. Then, it just sort of went away and AI turned into the Software Developer doomsday machine. We're on month 4 since the models got really good at code and we were all going to be out of a job in 6 months. I guess we only have 2 more months of employment left /s
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