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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

#321

Post by ethbr1 »

jacobgold wrote: post #314
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…

"Google had the best search engine, it became a centre of gravity..." Almost no one made serious attempts at competing with Google. And not because of network effects or any other hard blocker. In the early 2000s, the industry just wasn't mature enough to heavily fund serious competition. By the 2020s the industry has funding and founders ready to jump on any huge opportunity that presents itself. There are of course…

Yahoo? MSN Search?

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

#322

Post by slopinthebag »

mh- wrote: post #64
Gigachad wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of people are making the mistake of noticing that local models have been 12-24 months behind SotA ones for a good portion of the last couple years, and then drawing a dotted line assuming that continues to hold. It simply.. doesn't. The SotA models are enormous now, and there's no free lunch on compression/quantization here. Opus 4.6 capabilities are not coming to your (even 64-128gb) laptop or phone in the pop…

The gap between SOTA models and open / local models continues to diminish as SOTA is seeing diminishing returns on scaling (and that seems to be the main way they are "improving"), whereas local models are making real jumps. I'm actually more optimistic local models will catch up completely than I am SOTA will be taking any great leaps forward.

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

#323

Post by jstummbillig »

dns_snek wrote: post #276
jstummbillig wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating people able to do these optimizations costs human life, which is not spend on other things, like building the unoptimized version of another product.

We're not talking about writing assembly by hand here. If your software has a million daily users and wastes a minute of their day, that's about 9 work-years of labour wasted every single day. In a 5-year lifecycle that's about 10,000 years of human labour wasted. Yes, I had to quadruple-check this myself. Does it take 10,000 work-years of effort, per project, to train its developers to write reasonably performant co…

What world are you living in where the median piece of software has a million users? Or even a hundredth of that?

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

#324

Post by ponector »

blitzar wrote: post #81
socalgal2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How amazing is that Apple car

It has an excellent reputation of having no reported accidents!

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

#326

Post by dwaite »

bdavbdav wrote: post #110
lern_too_spel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

The text from images feature launched as a Pixel 2 series-only feature.

There's a lot clearer message to consumers on iPhone, since so many features are available on "every phone made in the last five years, once you update the software."

On Android, that feature might be bound to an OS version, or might be rolled out in a Play Store update, it might be specific to just Google or Samsung, or even just to one of their phones. There's much less word of mouth "have you tried this new thing?"

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

#327

Post by prmoustache »

smt88 wrote: post #252
prmoustache wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very US centric opinion. In other part of the globe iphone users are mostly using whatsapp or Line and couldn't care less about imessage.

And in those countries, iOS has a much smaller market share. You're proving my point.

The sum of all these smaller markets is still bigger than the US one.

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

#328

Post by bigyabai »

russelldjimmy wrote: post #116
bigyabai wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an obvious moat for Apple who can offer a cheaper alternative for training, inference AI server farms. According to Bloomberg, Apple's inference server farms are a flop: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep... the chips [...] are not powerful enough to run the latest frontier models like Gemini, which the new Siri will be based on

Go a little bit deeper than what the media directly wants you to think.

By all means, enlighten me. What did I miss?

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

#330

Post by carefree-bob »

prmoustache wrote: post #327
smt88 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in those countries, iOS has a much smaller market share. You're proving my point.

The sum of all these smaller markets is still bigger than the US one.

When measured in terms of mouths, yes, but when measured in terms of surplus spending power than can go to Apple, certainly not.

India has 1.3 Billion people in terms of counting mouths, but not wallets with $1000 to send to Apple for a new iphone.

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