Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by dwaite » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

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?

I would absolutely count blackberry and palm pilot, along with windows ce-based phones. Just because Apple leap-frogged them (and they all eventually folded those lines of business) doesn't mean they weren't existing products in the market.

The difference, if any, was focus. The premium on smartphones before Apple hit the market was on business/professional users who could afford the high premium. Apple instead targeted making a premium consumer product - that professionals then started to jump to over time, depending on how addicted they were to their blackberry keyboard.

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

#332

Post by bigyabai » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #200

bigyabai wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple's Neural Engine from 2017 is an NPU that's basically obsolete today in light of Metal Compute Shaders. It was accidental, and Apple is redesigning their GPU architecture to subsume it.

CUDA on the other hand continues to be relevant, and the compute capabilities from 2014 are still instrumental for accelerating training and acceleration workloads.

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

#333

Post by dd8601fn » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

sroussey wrote: post #122

charcircuit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are underestimating the strength a small model can get from tool use. There may be no substitute for scale, but that scale can live outside of the model and be queried using tools. In the worst case a smaller model could use a tool that involves a bigger model to do something.

Small models are bad at tool use. I have liquidai doing it in the browser but it’s super fragile.

I don’t really understand this, but I hear it a lot so I know it’s just confusion on my part.

I’m running little models on a laptop. I have a custom tool service made available to a simple little agent that uses the small models (I’ve used a few). It’s able to search for necessary tool functions and execute them, just fine.

My biggest problem has been the llm choosing not to use tools at all, favoring its ability to guess with training data. And once in a while those guesses are junk.

Is that the problem people refer to when they say that small models have problems with tool use? Or is it something bigger that I wouldn’t have run into yet?

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

#334

Post by dwaite » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #63

Gigachad wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago. The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.

Siri does not do it fine, it's literally the example the above commenter showed.

Knowing the building heights around Chicago is not an OS feature. Even if Siri was perfect, they still aren't going to ship a wikipedia object graph on every phone.

Likewise, the phone does not understand removing people from a photo. It is a feature specific to the photo app, and Siri allows you to wire in commands for the features in your app just fine and has for years. If Google decided for competitive reasons to not ship this feature to non-Pixel or non-Android users, thats not a Siri fault. That Apple did not integrate this as a voice command into their Photos app is also not a Siri fault (is it really common to remove all people from a photo, vs specific people?)

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

#335

Post by Miserlou57 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #306

crote wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The competition has also attached it to a toxic brand and heavily integrated it with actively user-hostile applications. It doesn't matter if your tech is years ahead when people expect using it will mean your image content info will be sold to anyone willing to pay a cent for it.

It's more that nontechnical users prefer luxury brands over utility brands. A much smaller issue, which you alluded to, is that some technical users aren't technical enough to know real privacy vs. marketed privacy. This feature exists in base Android, which doesn't require any Google services.

does anyone else tire of hearing Apple referred to as a "luxury" brand? Sorry its more Honda than LVMH

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

#336

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

dwaite wrote: post #334

satvikpendem wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri does not do it fine, it's literally the example the above commenter showed.

Knowing the building heights around Chicago is not an OS feature. Even if Siri was perfect, they still aren't going to ship a wikipedia object graph on every phone. Likewise, the phone does not understand removing people from a photo. It is a feature specific to the photo app, and Siri allows you to wire in commands for the features in your app just fine and has for years. If Google decided for competitive reasons to…

> Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone

Is what I was referring to, Siri often fails at even opening apps which is an OS feature. Regardless, even for your examples at a certain point an AI assistant not being able to do certain things while others can does become the fault of that AI.

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

#337

Post by alwillis » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #185

root_axis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that's the current state of the art after decades of aggressive optimizations, there's no foreseeable future where we'll ever be able to cram several orders of magnitude more ram into a phone.

We already cram several orders of magnitude more flash storage into phone than RAM (e.g. my phone has 16 GB RAM but 1 TB storage); even now, with some smart coding, if you don't need all that data at the same time for random access at sub millisecond speed, it's hard to tell the difference.

Agreed. Apple is sells an iPhone Pro Max with 2 TB of storage.

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

#338

Post by dwaite » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

Their focus is investing in areas where they see something being a competitive differentiator, or where the market has failed to create a competitive environment.

They do not make their own screens because they can source screens from multiple sources and work with those manufacturers to create screens with the properties they want. Same thing with them relying on others for electric batteries - there are plenty of manufacturers to provide batteries to Apple's spec.

They created their own wireless modems because there's only one company they were able to purchase modems from, and those modems did not necessarily have the features Apple wanted.

Apple hasn't announced any interest in selling electric cars, solar cell technology, or quantum computing platforms. I wouldn't expect them to do so until they had a consumer product ready for sale. I doubt they are planning to come out with products in any of these categories soon.

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

#339

Post by tim333 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

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…

Microsoft had a good go with Bing.

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

#340

Post by blitzar » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

ponector wrote: post #324

blitzar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How amazing is that Apple car

It has an excellent reputation of having no reported accidents!

My regular tow truck driver tells me he sees all sorts; fords, audis, mercedes, teslas, even the odd exotic car like a lambo - but never once an apple car would you believe it.