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

Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 992 posts

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#391

Post by MyFirstSass »

moooo99 wrote: post #371
bradgessler wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried talking to Siri? Compare that to ChatGPT and you'll see that it's much better. The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases, which when connected to "plugins" means we'll all have our own personal assistants. That's worth something.

> The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases But people in general don't seem to be interested in voice assistants in general. They were a huge hype when you basically had to manually uncheck boxes to not accidentially order an Amazon Echo, etc, but as quick as the hype was there it was gone. To my knowledge Amazon has yet to make any kind of substantial revenue with Alexa stuff. With LLM…

People aren't that interested in voice assistants atm, though i know plenty people who look up stuff, start music etc with it.

When voice synthesis, long context etc. i'm pretty sure a lot of people would love to have a private "Her" like friend/assistant that could both be therapy, a PA and a friend, and i don't think we're that far from that. Dystopian and lonely as it is.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#392

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #185
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

Apple had a huge lead on this with Siri, and then let it stagnate - actually devolve - instead of throwing money at it to develop it further. My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system. Text/image is close to being a solved problem, video is on its way but still not great. Both will be impossible to beat from a cold-ish start. I'm not convinced Apple has the hire-power to att…

[deleted]

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#393

Post by matwood »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

If you look at the market cap of Ferrari, it's not crazy why Apple was considering this. They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%). You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure. I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.

But Apple's M.O. is Toyota volume with Ferrari margins. No way would they be happy selling 4k of anything. And Apple's required margins is why I never thought they would release a car - there isn't enough money in it.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#394

Post by johndhi »

selimthegrim wrote: post #384
sjwhevvvvvsj wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee. The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

This was funny and I meant to update it but instead down voted it and now can't find how to undo that. Sorry!

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#395

Post by kjreact »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #348
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

> Good. Also bad. From the article: > many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen EV startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.

> So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen tech startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.

I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.

Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#396

Post by kwhitefoot »

staticman2 wrote: post #195
jcgrillo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and dis…

If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.

If AI replaces most humans at most tasks how are the humans going to pay for the products?

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#397

Post by intrasight »

smoldesu wrote: post #315
samatman wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has built-in hardware for neural networks in every chip they produce. That's a natural advantage. Your post contains a whole lot of what you want to see, rather than an analysis of the available facts.

In a lot of Apple's hardware, the fastest way to inference is to ignore the built-in Neural hardware and use Metal Compute Shaders. Suffice to say that simply shipping dedicated silicon is not equivalent to accelerating everything well, or supporting it upstream.

SMOB (simply matter of bytes) as they say. Will they finally invest in AI software? My take from this announcement is that they will. Dedicated silicon with a dedicated hardware stack shouldn't be so hard for Apple. They can throw considerable resource at the problem.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#400

Post by __loam »

itsoktocry wrote: post #347
itronitron wrote: post #249

It's shocking/hilarious how much/many people believe that there are any economic prospects in generative AI. By definition, if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand. There's also a reason it's called a singularity, it sucks everything in that touches it but otherwise has very little influence on anything else.

> if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand. AI is a tool. Are houses worthless because any hammer can create them?

What an inane strawman argument. Houses are obviously not worthless because there's finite land to build on and building houses takes a non trivial amount of labor and capital. The problem the user you responded to is pointing out is that a lot of people assume productivity was the problem with so-called creative fields and these tools are going to somehow fix that problem. What's actually going to happen is a ton of people are going to produce a ton of trite AI content that is essentially identical because everyone is using the same models, thus inflating the supply. In addition, nobody actually gives a shit about AI generated garbage, so demand isn't suddenly going to rise. In many ways, the attention economy is already saturated, and the way you succeed there is not through productivity but by differentiating yourself in ways that make your content more desirable.

Put simply, have you heard of or do you follow any AI based creators? I can name 10 or 20 artists, content creators, movie directors, or writers that I respect pretty much instantly. Can't really do the same thing for people using AI.

Post reply on HN