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Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

machinelearning.apple.com

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Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#511

Post by com2kid »

caseyy wrote: post #416
lolinder wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For people interested in AI research, there's nothing new here. Was anyone expecting anything new? Apple has never been big on living at the cutting edge of technology exploring spaces that no one has explored before—from laptops to the iPhone to iPads to watches, every success they've had has come from taking tech that was already prototyped by many other companies and smoothing out the usability kinks to get it r…

> Apple has never been big on living at the cutting edge of technology There was such a time. Same as with Google. Interestingly, around 2015-2016 both companies significantly shifted to iterative products from big innovations. It's more visible with Google than Apple, but here's both. Apple: - Final Cut Pro - 1998: iMac - 1999: iBook G3 (father of all MacBooks) - 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the…

> - 2000: Power Mac G4 Cube (the early grandparent of the Mac Mini form factor), Mac OS X

The Next Cube being a very obvious inspiration here.

Mac OS X was a needed step, and entire books have been written about its creation. While it has some innovative pieces, it was very much a do or die situation for Apple, not brought on by innovation so much as the need to survive. (I'm sure BeOS fans will argue that BeOS was the real innovative OS. ;) )

> - 2001: iPod, iTunes

iPod was a, very well done, refinement of the existing MP3 device category. iTunes' innovation was the licensing deal they got with record companies, that is what really surprised everyone.

> - 2002: Xserve (rackable servers)

Not sure how this is an innovation? Rack mount servers had been around a long time.

> - 2004: iWork Suite,

Microsoft literally had a product called Microsoft Works that was originally released in 1988 and came shipped on tons of home PCs.

> - 2005: iPod Nano, Mac mini

The iPod Nano was cool, the Mac mini was a wonderful feat of engineering and cost reductions.

> - 2006: Intel Macs, Boot Camp

Necessity brought this about.

> - 2007: iPhone and Apple TV

This is a perfect example of Apple entering an existing product category and doing an amazing job of execution. Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft were already releasing very capable smart phones, but none of them bothered polishing the product (MS and Blackberry focused on corporate sales, end user experience was not the top priority) and while Apple did push a lot of technology forward to make the iPhone (notably screen tech and using capacitive touch screens), their main innovation was realizing they could get customers to pay for a cell phone. For those who don't remember, prior to the iPhone, most customers got their cellphone for "free" from their cellular provider in return for agreeing to a 2 year contract. Apple realized if they made a really nice product, that people would buy it.

Apple also did some really cool, and now largely forgotten about, positioning here involving the iPod Touch, where the iPod Touch had access to the full App Store and became entry level "kids toy" devices that got people into the ecosystem.

Heck arguably the App Store was a larger innovation than the phone.

Fun fact: Microsoft had an App Store ready to launch for Windows Mobile (pre Windows Phone 7) but it was scrapped at the last minute because an exec thought that "no way would phone users ever pay for apps".

(When I joined MS in 2006 the source code was still laying around in the Windows Mobile source tree!)

Apple TV was arguably too early at this point in time, I'd say it didn't really take off until later generations when more streaming media was available.

But innovative? Web TV was out in the late 90s (!!) and Microsoft tried to do Media Center PC's since 2002. Heck for awhile with Xbox 360, Microsoft basically owned the "TV smart device" market segment. (and they released the Xbox One as a media streaming device and sort of forgot that it was also a games console... oops)

As with most products, Apple just did a really good job of it, but Roku has dramatically outplayed everyone else in the market by getting embedded directly into cheap TVs sold at Costco.

> - 2010: iPad, iPhone 4

iPad is/was an amazing product, and it succeeded thanks to great apps.

It was also a refinement of Tablet PCs which have been around since the late 80s/early 90s.

Apple was willing to do what Microsoft wasn't, break all back-compat and make a really good single purpose device. Microsoft's tablets (some of which are really damn nice!) were always hamstrung because Microsoft never could go all in on abandoning existing x86 software. (The closest attempt being Windows 8 RT, which managed to make the perfect set of compromises to anger everyone!)

> - 2015: Apple Watch, Apple Music

The first generation Apple Watch was... meh. Now, I say this as someone who was working on a direct competitor - I am still not sure how it has such a miserable battery life and why such a massively overpowered CPU and GPU still dropped frames.

I am not sure what is innovative about Apple Music, vs every other streaming music service.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#512

Post by chuckadams »

steve1977 wrote: post #499
gumby wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airport came out in the beginning of the year, maybe January, at Macworld. WECA renamed themselves the WiFi Alliance a few years later, but the name (and trademark) had to exist for it to be worth them doing so. WECA reminds me of other "memorable" names of the era, my favorite being PCMCIA, though VESA is another fave.

Thanks for the info. That was pretty much around the time when I started out in IT. And yes PCMCIA, what a mouthful! I remember Ethernet cards in this format.

People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#513

Post by eightysixfour »

gokuldas011011 wrote: post #245
eightysixfour wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how Google is doing it too.

Indeed. Google said LoRA and apple said adapter plugging. Wonder the difference is at, Apple's dev conference is for consumers and Google's dev conference is for developers.

Yeah, just Apple doing a better job branding. LoRA is an adapter.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#514

Post by josephg »

talldayo wrote: post #503
josephg wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation that stops companies copying ideas from one another would be a disaster.

I'm more suggesting that bad decisions should be litigated against fast-and-early, so other companies aren't encouraged to follow in Apple's footsteps. If every company had their own Lightning connector, there would be no choice but to force them all to converge. The original sin is letting it happen at all, in the first place.

Who decides which ideas are good and bad? I assume you wouldn’t want regulators to have retroactively forced Apple to keep floppy disk drives in their computers. Or cdrom drives? It’s just the “obviously bad” ideas that should be banned, right?

Do you have a crystal ball that lets you know ahead of time which choices are good and bad? Even in retrospect I’m not sure Apple made the wrong choice with the lightning connector. It’s a better connector in just about every way than micro-usb, which was the only standard alternative at the time. Apple’s experience with lightning was rolled into the design process for usb-c, which as I understand it they were heavily involved in. USB-c might not exist as it does today without Apple’s experiments with the lightning connector.

Even if we pretend you’re better at picking winners and losers in the tech world than Apple and Samsung, do you think regulators are going to be as canny as you are with this stuff? US politicians don’t seem to understand the difference between Facebook and the internet. Are you sure you want them making tech choices on your behalf?

If you ask me, I think regulators would make a dogs breakfast of it all. If they were involved we’d probably still have laws on the books mandating that all laptops still have parallel ports or PCMCIA slots or something. The free market can sure take its time figuring this stuff out. But competition does, usually, lead to progress.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#515

Post by dialup_sounds »

miven wrote: post #226

> For on-device inference, we use low-bit palletization, a critical optimization technique that achieves the necessary memory, power, and performance requirements. Did they go over the entire text with a thesaurus? I've never seen "palletization" be used as a viable synonym for "quantization" before, and I've read quite a few papers on LLM quantization

I enjoy the plausible irony that they used the very same model they're describing to proofread the article, and it didn't catch palettize (like a color palette) vs. palletize (like a shipping pallet).

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#516

Post by Aerbil313 »

astrange wrote: post #486
Aerbil313 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who understand cybersecurity who are not operating within a US-allied country use ... I don't know what to be honest. What to do in such a situation, where Apple is a US-based company obligated by law to comply with requests from three letter agencies and Android is a buggy mess which probably is backdoored by every major power?

Your threat model shouldn't be about three letter agencies unless you're running a terrorist group. It should be about porn spammers or something.

Do you mean that US is the measure of justice and goodness in the world and anyone who opposes her is a terrorist? I don't mean to detract the conversation but this is really victim blaming. There are valid situations where the US DoD is a threat.

Your username reminded me of Julian Assange, for a second I mixed them up.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#517

Post by astrange »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #516
astrange wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your threat model shouldn't be about three letter agencies unless you're running a terrorist group. It should be about porn spammers or something.

Do you mean that US is the measure of justice and goodness in the world and anyone who opposes her is a terrorist? I don't mean to detract the conversation but this is really victim blaming. There are valid situations where the US DoD is a threat. Your username reminded me of Julian Assange, for a second I mixed them up.

No, I assume if you're working for a foreign military then you wouldn't be posting about it on here.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#518

Post by astrange »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #507
astrange wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your experience for phone use cases will be better, because walking with wired headphones in gives you nasty telephonic effects (sound transmission along the cable) and they get tangled up.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Those who wish to use Bluetooth headphones can happily use them, while those who prefer wired can continue to use them. There's no reason smartphone manufacturers shouldn't support both.

They do, you can get the little dongle and it has superior audio quality to most audiophile DACs on the market.

But that 3.5mm port takes up a lot of room that could be used for more battery, backup antennas for when the user's hand is covering one of them, vibration motors etc.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#519

Post by scottyah »

talldayo wrote: post #454
andruby wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective it's not _stupid_. It sucks for us customers, but it's "smart" from a business point of view. Until they get serious competition, I doubt they'll change their practices. And while I hate the overpriced memory upgrades, I still prefer paying extra, rather than Apple switching to a Ad-based business model like Google (and potentially OpenAI in the future)

> From a business perspective it's not _stupid_. It sucks for us customers, but it's "smart" from a business point of view. Well, I'm not a business. I appreciate smart consumer choices and I applaud any company that doesn't have to be forced into doing the right thing. > I still prefer paying extra, rather than Apple switching to a Ad-based business model like Google (and potentially OpenAI in the future) Oh you swe…

Business and consumers both benefit from not using a cost-plus pricing model in a marketspace heavily dependent on R&D. Sure, the profit margins are hard to agree upon since it's an infinite scale and they change heavily day to day, but do not trust anyone who thinks all product pricings should be based solely on cost of materials.

Re: Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models

#520

Post by krick »

skeaker wrote: post #465
throw0101d wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, people who laughed at them removing the 3.5mm jack can still safely laugh away. Then laugh at Samsung and their flagship line of phones as well, since they haven't had headphone jacks for a while now. "After Note 10 dumps headphone jack, Samsung ads mocking iPhone dongles disappear" (2019): * https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/after-removing-headphone-ja... "Samsung is hiding its ads that made fun…

We absolutely do laugh at both already.

I would gladly laugh, but it's nearly impossible to buy a good phone now. TBH I don't care that much about my phone not having a 3.5mm (even if I would need to use wired headphones, which is very rare now, I can use an USB adapter for that), but there are basically no phones without this stupid hole in the display, or with a good dedicated (not under screen) fingerprint scanner (because who needs that, when you can have face recognition, right?) All top-line phones are like $1500 now, but still are considered like disposable products that are naturally expected to be changed every 2 years. Batteries are not removable, yet devices are not actually (reliably) waterproof.

And maybe I'm wrong, but somehow it feels each improvement like that was actually pioneered by Apple. In the dreamworld of free-market enthusiasts this should have made Apple bankrupt or iPhone a very niche consumer device, but in the real world everything just became iPhone. There are some rare exceptions, but these are either outright experimental and gimmicky (because being different is their identity), or just bottom-of-the-line products that have these "intentional defects" that should make you chose the more expensive option.

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