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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

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

#591

Post by concinds »

dartos wrote: post #493
theturtletalks wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car. All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not…

That’s some Apple fan boy cope.

It's more "fuzzy thinking" than fanboy cope.

Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.

I wish we could read the internal emails on it.

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

#592

Post by doctorpangloss »

acaloiar wrote: post #522

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people work…

> The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning.

Maybe the entire, most valuable part of the team is working on synthetic data, since at least 2020, and maybe as early as 2017.

Apple’s Hypersim dataset is a good example of how essential it is.

Synthetic data delivered Sora. It delivered Parallel Domain, an autonomous driving data startup. It’s been the state of the art idea for longer than GPT 3 has been around.

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

#594

Post by [deleted] »

acaloiar wrote: post #522

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people work…

[deleted]

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

#595

Post by wolverine876 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #499
wolverine876 wrote: post #474

I hope it's not an overreaction to the current reactionary anti-ESG trend. We do need electric cars; they are the future.

I don't follow. Why would anti-ESG folks be against an Apple car?

They are pushing companies (and universities and governments and everyone else) to abandon efforts to stop climate change.

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

#596

Post by vrc »

anonylizard wrote: post #581
pquki4 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: does Apple actually need so many people working on GenAI? Would a team with 300 people be twice as good as a team with 150 people for what Apple is going to release as products? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is going to lay off most of them.

Wow, skimping on 150 people for the biggest change to the tech industry in since the invention of the computer. You understand Apple spent like billions for this electric car industry that never produced anything? Why would they want to starve the AI project now? You understand how many people in Microsoft and Google are working on AI adjacent projects? Even if they aren't AI researchers, there's tons of work just to…

I’d argue the internet is much bigger to date. In the future, who knows — anything getting closer to AGI would be bigger possibly but still built on the backbone of computers and the internet.

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

#597

Post by pjerem »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #554
evan_ wrote: post #490

If I were running a successful company I would stay as far away from selling cars as possible- it can't imagine how bad it is for PR (not to mention your psyche) to suddenly have "Family killed by drunk driver" headlines with a giant color picture of your flagship product, blood-stained and mangled below it.

People are taking issue with your comment (by more or less excusing other car companies) but I get what you are saying. Working in software I didn't sign up for something that people will put their lives in the hands of (awkward wording, but you know what I mean).

> Working in software I didn't sign up for something that people will put their lives in the hands of

It really depends. I think it happens more frequently than you thought. From life supporting software and automated planes which are obvious, to suicides caused by buggy software (see the British post bug) but also all the harm that social algorithms or private data leak can do.

In fact, there is a lot of things that can go very wrong with most software systems.

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

#598

Post by smoldesu »

bradgessler wrote: post #433
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…

Have you read the headlines about how difficult and expensive it is to procure NVIDIA GPUs? Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware. If software ends up being the "easy part" and hardware remains difficult, Apple is in a great spot between the volume of hardware they're already moving and their cash reserves.

> Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware.

The constraint isn't hardware. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are buying datacenter-scale Nvidia hardware that Apple quite literally does not ship the equivalent of. There are no Macs that support DGX-sized workloads, and attempting to make one seems like a suicide mission a-la Xserve. Nobody is buying what Apple's selling, in the server market.

Apple and Nvidia both compete over new TSMC nodes, and with Nvidia reaching a trillion (!!!) dollar valuation you'd be foolish to assume they're not outbidding Apple as we speak. All things being equal, Nvidia is probably Apple's greatest threat in pure compute-per-watt: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

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

#599

Post by wrs »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #509
MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

> I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. Jaguar is owned by Tata motors, Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary, Lamborghini's ownership is Audi -> Volkswagen, so not really small makers in any sense. But generally I agree, I think Apple making the full car is an odd choice. I think so much of their DNA, though, is "hardware and software working in concert together"…

And Volvo is a Geely subsidiary.

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

#600

Post by smoldesu »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #459
PheonixPharts wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a lot of open source LLM research/dev work on a Mac Studio. While it doesn't quite compete in terms of speed with a GPU for standard transformers models, I can run pretty huge models locally. When I'm working with llama.ccp, the speed and model size I can run is very impressive. I can also run Stable Diffusion XL in reasonable time frames on an iPad Pro . The current gen Mac book Pro can perform almost as well a…

I feel like there's going to be a lot of movement towards the CPU with AI compute, and Apple's processors show the possibilities. GPUs happened to have a lot of throughput lying around so they got put to work, but already the importance of having lots of memory to hold huge models even just for inference is clear. I also think the future AI will have a lot more going in 'conventional' compute rather than just large a…

> CPUs will increasingly gain specialist hardware to accelerate AI workloads

Maybe, but then you're describing a coprocessor instead of the CPU. The CPU portion of the M1 SOC should be simpler than Apple's Intel processors, considering they don't support the wide bevvy of AVX/SSE instructions in-hardware anymore. The goal of the ARM transition is to keep the CPU side as simple as possible to optimize for power.

Personally I think we're going to see more GPU-style accelerators in the future. People want high-throughput SIMD units, ideally with a good programming framework a-la CUDA to tie it together. It makes very little sense to design dedicated inferencing hardware when a perfectly usable and powerful GPU exists on most phones. It's practically redundant to try anything else.

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