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Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

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Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#71

Post by stockresearcher »

Fade_Dance wrote: post #25
stockresearcher wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? Doesn't somebody (not named Nvidia) need to make a serious profit on AI before we can say that Tim Cook failed? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't anywhere close. Meta? Google? The only one I can think of might be Microsoft but they still refuse to break out AI revenue and expenses in the earnings reports. That isn't a g…

I certainly don't think that profit would be required. Many of the massive tech companies that exist today went through long periods of time were they focused on growth and brand no profits for many years even post IPO. I won't pretend to know exactly how the AI landscape will look in the future, but at this point it's pretty clear that there's going to be massive revenue going to the sector, and Moore's law will con…

Yeah, I think we're on the same page on this one.

"failed to skate where the puck was headed" assumes that we know where the puck is going to be. We don't.

Everyone is skating towards that same spot while Apple is over by the blue line practicing their swizzles. They sure look like they're doomed. But large groups of people have skated to the "wrong spot" thousands of times. That's the entire point that Gretzky was making with his quote. He's not big enough, strong enough, fast enough to get in that scrum. They're all fighting it out and the puck slides away. To him. All alone.

Maybe that is Apple, maybe it's not. I mean, they're still learning to skate while everyone else is playing hockey.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#72

Post by qrios »

Current "good enough" models like Mistral Small require GPUs like the RTX 6000 to achieve user-friendly response times. The model quality is good enough, especially for narrow-scope tasks like summarization and classification. If Moore's Law holds for a few more years, a mobile device will be able to run it on-device in around 8 years (Apple's A11: 410 GFLOPS vs. RTX 6000: 16 TFLOPS [1]).

This is under the assumption that we don't see any significant optimization in the meantime. Looking back over the last eight years, the probability of no progress on the software side is near zero.

For a breakthrough in the consumer market, running LLM on-device with today's capabilities requires solving one key topic: "JIT learning" [2]. We can see some progress here [3, 4]. Perhaps the transformer architecture is not the best for this requirement, but it is hard to argue that it is impossible for Generative AI.

Due to today's technical limitations, we don't have real personal assistants. This could be the Mac for Apple in the AI era.

[1] https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/apple-a11-bionic-gpu-...

[2] Increasing context size is not a valid option for my scenario as it also increases the computation demand linear.

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06668

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466

[Edit: decimal separator mess]

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#73

Post by xdennis »

potatolicious wrote: post #65
koakuma-chan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying Apple integrated AI successfully? How do you use AI in Apple products?

- If you get into a car crash with your iPhone a ML model detects this and automatically calls emergency services. - If you are wearing an Apple Watch a ML model is constantly analyzing your heart rhythm and will alert you to (some types of) irregularities. It's so computationally efficient it can literally do this in the background all day long. - When you take any picture on any iPhone a whole array of ML models im…

> Or are we playing that stupid game where "AI === LLM"?

Well, the original question was specifically about LLMs. ("What other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products?")

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#74

Post by gabriel666smith »

financltravsty wrote: post #63
nunez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misinformed take IMO. M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches. Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet? Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years. Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPh…

You talk like a nerd. Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura. Apple is not cool.

Agree. There are probably more than a million tiny contextual data points that make a person look at something (whether it’s a tech product or a musician) and go: “cool, man.”

But those millions of data points can (rarely, briefly,) coalesce around a product or company, even though that’s mostly out of the control of those building the product or company.

EG if you asked someone in 1965 if a Jaguar E-Type was cool, or someone in 2000s London whether the Fruityloops DAW was cool, they’d say “yeah”.

I’m mostly agreeing, and it’s a super minor point, but tech specs are part of the unknowable, constantly-shifting constellation of symbols that produce “cool”, and there isn’t a reason an Apple product couldn’t, in the future, align the stars. They did before! The white iPod earbud wire did, briefly, signify cool.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#75

Post by baal80spam »

financltravsty wrote: post #63
nunez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misinformed take IMO. M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches. Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet? Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years. Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPh…

You talk like a nerd. Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura. Apple is not cool.

> Apple is not cool.

Says who, exactly? It is very cool for most.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#76

Post by spacedcowboy »

politelemon wrote: post #56
troad wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually very consistent for Apple. Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something, but have always taken the line that they're the first to execute it well . Hence their fondness for words like 'reimagine', 'revolutionise', etc.

> Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims inventing things that have existed.

> Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims inventing things that have existed

Strongly disagree with this. Their marketing often claims reinventing things that have existed, or revolutionising them, or reimagining them, but rarely claims to be the first, ever, without qualification.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#77

Post by mingus88 »

qrios wrote: post #72

Current "good enough" models like Mistral Small require GPUs like the RTX 6000 to achieve user-friendly response times. The model quality is good enough, especially for narrow-scope tasks like summarization and classification. If Moore's Law holds for a few more years, a mobile device will be able to run it on-device in around 8 years (Apple's A11: 410 GFLOPS vs. RTX 6000: 16 TFLOPS [1]). This is under the assumption…

Apple’s answer to that is Private Compute Cloud

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#79

Post by reactordev »

ljlolel wrote: post #60
reactordev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Tim Cook is a finance guy - he knows the numbers and how to keep Apple profitable. What he lacks is product vision. His one opportunity (ironically, vision) fell flat.

Don’t downvote this guy! Interesting to note that he probably constantly got criticized for not having vision, so he took that literally and called the product Vision Pro. It’s the kind of mistake an LLM would make. Very Lacanian.

I wouldn’t go that far. Tim Cook doesn’t really care what people think of him, he only cares about one group of people - shareholders. It was probably marketing that came up with it. Tim is totally fine being the finance guy and the vision he sold the board was “I’ll keep Apple from imploding” which he has been very successful at.

Like Nadella, you need someone from the early years, who knows the business, to run it.

Cook lacks product vision because 1) he’s no Steve Jobs. He was hired. He didn’t create. 2) He doesn’t have an Jonny Ive to make something as boring as a computer be as sexy as an Italian vase. Or as sleek as a pencil. Or as flat as paper. Or whatever metaphors were used during the Ive years to describe his design process.

But he has been there long enough to know how it works.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#80

Post by pretext-1 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #62

I feel like Steve Jobs would have designed what real androids should be. Instead Apple can’t even manage to implement speech to text that works in safari and can’t manage to make Siri not suck.

Text to speech doesn’t work correctly either. It often highlights different words than what is currently spoken.
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