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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

#91
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Nadella seems to have incomparably more vision...

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#92
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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?")

I took that to mean the tech under LLMs.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#93
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Nadella seems to have incomparably more vision...

Different character of person though. Nadella was engineering, former Sun Microsystems, he understands cloud, having led initiatives within Microsoft in that area. He also opened the door to open source that Microsoft had shuttered for so long.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#94

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.

I don’t know if Tim Cook has actually tried Siri day-to-day like most typical users who get frustrated. Half the time I ask siri to convert units of measure, it pulls up a web search? We’re not asking for siri to have LLM abilities to compose sonnets. Interestingly, does anyone remember when siri would use WolframAlpha for answers? Perhaps that’s the company Apple should buy not OpenAI.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#95
post #87
post #47

Tim Cook is a "Keep things ticking along" CEO, not a "Change course to a new destination" CEO. Initiatives like this will probably require different leadership to succeed.

Tim Cook is the guy you hire to squeeze more money from your existing customer base. He is not the guy you hire to create new cool things.

I both don't disagree with this really, but also, as an ops person, yes it is crazy hard building some of the most micro miniature systems on the planet and having someone who can see to the details of production is a pretty vital skill.

Still not a customer facing / product development role. At the same time though, again, so much of what makes Apple's products so good is that they have been amazing at product having to work with manufacturing to push the bounds of what is possible. Apple Vision for example taps this intersection: part of the product very much was figuring out physically what it was you could build.

(Something about the past year has really really shifted my perspective, enhanced the already huge respect I have for people making physical things.)

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#96
post #34

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

They announced this at wwdc this year in “Foundation Models”. Developers have access to an on-device llm (not sure how good it is yet).

Yeah but they're just too small to do anything useful with yet. Like we're in this weird state where you can't easily sell usage based pricing through appstore payments (and customers don't really understand usage anyways). So you need to sell access to an agent via a subscription, but your costs are 90% usage based so it's hard to price. If appstore developers could use a quota of access tokens from a users apple intelligence subscription we could offer AI agents for $3-5/mo and they would be actually usable! But if you need to pay for inference costs it has to be $10-20/mo. It's just a lame experience and makes the web the place to build agents even though they'd be more useful on mobile devices.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#97

I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.

I mean, they’ve released a framework to access the on device model https://developer.apple.com/documentation/FoundationModels

They're just too small though, maybe in the future you will be able to run a larger model on device or smaller models will become more finetuneable to be actually useful, but the current slate are pointless.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#98
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

Isn't "Private Compute Cloud" just a marketing term with some restrict sec architecture? The real personal assistant LLM would mean to have the realtime data available in hot memory (to make sure to give instant responses).

Audio, video, screen recordings, etc. from a single customer could be something between 1 and 10 GByte per day on average. After training you might get something like 3 MByte in additional model size per day. Even with 1 billion active users you would need to store additional data with 1 billion GByte (again on hot storage, like expensive GPU memory). The total amount of the memory of GPUs sold by NVIDIA is not even close to 400mio GByte (NVIDIA 3.8mio data center GPUs in 2023).

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall

The difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR. Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.

The Metaverse was a waste of billions of dollars to develop a product that nobody wanted. In no world was that a smart business move, or one that should be emulated. Doing nothing is better than flushing money down the toilet.

Re: Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts

#100

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…

My bad, I meant LLMs
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