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.
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).
Google AI summaries isn't a chatbot exactly, but probably has been successful in staving off migration to chatgpt search, at least once it improved a lot.
- 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 immediately run to improve the image. More models are used when manually editing images.
- After you save the photo ML models run to analyze and index the photo so it's easily searchable later. That's why you can search for "golden retriever" and get actual results.
- When you speak at your device (for example, to dictate a text message) there's a ML model that transcribes that into text. Likewise, when you're hands-free and want to hear an incoming text message, an ML model converts it to audio. All on-device and available offline at that.
Or are we playing that stupid game where "AI === LLM"?
It looks like the parent was asking about LLMs specifically, in which case I don't think those two count. AFAIK Adobe's image-generation stuff is a diffusion model, not an LLM, and Nvidia's DLSS isn't an LLM either.
I have to admit - outside of cost and core values differences - Adobe has been an early player and often overlooked - but the company smells so bad that I guess they're a little looking for it.
> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
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.
Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen.
When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.
Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the keyboard.
I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).
There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles.
There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.)
There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs.
There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc
They didn't, that's why I explicitly wrote "or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages".
But they sure write releases like that's implied.
> iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers.
Large display existed before, "just fingers" control was... always the case, the interface was quite polished, but it existed elsewhere, etc. But if you didn't know that, reading the announcement sure sounds like it's never been done before. It's the multi touch that makes the combination novel.
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.
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
Oh good, maybe we'll get LLM-based image descriptions in VoiceOver (Apple screen reader) next year. Meanwhile Google has had them for a year in TalkBack now. So when my mom sends me a picture of our cat, on Android I can simply tap and hold with three fingers (that's the gesture I've set for describe focused item), and in about 5 seconds, a description appears. I don't have to share to another app and wait for that or anything.
I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away.
The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option
To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control.
I haven't seen anything out of Apple suggesting that Apple's leaders understand that a plan of the first kind or the second kind is necessary.
Most people who have written about the topic in detail put Anthropic as the least bad option because out of all the groups with competitive offerings, their leadership has written in the most detail about the need for a plan and about their particular (completely inadequate IMHO) plan.
I myself put Google as the least bad option -- the slightly less awful option, to be precise -- with large uncertainty because Google wasn't pushing capabilities hard till OpenAI and Anthropic put it in a situation in which it either had to start pushing hard or risk falling so far behind it wouldn't be able to catch up. Consequently, I use Gemini as my LLM service. In particular, Google risked finding itself in a situation in which it cannot create a competitive offering because it doesn't have access to enough data collected from users of LLMs and generative AIs and cannot get enough data because it cannot attract users. While it was the leading lab, Google was proceeding slowly and at least one industry insider claims credibly that the slowness was deliberately chosen to reduce the probability of an AI catastrophe.
I must stress that no one has an adequate plan for avoiding an AI catastrophe while continuing to push capabilities, and IMHO no one is likely to devise one in time, so would be great if no one did any more frontier AI research at all till humanity itself becomes more cognitively capable.
It is pissing in the wind, but at least I'm not contributing to the catastrophic outcome by cooperating or doing business with Apple.
It's not my fault that the reality in which humanity find itself turned out to be more dangerous than almost anyone suspected. My only moral obligation is to do what I can to make the future turn out okay even though what I can do is very very little.
> because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.
I think you're focusing on the wrong things. AI can be used in harmful ways, but not because they're outsmarting human beings despite all the cult-like hype. In fact, they don't need to be actually competent for the rich to take advantage of the tech in destructive ways. They just need to convince the public that they're competent enough so that they have an excuse to cut jobs. Even if AI does a poorer job, it won't matter if consumers don't have alternatives, which is unfortunately the case in many situations. We face a much bigger threat of data breaches from vibe coded apps than conscious robots manipulating humans through the Matrix.
Just look at Google support. It's a bunch of mindless robots that can kick you out of their platform on a whim. Their "dispute process" is another robot that passive-aggressively ragebaits you. [1][2] They're incompetent, yet it helps one of the richest companies in the world save money.
Also, let's not forget Google's AI flagged multiple desperate parents sharing medical pics of their kids to their doctors. Only when the media contacted them did a human being come out, only to falsely accuse the parents of being pedos. [3] People were harmed, and it's not because of competency.
Another greater concern is the ability of LLMs to mass-produce spam or troll content with minimal effort. It's a major threat to democracies all around the globe, and it turns out we don't need a superintelligence for demagogues to misuse it and cause harm.
There are more real concerns regarding AI other than the perpetually "just around the corner" superintelligence. What we need is a push for stronger regulatory protection for workers, consumers, and constituents. Not boycotting Macbooks because of AI.
They need to fix bugs first. For fucks sake, predictive text on the iOS keyboard regularly predicts non-grammatical words, and dictation is terrible. It’s ridiculous that AI is good enough to write sonnets and coherent code, yet Apple can’t even do autocomplete. Whisper has been available for forever, yet it’s still painful to enter text on iOS without a third party app.
Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.
It’s bizarre to me that this headline isn’t from years ago. I think Apple’s conservative/cautious approach to slow, methodical, incremental change may now pu them in a game of catch up.
Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.
Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money.
They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity???
They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
> "They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?"
This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP).
I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the truth.
In reality a LLM presented with a vast array of tools has extremely poor reliability, so if you want a thing that can order delivery and remember your shopping list and remind you of your flight and play music you're radically exceeding the capabilities of current models. There's a reason successful (anything that isn't demoware/vaporware) uses of agentic LLMs tend to narrow-domain use cases.
There's a reason Google hasn't done it either, and indeed nor has anyone else: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have a general purpose assistant (defined as being able to execute an indefinite number of arbitrary tools to do things for you, as opposed to merely converse with you).
> They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
This does seem like an embarrassing fail, but even Google has not completed replacing Assistant with Gemini. There have also been lost functionality (maybe temporary) in the process.
they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.
They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that.
Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
> 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 good sign.
This is what Apple would say, but it’s not the same. To activate the shortcut I have to unlock the phone whereas Siri works in any situation.
The friction of one button press to 3-4 interactions is significant enough to make it not worth the action button, especially since holding the power button is supposed to do the same thing.
My prediction: Always on video/ audio recording in wearable form factor (probably glasses).
This seems "creepy" now, but people thought that about Google "reading" all your email too. The benefits of an ever present and aware assistant are just to great to ignore.
Apple's angle is that they are well liked and trusted (much more so than Facebook which people already think is eavesdropping on them to show ads) and will do all processing on device.
https://archive.is/iBtcQ
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]
Inference is getting cheaper by the minute, because hardware is getting cheaper and also because smarter ideas like latent attention are spreading.
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).
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What other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products?
To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.
Google AI summaries isn't a chatbot exactly, but probably has been successful in staving off migration to chatgpt search, at least once it improved a lot.
Are you implying Apple integrated AI successfully? How do you use AI in Apple products?
Does the amazing OCR in the macOS Preview app count? As someone who sometimes gets tracebacks sent to as screenshots, I'm really happy about it.
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- 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 immediately run to improve the image. More models are used when manually editing images.
- After you save the photo ML models run to analyze and index the photo so it's easily searchable later. That's why you can search for "golden retriever" and get actual results.
- When you speak at your device (for example, to dictate a text message) there's a ML model that transcribes that into text. Likewise, when you're hands-free and want to hear an incoming text message, an ML model converts it to audio. All on-device and available offline at that.
Or are we playing that stupid game where "AI === LLM"?
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No Im not implying that. I toggled Apple Intelligence to off the first day.
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The “proof read” feature in macOS Mail is very nice.
Adobe
Nvidia
It looks like the parent was asking about LLMs specifically, in which case I don't think those two count. AFAIK Adobe's image-generation stuff is a diffusion model, not an LLM, and Nvidia's DLSS isn't an LLM either.
I have to admit - outside of cost and core values differences - Adobe has been an early player and often overlooked - but the company smells so bad that I guess they're a little looking for it.
Aren’t LLMs distinct from image generation and manipulation models?
Serious question: Did Apple employees need rallying?
Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was.
If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
> current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, my understanding was that they actually are barred from doing just that
Where do you think Mark Gurman's story came from?
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From the reports from Bloomberg etc, yes, it does sound like some Apple AI employees may need rallying.
Though it sounds like what they actually got was fairly in-substantive statements without a clearly articulated AI strategy.
Doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a promising AI strategy though, if so, it wasn't communicated in this Pep Talk: so what was the point?
Perhaps to look like they are doing something? Are empty words better than no words at all?
> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
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.
Yes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen.
When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form.
Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the keyboard.
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> 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.
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True. But in this case Apple isn't only a bit late but completely lost with AI - Efforts driven towards AR for years absolutely killed their game.
I've heard the phrase "through Apple new technologies achieve their final form", possibly not official Apple but one of the Apple choir bloggers (Gruber?).
There were smartphones before iPhone, now all smartphones are black featureless rectangles. There were printers before LaserWriter, then for 20 years all printers became this. (And later disappeared.) There were wireless heaphones before Airpods, now the difference is in the shape of the stubs. There were laptops before the Macbook Air... etc
Can you source the apple PR claiming they invented the mp3 player or the smartphone?
I recall marketing comparing iPhones to blackberries. They even had iTunes running on Motorola phone
https://www.makeuseof.com/itunes-phone-before-the-iphone-exp...
Nobody claimed Apple was the first at this. They were just the best, eventually. But it’s been 20 years
They didn't, that's why I explicitly wrote "or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages".
But they sure write releases like that's implied.
> iPhone introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control iPhone with just their fingers.
Large display existed before, "just fingers" control was... always the case, the interface was quite polished, but it existed elsewhere, etc. But if you didn't know that, reading the announcement sure sounds like it's never been done before. It's the multi touch that makes the combination novel.
It's pretty on brand for Apple, I'm surprised they hadn't pushed this narrative harder earlier.
There were smartphones before the iPhone. Consider the IPAQ and Windows Mobile 6.0.
And of course plenty of MP3 players before iPod.
And what exactly in your iPhone announcement quote was untrue?
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.
Chief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
Apple has a ton of problems, but your comments don't address them (primarily the perceived decline in software quality and app store developer gouging).
While cool is subjective, what new, mass-market products should they create? Which product market should they "re-invent"? I wish they'd buy Sonos and fix that shit show, but that's not a profitable market to enter.
Barring the price jump around the iPhone 7, their smartphones have stayed about the same price. [1]
Over half of all smartphone repairs are battery replacements, which implies people don't take care of their batteries or are keeping their phones long enough to wear the battery down normally. [2] Additionally, Apple ranks very well in repairability. [3] They also support their phone's software longer on older devices than the competition.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-price-history-322149... [2] https://www.businessresearchinsights.com/market-reports/smar... [3] https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit...
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Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
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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.
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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.
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.
Text to speech doesn’t work correctly either. It often highlights different words than what is currently spoken.
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.
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.
The Apple Car fiasco happened on his watch too.
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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.
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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.)
>not a "Change course to a new destination" CEO.
Based on what exactly? He led the overhaul of a massive amount of Apple under his tenure.
Oh good, maybe we'll get LLM-based image descriptions in VoiceOver (Apple screen reader) next year. Meanwhile Google has had them for a year in TalkBack now. So when my mom sends me a picture of our cat, on Android I can simply tap and hold with three fingers (that's the gesture I've set for describe focused item), and in about 5 seconds, a description appears. I don't have to share to another app and wait for that or anything.
I thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research.
I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.
Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away.
The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option
To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control.
I haven't seen anything out of Apple suggesting that Apple's leaders understand that a plan of the first kind or the second kind is necessary.
Most people who have written about the topic in detail put Anthropic as the least bad option because out of all the groups with competitive offerings, their leadership has written in the most detail about the need for a plan and about their particular (completely inadequate IMHO) plan.
I myself put Google as the least bad option -- the slightly less awful option, to be precise -- with large uncertainty because Google wasn't pushing capabilities hard till OpenAI and Anthropic put it in a situation in which it either had to start pushing hard or risk falling so far behind it wouldn't be able to catch up. Consequently, I use Gemini as my LLM service. In particular, Google risked finding itself in a situation in which it cannot create a competitive offering because it doesn't have access to enough data collected from users of LLMs and generative AIs and cannot get enough data because it cannot attract users. While it was the leading lab, Google was proceeding slowly and at least one industry insider claims credibly that the slowness was deliberately chosen to reduce the probability of an AI catastrophe.
I must stress that no one has an adequate plan for avoiding an AI catastrophe while continuing to push capabilities, and IMHO no one is likely to devise one in time, so would be great if no one did any more frontier AI research at all till humanity itself becomes more cognitively capable.
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Your phone is probably an Android or iPhone, it's funding AI research with your hard-earned money! Better smash it with a rock and eat the pieces.
I've never owned an Android phone or an iPhone.
You might enjoy the Aussie saying “pissing into the wind”.
It is pissing in the wind, but at least I'm not contributing to the catastrophic outcome by cooperating or doing business with Apple.
It's not my fault that the reality in which humanity find itself turned out to be more dangerous than almost anyone suspected. My only moral obligation is to do what I can to make the future turn out okay even though what I can do is very very little.
> because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.
I think you're focusing on the wrong things. AI can be used in harmful ways, but not because they're outsmarting human beings despite all the cult-like hype. In fact, they don't need to be actually competent for the rich to take advantage of the tech in destructive ways. They just need to convince the public that they're competent enough so that they have an excuse to cut jobs. Even if AI does a poorer job, it won't matter if consumers don't have alternatives, which is unfortunately the case in many situations. We face a much bigger threat of data breaches from vibe coded apps than conscious robots manipulating humans through the Matrix.
Just look at Google support. It's a bunch of mindless robots that can kick you out of their platform on a whim. Their "dispute process" is another robot that passive-aggressively ragebaits you. [1][2] They're incompetent, yet it helps one of the richest companies in the world save money.
Also, let's not forget Google's AI flagged multiple desperate parents sharing medical pics of their kids to their doctors. Only when the media contacted them did a human being come out, only to falsely accuse the parents of being pedos. [3] People were harmed, and it's not because of competency.
Another greater concern is the ability of LLMs to mass-produce spam or troll content with minimal effort. It's a major threat to democracies all around the globe, and it turns out we don't need a superintelligence for demagogues to misuse it and cause harm.
There are more real concerns regarding AI other than the perpetually "just around the corner" superintelligence. What we need is a push for stronger regulatory protection for workers, consumers, and constituents. Not boycotting Macbooks because of AI.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805
They need to fix bugs first. For fucks sake, predictive text on the iOS keyboard regularly predicts non-grammatical words, and dictation is terrible. It’s ridiculous that AI is good enough to write sonnets and coherent code, yet Apple can’t even do autocomplete. Whisper has been available for forever, yet it’s still painful to enter text on iOS without a third party app.
Apple Intelligence? Or Artificial Intelligence?
Apple Intelligence™ is most definitely "theirs to grab"
Alibaba Intelligence.
Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.
Because of Azure, Office, Game Pass, Github,....
To detriment of Windows, XBox hardware, .NET team shooting into all directions.
It’s bizarre to me that this headline isn’t from years ago. I think Apple’s conservative/cautious approach to slow, methodical, incremental change may now pu them in a game of catch up.
Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.
Or, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.
> 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
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> "They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?"
This is actually one of the hardest frontier problems. The "general purpose" assistant is one of the singular hardest technical problems with LLMs (or any kind of NLP).
I think people are easily snowed by LLMs' apparent linguistic fluency that they impute that to capability. This cannot be further from the truth.
In reality a LLM presented with a vast array of tools has extremely poor reliability, so if you want a thing that can order delivery and remember your shopping list and remind you of your flight and play music you're radically exceeding the capabilities of current models. There's a reason successful (anything that isn't demoware/vaporware) uses of agentic LLMs tend to narrow-domain use cases.
There's a reason Google hasn't done it either, and indeed nor has anyone else: neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have a general purpose assistant (defined as being able to execute an indefinite number of arbitrary tools to do things for you, as opposed to merely converse with you).
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> They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time?
This does seem like an embarrassing fail, but even Google has not completed replacing Assistant with Gemini. There have also been lost functionality (maybe temporary) in the process.
they are not talking about perplexity; the endless rumor mill talks about perplexity. The same that has them buying everything from Disney to Porsche to Nike for decades.
Undercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
They don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.
Isn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that.
Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
Silicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
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> 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 good sign.
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Their X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.
Don't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
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Macs are basically a dead business. The key is somehow creating the AI equivalent of an App Store or something
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Apple failed so hard, and it was so easy to succeed.
I should be able to replace Siri with any AI provider over a year ago. (Eg hold power button and immediately talk to gpt4)
How’s something so easy so hard for Apple?
It’s not hard
If Siri is a lot better than less people will use safari to google things and the $20,000,0000,0000.00 annual deal with google will be compromised
iPhone sales are up year over year
Mac sales on fire
Why should they be scrambling? Everything is more than fine, no one cares
You can do it today with the action button and various apps (including OpenAI). And I believe you could do it a year ago as well.
This is what Apple would say, but it’s not the same. To activate the shortcut I have to unlock the phone whereas Siri works in any situation.
The friction of one button press to 3-4 interactions is significant enough to make it not worth the action button, especially since holding the power button is supposed to do the same thing.
Maybe it’s not so easy?
My prediction: Always on video/ audio recording in wearable form factor (probably glasses).
This seems "creepy" now, but people thought that about Google "reading" all your email too. The benefits of an ever present and aware assistant are just to great to ignore.
Apple's angle is that they are well liked and trusted (much more so than Facebook which people already think is eavesdropping on them to show ads) and will do all processing on device.
Apple could easily acquire Mistral and become competitive fast. And I hope they do. The more AI the better.
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Very sad results; the end of America's once greatest company?
On Thursday, Apple reported yet another record financial quarter.
That doesn't seem to help Apple achieve AGI
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