Comment by seec
3 months ago
But don't forget, "the hype is real". Apple fanboys are something else.
At this point it's not even clear that the LLMs will have much use outside of chatbots spitting questionable reality faking but it's pretty clear that the small local models are largely useless. Outside of the poor user experience the lack of large dataset make them an exercice out technical feasibility more and anything else.
Apple feeling like they have to partner with Google to replace their own "Apple Intelligence" should tell you everything you need to know about local AI but I guess believers gotta believe.
> Apple feeling like they have to partner with Google to replace their own "Apple Intelligence"
They’re not replacing Apple Intelligence; the partnership with Google is for the backend of Siri.
Yeah but this is what I mean. They are unable to produce a decent AI solution so they have to outsource. And if it was just about being limited by on device processing power, they could just switch to using their cloud infrastructure.
To me that's just dumb. They are spending money for a competitor solution just to keep control and appearances. At this point they could just forget about AI altogether and/or open their OSs to let others integrate their solutions. But Apple is way too proud to admit being wrong and we will get a half-assed solution that will both cost them money and be inferior to the competition because of their own self-imposed limitations.
They have been riding on their privacy/security narrative for a while, yet they work with governments and ads/tracking hasn't gone anywhere. And they'll have to open up the App Store golden goose at some point anyway. They should recognise when the strategy isn't working for the long run and switch it up...
But they have tried to compete with Google for maps, it is still largely inferior in many ways and they seem to be fine with that. So I think it will end up in a similar situation.
You know Google pays Apple ~$20 billion a year to be the default search engine, right? The rumored deal with Google is $1 billion, so Apple is still up $19 billion.
There's only three frontier model makers: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. So everyone that's using a frontier model behind the scenes is using one of these three.
It's likely whatever happens, it'll be running on Apple's Private Compute Cloud [1]—it won't be mined for ads, etc.
What you don't understand is on-device AI isn't going away due to using Gemini for Siri; they're two separate products. Using Gemini is the fastest way to add "world knowledge" to Siri.
[1]: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
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