I think Apple is waiting for the bubble to deflate, then do something different. And they have the ready to use user base to provide what they can make money from.
If they were taking that approach, they would have absolutely first-class integration between AI tools and user data, complete with proper isolation for security and privacy and convenient ways for users to give agents access to the right things. And they would bide their time for the right models to show up at the right price with the right privacy guarantees.
They apparently are working on and are going to release 2(!) different versions of siri. Idk, that just screams "leadership doesn't know what to do and can't make a tough decision" to me. but who knows? maybe two versions of siri is what people will want.
This whole thread is about whether the most valuable startup of all time will be able to raise enough money to see the next calendar year.
It's definitely rational to decide to pay wholesale for LLMs given:
- consumer adoption is unclear. The "killer app" for OS integration has yet to ship by any vendor.
- owning SOTA foundation models can put you into a situation where you need to spend $100B with no clear return. This money gets spent up front regardless of how much value consumers derive from the product, or if they even use it at all. This is a lot of money!
- as apple has "missed" the last couple of years of the AI craze, there has been no meaningful ill effects to their business. Beyond the tech press, nobody cares yet.
I mean, they tried. They just tried and failed. It may work out for them, though — two years ago it looked like lift-off was likely, or at least possible, so having a frontier model was existential. Today it looks like you might be able to save many billions by being a fast follower. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lift-off narrative comes back around though; we still have maybe a decade until we really understand the best business model for LLMs and their siblings.
I think you are right. Their generative AI was clearly underwhelming. They have been losing many staff from their AI team.
I’m not sure it matters though. They just had a stonking quarter. iPhone sales are surging ahead. Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
To use the parlance of this thread: "next" foundation models is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Am I doing this right?
My point is, does Apple have any useful foundation models? Last I checked they made a deal with OpenAI, no wait, now with Google.
Apple does have their own small foundation models but it's not clear they require a lot of GPUs to train.
Do you mean like OCR in photos? In that case, yes, I didn't think about that. Are there other use cases aside from speach to text in Siri?
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I think Apple is waiting for the bubble to deflate, then do something different. And they have the ready to use user base to provide what they can make money from.
If they were taking that approach, they would have absolutely first-class integration between AI tools and user data, complete with proper isolation for security and privacy and convenient ways for users to give agents access to the right things. And they would bide their time for the right models to show up at the right price with the right privacy guarantees.
I see no evidence of this happening.
They apparently are working on and are going to release 2(!) different versions of siri. Idk, that just screams "leadership doesn't know what to do and can't make a tough decision" to me. but who knows? maybe two versions of siri is what people will want.
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Apple can make more money from shorting the stock market, including their own stock, if they believe the bubble will deflate.
Apple is sitting this whole thing out. Bizarre.
This whole thread is about whether the most valuable startup of all time will be able to raise enough money to see the next calendar year.
It's definitely rational to decide to pay wholesale for LLMs given:
- consumer adoption is unclear. The "killer app" for OS integration has yet to ship by any vendor.
- owning SOTA foundation models can put you into a situation where you need to spend $100B with no clear return. This money gets spent up front regardless of how much value consumers derive from the product, or if they even use it at all. This is a lot of money!
- as apple has "missed" the last couple of years of the AI craze, there has been no meaningful ill effects to their business. Beyond the tech press, nobody cares yet.
I mean, they tried. They just tried and failed. It may work out for them, though — two years ago it looked like lift-off was likely, or at least possible, so having a frontier model was existential. Today it looks like you might be able to save many billions by being a fast follower. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lift-off narrative comes back around though; we still have maybe a decade until we really understand the best business model for LLMs and their siblings.
I think you are right. Their generative AI was clearly underwhelming. They have been losing many staff from their AI team.
I’m not sure it matters though. They just had a stonking quarter. iPhone sales are surging ahead. Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
From a technology standpoint I don’t feel Apple’s core competency is in AI model foundations
They might know something?
More like they don't know the things others do. Siri is a laughing stock.
They are in housing their AI to sell it as a secure way to AI, which 100% puts them in the lead for the foreseeable future.