Well they tried and they failed. In that case maybe the smartest move is not to play. Looks like the technology is largely turning into a commodity in the long run anyways. So sitting this out and letting others make the mistakes first might not be the worst of all ideas.
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.
> Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
I would rather say their products didn’t just loose in value for not getting an improvement there. Everyone agrees that Siri sucks, but I’m pretty sure they tried to replace it with a natural language version built from the ground up, and realised it just didn’t work out yet: yes, they have a bad, but at least kinda-working voice assistant with lots of integrations into other apps. But replacing that with something that promises to do stuff and then does nothing, takes long to respond, and has less integrations due to the lack of keywords would have been a bad idea if the technology wasn’t there yet.
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.
Well they tried and they failed. In that case maybe the smartest move is not to play. Looks like the technology is largely turning into a commodity in the long run anyways. So sitting this out and letting others make the mistakes first might not be the worst of all ideas.
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.
> Their customers clearly don’t care about AI or Siri’s lacklustre performance.
I would rather say their products didn’t just loose in value for not getting an improvement there. Everyone agrees that Siri sucks, but I’m pretty sure they tried to replace it with a natural language version built from the ground up, and realised it just didn’t work out yet: yes, they have a bad, but at least kinda-working voice assistant with lots of integrations into other apps. But replacing that with something that promises to do stuff and then does nothing, takes long to respond, and has less integrations due to the lack of keywords would have been a bad idea if the technology wasn’t there yet.
Honestly, what it seems like is financial discipline.
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.
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.