Comment by JKCalhoun
6 hours ago
Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
I dont see it as a contradiction. Apple knows its core competencies and has the cash to back to any initiative worth pursuing through acquisition and/or hiring. Cook was a savant at vertically integrating supply the supply chain and horizontally integrating the entire ecosystem. This led to multiple innovations where Apple is the de facto standard for quality.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.
> I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user
Aren't the notification summaries just that? When they came out there were lots of examples of their horrifying results (summarizing Messages threads to sound like family members died etc)
I suspect they're already doing that for text autocomplete, which has degraded really badly over the last couple of years.
An older Stratechery article discusses the black-box point: https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/
Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.
Cool article! I never saw that one, even though I do read that blog.
I'd argue that it was from 2018, and it's a different world today. Since then, Microsoft has made a pretty extreme pivot towards the "do things for you" camp and they seem to have become absolutely convinced that "AI" was vaguely the thing they wanted to do for you.
I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.
Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.