Comment by apurvak

1 month ago

I wonder why Apple stayed absent from signing this?

I think if anyone at Apple signs a plea that has the word 'open' in it they spontaneously combust into flames

This would support the hypothesis that they are incentivized as compute providers and not simply because they're losing the frontier llm race

If it doesn't involve a walled garden subject to Apple's domination and control, it's not an Apple product.

Apple voted long time ago not to participate their contribution was giving OpenAI nothing and giving Google a $1 billion refund on the default search position money.

Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.

  • I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.

Apple is allergic to industry-spanning consortiums.

  • Apples allergy goes back to Motorola saying no, IBM saying no, Intel saying no, which led to buying Pa Semi, Intrinsity, and Anobit which in turn led to the birth of Apple Silicon with in house Soc’s.

    Waiting for the crowd means no vertical computing, no gorilla glass, multiple, ecosystems, Tandem OLED or thunderbolt five releases to a wide audience before most of the competition.

    • Apple is a trillion-dollar business, you can't blame their participation on Motorola. They can perfectly well hold down a consortium alone, we've seen it happen before.

      Features like Corning Gorilla Glass, tandem OLED and "vertical computing" should have been cut in favor of a GPGPU redesign. Apple Silicon is now dead-last in the GPGPU architecture race, in the middle of a $4 trillion CUDA market. Nothing that you listed is a $4 trillion feature, Apple absolutely should have put aside their pride and helped Khronos kill CUDA.