Comment by SaltyBackendGuy
16 hours ago
Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
16 hours ago
Maybe a bit of hindsight bias / the outside view here, but I feel like they're completely asleep if they didn't anticipate strong demand for this specific use case.
I think a reasonable story could have been told that goes like this: local models aren’t as good as frontier models with a $20/month subscription, and the hardware costs a lot. So only a few enthusiasts will buy Apple machines for this purpose.
This story turned out to be false but I think smart, reasonable people a couple years ago could have believed it with conviction. It doesn’t really seem like “completely asleep” to me.
They were investing in ANE and Metal before everyone in consumer. Hardly asleep. They just underestimated the market size, as pretty much everyone did.
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I don’t understand how that’s possible. They should have had a better idea of what was happening in the memory markets than pretty much any other entity.
Their universal RAM strategy is so obviously helpful for AI. (1) GPU/NPU <--> CPU RAM copies eliminated. (2) All (most) RAM available for GPU/Neural, when local models are typically kneecapped by limited GPU RAM sizes vs. the much larger RAM options for M/Max/Pro/Ultras.
They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1.
Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's = 2TB RAM. Perfect for a large Mixture-of-Experts model.
It would be very strange if they didn't notice their product line had landed in a new sweet spot.
I am curious about the corporate disconnect from the frontline to the generals.
While the company I am in is embracing AI the disconnect and delay between what is available and possible versus what is approved and permitted is a three month window. The State employees I speak to are just now getting around to writing their usage policies for internal AI usage.
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FWIW, the reported reason for OpenAI buying Macs has nothing to do with the memory by the sounds of it. Every single outlet I can find reporting on this seems to repeat that the intended use case is for agentic workloads and generating training data for reinforcement learning. They don't appear to be doing inference nor any sort of training AFAICT.
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Tim Cook has been touted as the greatest supply chain logistics person on the planet and revolutionizing Apple's product delivery, securing exclusive contracts years in advance, etc., etc.
But "oops, we missed that people are interested in AI work on our machines" seems like a really fucking big myopia. But then again, Tim's off to retire on a bed made of cash this week, so...