Comment by riffraff
6 hours ago
I am not sure it's correct to lump apple and Mistral's strategies together. Apple's business is selling hardware/services and their stores, but Mistral's business is AI.
Apple's strategy seems to be "wait till real business shakes out" but Mistral's strategy seems to be "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights".
The other part of Apple's strategy is "lets not waste money doing all that expensive research - lets just pay them for the finished result and save money".
Apple is probably also waiting for increased RAM supply to start making high-quality local inference a viable mainstream option.
Well the only place they were ever able to compete with are open models, which is by definition completely unprofitable (unless they also want to compete with Vast or Openrouter as hosting for their models or something), so that sort of makes sense from the business side of things?