As a retired developer, I’ve long perceived AI as a wonderful tool but not the end of civilization as we know it. This guy has the logic to call Microsoft’s BS that I don’t have. Along the way he dispels the mystery behind the hype.
https://youtu.be/31OyQa_3gZU?si=UIIa-62mLlvdnm6h
I totally agree with his post. I was really happy when Apple made the Gemini announcement after I took a moment to reflect.
There are some things that the past has told us about Apple.
They are not an Enterprise company. Thus it is beyond their core competency to invest in AI at the level of other companies that are reliant upon Enterprise sales. Apple didn’t even want to keep the xsere and xraid product lines going and they could have dogfooded those products.
Because Apple’s focus is on the consumers they can scale back their AI into a scope of what features satiate consumer demand and that should allow them to shrink the foundation models to something that will operate comfortably on future Apple silicon.
AI demand is not grassroots. People are being being told AI a big deal but there is a decided lack of real world examples of AI making consumer life better. Even corporations are finding out that AI isn’t the uplift that they’ve been told it would be. Consumers realize they’re being sold a bill of goods.
The creative industry is not going to go down with a fight. I expect more advertising around “It’s not AI it’s theft” that are cropping up. In a couple of years i’m going to build a PC with my son because it’s what he wants and I had always just assumed I’d run Windows but looking at how far Linux has come with gaming focused distros. I get to be Microsoft free.
Apple is winning the AI race because they created a superior chip for consumer devices? And they started designing it almost a decade before Google came up with the foundational technology of today’s AI?
I agree. I don’t think consumers will continue to buy more powerful, more expensive, devices just so their digital assistant can order them an Uber. And corporations are not likely to start allowing their data to be downloaded and run “on-device”.
I think we all might be surprised at what’s coming down the road.
Sadly, I think Microsoft’s BS is likely to prevail.
It’s possible. I wonder how bad Windows 11 really is? Will that help or hurt their AI ambitions?
I’ve not used Windows in the last few years. But from what I’ve read and learned from current users, most of the complaints are due to the newer hardware requirements. And from things that Microsoft could fix/change but haven’t. Like making users log in with a Windows account, always pushing their Edge Browser, etc. and not fixing some unpopular item in the UI.
I used to manage windows servers & PCs, and they were as secure and reliable as Macs. IMO
2 weeks ago I linked to this Hacker News comment in my notes on the ‘AI bubble’.
Apple picks Gemini to power Siri:
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don’t want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium “last mile” delivery network for someone else’s intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
It’s a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I’m oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google’s brain, wrapped in Apple’s privacy theater.
I’m not a qualified head in this space. I’ve heard of, but never investigated reports about Sam Altman purchasing—if you let the informal reporters tell it like they’d like to—all the silicon chips in existence that Apple doesn’t have to call dibs on because they’ve got their own.
Before news about the Apple/Google deal broke I still expected Apple to team with OpenAI. This is what I wrote to myself 30 minutes before finding out that either I made up the tentative pairing or it dissolved unbeknownst (strikeouts were added 30 minutes after the discovery):
I expect Meta and Apple to head in other directions and either appropriate open models or contract software from the above companies.
I think Apple is already doing that with OpenAI although they really should be looking at Anthropic (better culture fit IMO).
And in public I wondered:
…what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
The last part about CarPlay vs. Hey Google was me apparently exaggerating this MPU comment that I remembered as a representation of the opinion of “a lot of Apple fans”. Sorry.
In a way I figure that Anthropic is a ‘competitor’ to Apple as well. More so than OpenAI. And thinking about it I can’t tell what OpenAI can compete with Apple for. Prior to finding out about the Apple/Google announcement I found out about Cowork, which is the exact sort of thing that I feel like Apple should be developing on their own. Either way, Anthropic and OpenAI both represent ‘new money’ and fresh faces that may not be viewed as battle tested in the court of congress the way a CEO like Sundar Pichai is. Shoot. Even Zuck. To boot, I’m not sure who Anthropic’s CEO is and whether he has the profile of his colleagues. I’m reminded of a feature from maybe a year ago on Sam Altman that described him eating a salad in a limousine or something like that. A real schmooze of a cover. Has Anthropic got one of those for their brass?
Again, my own private thoughts:
You want to work with people who can sound competent at a congressional hearing…and yield to Trump without [you] worrying about actually [them] being a “True Believer” in him…
Which leads me to the politics that saturate the tech industry and AI in particular. I don’t think any of the CEOs of the five named companies are Trumpets. By the way when did “Trumpism” become the new word to refer to Trump supporters? Is “MAGA” reserved for the die-hards and “Trumpism” or “Trumpist” kept for people who just show up at his wife’s shindigs and kiss the ring with their own fingers crossed? Autocorrect changed “Trumpists” to “Trumpets”. But to play one you gotta pucker real strong, you know…
Apple is playing the long game. They are a shrewd business with remarkable PR; so much so that even the things that may make you hate them actually speaks to their shrewdness, as much as the things that may have made you love them in the past speaks to the same trait.
It’s likely that on all fronts they’re better equipped to weather the economic and political storm as the threat levels for democracy and industrial autonomy trepidatiously shift from yellow to orange where we realistically hope they rest at. Or else everyone’s in trouble.
AI is shaky. Governments are shaky. The aftermath of Tahoe is redeemable and although a lot of foreign governments and citizens appear to be determined to migrate from US providers like Google I imagine that many of them, at least in private, will be slow to part ways with the assortment of Apple products they own that may be leveraging Google’s own work under the hood.
You make some good points. I was questioning why anyone would claim “. . . Apple is quietly winning the AI race”.
IMO, in the first hand of consumer “AI poker” Apple bluffed and lost. I still don’t understand how that happened. Didn’t any senior manager ask for a demonstration before they filmed WWDC 2024?
I do that everyday. The only way I am able to use an iPad as my primary computer is to run Google Workspace in a browser, or use one of Google’s apps. In a way, my iPad is like a Chromebook with dedicated apps for banking, etc. That will never need a more powerful processor or additional storage.
At this point Apple’s competition isn’t OpenAI, or Anthropic, or any other AI company, IMO. That could change but right now none of them have any hardware running AI.
Apple’s competition is still Samsung and every other Android maker. And they are doing very well in that game.
When I think of Microsoft and AI, I remember Clippy.