Deep breath. There’s no sense in trying to outcompete Google in burning cash. They’ve got time to wait until there’s the beginning of commodification of the tech, and a large profitable market to be had.
I wish apple would provide a decent model to apple intelligence and let developers build on it. Like sure it would lose a lot of money right now, but it would mean that app developers making AI agents on the iphone could still charge modest amounts if they aren't responsible for the inference costs.
Some problems cannot be fixed with more money (unless to buy a stake , as Microsoft did with open ai). See Microsoft's endless failed efforts to compete with Google search or iPhone. Although looking at the recent stock price since 2020, MSFT stock was the winner anyway.
> there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod
That's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
My prediction: Always on video/ audio recording in wearable form factor (probably glasses).
This seems "creepy" now, but people thought that about Google "reading" all your email too. The benefits of an ever present and aware assistant are just to great to ignore.
Apple's angle is that they are well liked and trusted (much more so than Facebook which people already think is eavesdropping on them to show ads) and will do all processing on device.
Tim Cook is a "Keep things ticking along" CEO, not a "Change course to a new destination" CEO. Initiatives like this will probably require different leadership to succeed.
Current "good enough" models like Mistral Small require GPUs like the RTX 6000 to achieve user-friendly response times. The model quality is good enough, especially for narrow-scope tasks like summarization and classification.
If Moore's Law holds for a few more years, a mobile device will be able to run it on-device in around 8 years (Apple's A11: 410 GFLOPS vs. RTX 6000: 16 TFLOPS [1]).
This is under the assumption that we don't see any significant optimization in the meantime. Looking back over the last eight years, the probability of no progress on the software side is near zero.
For a breakthrough in the consumer market, running LLM on-device with today's capabilities requires solving one key topic: "JIT learning" [2]. We can see some progress here [3, 4]. Perhaps the transformer architecture is not the best for this requirement, but it is hard to argue that it is impossible for Generative AI.
Due to today's technical limitations, we don't have real personal assistants. This could be the Mac for Apple in the AI era.
I understand your sentiment, but AI is the new internet -- despite the hype it's not going away.
The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
> because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.
I think you're focusing on the wrong things. AI can be used in harmful ways, but not because they're outsmarting human beings despite all the cult-like hype. In fact, they don't need to be actually competent for the rich to take advantage of the tech in destructive ways. They just need to convince the public that they're competent enough so that they have an excuse to cut jobs. Even if AI does a poorer job, it won't matter if consumers don't have alternatives, which is unfortunately the case in many situations. We face a much bigger threat of data breaches from vibe coded apps than conscious robots manipulating humans through the Matrix.
Just look at Google support. It's a bunch of mindless robots that can kick you out of their platform on a whim. Their "dispute process" is another robot that passive-aggressively ragebaits you. [1][2] They're incompetent, yet it helps one of the richest companies in the world save money.
Also, let's not forget Google's AI flagged multiple desperate parents sharing medical pics of their kids to their doctors. Only when the media contacted them did a human being come out, only to falsely accuse the parents of being pedos. [3] People were harmed, and it's not because of competency.
Another greater concern is the ability of LLMs to mass-produce spam or troll content with minimal effort. It's a major threat to democracies all around the globe, and it turns out we don't need a superintelligence for demagogues to misuse it and cause harm.
There are more real concerns regarding AI other than the perpetually "just around the corner" superintelligence. What we need is a push for stronger regulatory protection for workers, consumers, and constituents. Not boycotting Macbooks because of AI.
They need to fix bugs first. For fucks sake, predictive text on the iOS keyboard regularly predicts non-grammatical words, and dictation is terrible. It’s ridiculous that AI is good enough to write sonnets and coherent code, yet Apple can’t even do autocomplete. Whisper has been available for forever, yet it’s still painful to enter text on iOS without a third party app.
Oh good, maybe we'll get LLM-based image descriptions in VoiceOver (Apple screen reader) next year. Meanwhile Google has had them for a year in TalkBack now. So when my mom sends me a picture of our cat, on Android I can simply tap and hold with three fingers (that's the gesture I've set for describe focused item), and in about 5 seconds, a description appears. I don't have to share to another app and wait for that or anything.
It’s bizarre to me that this headline isn’t from years ago. I think Apple’s conservative/cautious approach to slow, methodical, incremental change may now pu them in a game of catch up.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 53.3 ms ] threadThat's the biggest shift I've heard from Apple. They were either "first" or ignored the existence of competing features/products for ages. I'm really surprised by this quote.
Compare "smartphones before iPhone" to the original announcement:
> iPhone also ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones. (...) iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,
To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.
This seems "creepy" now, but people thought that about Google "reading" all your email too. The benefits of an ever present and aware assistant are just to great to ignore.
Apple's angle is that they are well liked and trusted (much more so than Facebook which people already think is eavesdropping on them to show ads) and will do all processing on device.
Also, it sounds like Cook and Federighi just repeated talking points the public has already heard, so I'm not sure what the point of this was.
If there are any current Apple employees here, maybe they can weigh in.
Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, my understanding was that they actually are barred from doing just that
Though it sounds like what they actually got was fairly in-substantive statements without a clearly articulated AI strategy.
Doesn't mean that Apple doesn't have a promising AI strategy though, if so, it wasn't communicated in this Pep Talk: so what was the point?
Perhaps to look like they are doing something? Are empty words better than no words at all?
Instead Apple can’t even manage to implement speech to text that works in safari and can’t manage to make Siri not suck.
This is under the assumption that we don't see any significant optimization in the meantime. Looking back over the last eight years, the probability of no progress on the software side is near zero.
For a breakthrough in the consumer market, running LLM on-device with today's capabilities requires solving one key topic: "JIT learning" [2]. We can see some progress here [3, 4]. Perhaps the transformer architecture is not the best for this requirement, but it is hard to argue that it is impossible for Generative AI.
Due to today's technical limitations, we don't have real personal assistants. This could be the Mac for Apple in the AI era.
[1] https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/apple-a11-bionic-gpu-...
[2] Increasing context size is not a valid option for my scenario as it also increases the computation demand linear.
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06668
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466
[Edit: decimal separator mess]
I was leaning towards buying a Mac, but now I won't because I do what (little) I can to slow down AI.
Switching to Windows would also clearly be encouraging the AI juggernaut, so I will stay with Linux.
The ability to have true personal AI agent that you would own would be quite empowering. Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option to have that happen with.
I think you're focusing on the wrong things. AI can be used in harmful ways, but not because they're outsmarting human beings despite all the cult-like hype. In fact, they don't need to be actually competent for the rich to take advantage of the tech in destructive ways. They just need to convince the public that they're competent enough so that they have an excuse to cut jobs. Even if AI does a poorer job, it won't matter if consumers don't have alternatives, which is unfortunately the case in many situations. We face a much bigger threat of data breaches from vibe coded apps than conscious robots manipulating humans through the Matrix.
Just look at Google support. It's a bunch of mindless robots that can kick you out of their platform on a whim. Their "dispute process" is another robot that passive-aggressively ragebaits you. [1][2] They're incompetent, yet it helps one of the richest companies in the world save money.
Also, let's not forget Google's AI flagged multiple desperate parents sharing medical pics of their kids to their doctors. Only when the media contacted them did a human being come out, only to falsely accuse the parents of being pedos. [3] People were harmed, and it's not because of competency.
Another greater concern is the ability of LLMs to mass-produce spam or troll content with minimal effort. It's a major threat to democracies all around the globe, and it turns out we don't need a superintelligence for demagogues to misuse it and cause harm.
There are more real concerns regarding AI other than the perpetually "just around the corner" superintelligence. What we need is a push for stronger regulatory protection for workers, consumers, and constituents. Not boycotting Macbooks because of AI.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32538805
I should be able to replace Siri with any AI provider over a year ago. (Eg hold power button and immediately talk to gpt4)
How’s something so easy so hard for Apple?
If Siri is a lot better than less people will use safari to google things and the $20,000,0000,0000.00 annual deal with google will be compromised
iPhone sales are up year over year
Mac sales on fire
Why should they be scrambling? Everything is more than fine, no one cares