Apple bets cheaper AI will woo small developers (techcrunch.com)

Small developers: "Your $99/year tithe has cost me thousands of dollars to provide basic support for your ecosystem."

Apple: "Did somebody say 'we want cheaper AI'?"

Reading the title I had a very different notion of what to expect. The article has something completely different. I was hoping this would be something for indie app devs.

Cheaper isn't as much of a problem as functional.

>Apple is hoping to draw in newer developers with lower AI infrastructure costs

Good luck, but define "cheaper" ? If you have to pay, no individual will pay, just corporations.

What is the target to write for is the key aspect here. Not sure there is enough on the phone for developers to create new experiences. I fear all of them are going to try to automate everything on the phone for the user. Not sure what value that provides. May be I am overly skeptical , let’s see

Is this more scraping at the bottom of the barrel?

I get it. So many tech companies built their platforms around people submitting their work for sale. Now that things have cooled down they're desperate. This is exactly like what happened to the music and movie industries.

If they want to make money they must take bigger creative risks. AI is the exact opposite of that because it's trained on what's already been done.

I'm 5'7" thank you very much. That's above average in some regions.

but these "free" tokens take up an end user's daily free quota, after which a user needs to pay. ?

I haven’t been able to find a cost for larger developers. Is that published yet?

Their presentations talked about how it was based on the user’s quota, with higher quotas for iCloud+ subscribers.

Wait, Apple is charging infrastructure fees? Since when, or are they just introducing new fees for those with over 2 million first-time downloads?

the small developers eager to pay the Apple tax! I wonder what the theoretical size of this set is.

Can't wait to try it. Made a small log app for my IBS which allows free text input and uses LLM to create JSON. If that could be done on device with a foundation model, it would be awesome. (and also completely bomb my income model)

I think Apple should do niche AI as in all these companies run LLM on their infrastructure and Apple should focus on running light LLMs on their devices which are capable of doing so.

This means it would be cheap for the end user and they could sell their "privacy" by saying that the user's communication never leaves their devices

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