Sure. Haswell CPUs from 2014 are "there" for inference if they have AVX support and 8gb of RAM. Inferencing isn't the problem though, not on M1 or Macbooks from

Sure. Haswell CPUs from 2014 are "there" for inference if they have AVX support and 8gb of RAM. Inferencing isn't the problem though, not on M1 or Macbooks from 2016. Scaling a desirable (and hopefully open) GPGPU programming interface is. This is bottlenecked by both hardware and software decisions Apple has made, making a "home grown" competitive model much more unlikely in my eyes. I agree that there is an incentive to put AI models on your OS. I just don't think Apple can own the whole stack if they want to play ball right now.