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I'm surprised by the almost universally bearish opinion here so far. AI is going to change everything about how we interact with computers. A M4 with a terabyte
by modeless 3y ago
I'm surprised by the almost universally bearish opinion here so far. AI is going to change everything about how we interact with computers. A M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally. Forget Siri. You will be able to converse directly with your computer as if it was a person. Not only in text, but by voice and even video, and it will be incredibly responsive. The computer will see using the webcam and have conversations about objects you show it. It will read your screen and give you advice about what you're working on, and even perform tasks for you. It will browse the web for you, summarize content, and take actions on your behalf. It will create images of anything you describe, and compose personalized music in any style. It will render an avatar for itself and show emotions, and it will see and react to your facial expressions and gestures.
This is not speculative. Almost all of this stuff is already shown to work, and it is all improving incredibly quickly as we speak! It just needs to be assembled into an actual product, which is exactly what Apple does best. With their silicon advantage they are best positioned to ship these kinds of features, and the best part is it can all run offline locally. No data sent to servers. No privacy concerns. Zero network latency.
- lettergram 3y ago[flagged]
- er4hn 3y agoI'm not a big proponent of AI, but running code locally is far far better for privacy than giving all your data to a remote service you don't control.
- jsheard 3y ago> A M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally. Perhaps, but a 1TB RAM upgrade would probably cost about as much as a new car. This is Apple we're talking about.
- sroussey 3y agoThe original 128kb Mac was about $7,300 (today's dollars). Apple's Lisa was about $30,000 (today's dollars)
- jsheard 3y agoI don't know what the relevance of prices from 40 years ago is, but today they want +$800 just to add +64GB RAM to a machine.
- sroussey 3y agoToday, we get a much better deal.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoit wasn't long ago that 128GB was a gobsmacking number for a home user I look forward to checking the "+$1000" box for a terabyte of on-chip RAM
- Etheryte 3y agoFor context, if you get the beefiest MacBook Pro right now you'd pay an extra $1000 to upgrade from 48GB to 128GB RAM. For lower end machines you pay more for RAM, $200 per each 8GB you add on top of the 8GB baseline.
- credit_guy 3y agoBut that's if you want Apple to do that for you. What if you buy the memory separately and put it in yourself? I'm considering doing that for my own iMac, and I saw that a 32 GB memory unit is about $65, so 4 of those $260. For laptops it's probably different, but surely it's going to be less than $1000.
- jsheard 3y agoYou can't anymore, none of the Apple Silicon Macs have upgradable memory. If you have an older Intel Mac then it might be possible depending on the exact model.
- binkHN 3y ago> terabyte of RAM LOL. Have you seem the pricing of Mac memory?
- LorenDB 3y agoProbably it's like their storage. LTT determined that Apple storage is worth more than it's weight in gold (at least at the Apple prices).
- fragmede 3y agoperhaps we should change the saying to worth its weight in Apple ram.
- gutnor 3y agoAt Mac Pro pricing (128 GB = $1600) that's $12,800 Of course, I can imagine that there will be a significant discount even just considering the price of high end branded memory outside Apple. Still, Apple has showed no sign of abandoning 8GB for regular people. Even if they switch by the end of the year on their high model, they have a serious handicap in their own installed base.
- FireBeyond 3y ago> Of course, I can imagine that there will be a significant discount even just considering the price of high end branded memory outside Apple. Apple wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory for my Mac Pro (i.e. going from a base 32 to 192GB). OWC sells the same memory (same spec, same manufacturer) now for $620, though I believe I paid about $1,000. They also wanted another $3,000 for an 8TB SSD. Similarly, I was able to buy a 4xM.2 PCI card, and populate it with 4 x 2TB SSDs for under $1,500. Furthermore my PCI setup is FASTER than the Apple drive (7GBps versus 5.5).
- Rinzler89 3y agoWaiting for the EU to force PCs to ship with at least 16GB of RAM and then Apple to immediately announce how they were planning this whole time to double the starting RAM on their base machines then turn it into a 2h presentation about innovation, sustainability and thetics.
- jprete 3y agoI don't really want any of those things. Predictability and control is what I want from a computer, not to be an ersatz companion that back-seat-drives everything I do.
- ok_dad 3y ago> You will be able to converse directly with your computer as if it was a person. No thanks, I like that my computer only speaks an incredibly specific language which I can use to tell it exactly what to do, and know it’s not going to do anything else. If I wanted a PA, I would hire one.
- aeturnum 3y agoLike many, I am not overly bearish "on ai" - I am bearish on an "ai-focused laptop in late 2024." I think what you say is roughly true and maybe in six months I'll be wishing my portable computer ran AI faster, but I don't feel that way now. As you say, the full client-side experiences are still in development and, I would wager, more than six months away. Other attempts at "local AI" from less skilled hardware designers have not impressed me and, though I'm eager to see what Apple comes up with, I see no reason to get excited yet.
- modeless 3y agoI agree that the most compelling applications are more than six months away. But I hope that a computer I buy now will last a lot longer than that. I don't upgrade my computer every two years anymore like in the 90s, and I don't want to go back to that. Three or four years from now I think you'll be feeling pretty left out if your computer can't run much AI.
- fragmede 3y agoIt's relative though. I mean, how excited for an M4 without LLM capabilities are you though? Or an iPhone 16 that's basically the same as the 15 or the 14 with better specs?
- chaostheory 3y agoI agree. I just still don’t believe in Apple’s marketing in regards to AI. Past M chips were way slower than consumer Nvidia RTX chips. Their only advantage was the available memory. I’m speaking as a member of the Apple cult.
- extheat 3y agoI'm personally looking forward to it. One of the biggest advantages with running locally is cost. Yes, the upfront cost to getting your own hardware is much higher, but I'd much rather pay for something once then worry about paying a monthly bill for using someone else's infra that they may at any time decide to pull out of service or hike the price for. The "no data sent to servers" point I agree is super important for work things. I pay for and use Github Copilot for personal things but I'm not allowed to use it at work for obvious reasons. If we could remove the privacy concerns and run these models on local hardware (that people actually have) then it'd be game changing. Reading some of the other anti-AI comments is a bit odd. I guess it's going to depend on what you do for work, but as someone who writes software not using Copilot is like comparing myself from a 0.25x developer to a 2x developer. I mean that when I say it, but I get that you do need to be able to identify wrong code faster than you can run it.
- bb88 3y agoThe Gartner Hype Cycle has proven itself over and over again. https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... We have not reached the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" yet in AI. Contrast that to Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, where we are definitely in the "Trough of Disillusionment".
- alwillis 3y ago> Contrast that to Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, where we are definitely in the "Trough of Disillusionment". Bitcoin has been hovering around its all-time high of around $74,000 and is still expected to continue to increase, especially now that several ETFs have been approved.
- deergomoo 3y agoI really, really hope that the future you describe doesn’t come to pass. It sounds like hell. There is an aspect of personal bias for sure: I don’t want my profession or the countless related fields to be devalued, I dislike the imprecision of LLMs, and they spark none of the joy in me that programming does. But there’s something beyond that I find difficult to put into words. There is a tremendous inelegance to it all, in the same way a brute force solution feels fundamentally unsatisfying. Most software today only uses a tiny fraction of the capabilities of the hardware, because we optimise for how fast we can implement marketable (and often hostile) features. LLMs and co strike me as dialling that up to 11; why improve anything when we can just throw more hardware at the stuff that sucks? I like browsing the web god damn it, and I don’t need some corporate facsimile of a human to ask me why I don’t look happy.
- modeless 3y ago> we optimise for how fast we can implement marketable (and often hostile) features. I actually think local LMs are the antidote for this. Every UI I use these days is optimized by designers for attractiveness and hordes of PMs for business KPIs, not engineers for useful functionality. With local LMs I can take back control over the UI I actually use. The LM can deal with whatever trash UI redesign is being forced on me, and present a much simpler UI that matches my specific needs. For example, it can summarize the news and I never have to visit a news site and be assaulted by dark patterns. It can collect family photos from Facebook and show me a few without random TikTok videos inserted between them. It can trawl Amazon and Target and Walmart to find a shortlist of products for me to pick from, filtering the trash. It can watch that 10 minute long YouTube video past the sponsored segment to find the nugget of information I need to fix my dishwasher or whatever. We're a long way from this now. But I see a path there, and a world where users have control over the UIs they use is a better world.
- deergomoo 3y agoWe very much differ in optimism I think. I expect model-driven UIs to end up the same as software and services today: you can use open, non-hostile options if you go out of your way, but most people use the offerings from the big corporations and if you want a friction-free experience you have to as well. I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down. I can just as easily see a future where I can summarise my feed, but only if I use the Metabot or whatever which is just implementing some different dark pattern. Although that does bring me back somewhat to my initial point in that it all feels like brute forcing our way out of problems instead of solving them. We could have a Facebook that shows a nice summary of your family photos, we could have a shopping search engine that doesn’t include the trash, we could have short and to the point videos that aren’t optimising for the engagement flavour of the month. We don’t because there are too many financial incentives pushing back and too many established players that can burn piles of money for much longer than you, and I just do not see how those same facets won’t just be translated for models.
- qmmmur 3y agoI can't imagine anything facile and under-stimulating than composing music by prompting a computer.
- modeless 3y agoHonestly I agree that the current user interface of Udio and Suno is pretty lame. But it shouldn't take much imagination to see that it won't always be this way. Now that the core capability of generating music is there, a better UI will come. It will be interactive, it will be fun, it will be powerful and sophisticated. It's only a matter of time.
- benterix 3y ago> M4 with a terabyte of RAM will run GPT-4 level models locally. No it won't. Apart from the fact that (if the article is correct), M4 will support maximum of 512 GB (and I don't want to know how many thousands of dollars you will have to spend on it given how much Apple wants you to pay for a difference between 8 GB and 16 GB MacBooks...), GPT-4-level models that you could run locally don't exist and it would be a challenge in itself to create them. The closest, Claude 3 Opus, as far as I can tell can't be run locally, and it is in nobody's interest to change this status quo (less capable models = run locally, powerful ones = pay us). I do hope this changes one day, but it is not directly related to M4 (or M5/M6).
- modeless 3y agoApple can create them. They have the resources and can hire or acquire the expertise. And 512 GB should be more than enough for GPT-4 performance. We have invented a whole lot of techniques to reduce RAM requirements since GPT-4 was trained. Of course, GPT-5 and GPT-6 will come out and be better, but even just GPT-4 level performance will be enough for useful applications. And we will undoubtedly continue to discover ways to get better performance with less RAM. We've barely started optimizing these things.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI agree with what you are saying, but I think we will have to wait two or three years for the very nice scenario you laid out for us. Earlier this year I popped for a M2 Pro 32G. I am amazed at what even that can run, but I have to use Ollama to run individual models for general text processing and NLP, one for medical advice, one vision model, one large uncensored model to get an understanding of general utility of censored vs. uncensored models (I wish all models I used were uncensored and trained just on English. I have only used non-English language support for a handful of interactions). I also want Apple to develop very strong support for cloud models for my Apple Watch. With the excitement and disappointment for the new AI alternative pin computers, etc., I say we already have something useful in the Apple Watch so just keep improving that. I like to go about my day phone-free and the Apple Watch makes that work out OK for me.