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Why do people have faith in Apple being competitive in the AI race? It’s like betting on Bing reaching the level of search results that Google provides today, 6

Why do people have faith in Apple being competitive in the AI race? It’s like betting on Bing reaching the level of search results that Google provides today, 6 months from now.

gensym 2y ago
AI companies have learned and struggled for a few years, learning how to make a decent model. Phone and laptop guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.
- bjtitus 2y ago
  > it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI. No need for "phone and laptop guys" to "figure this out" when they can just license the models for use with their massive piles of cash.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- text0404 2y ago
  erm... https://machinelearning.apple.com/ https://machinelearning.apple.com/
com2kid 2y ago
Apple sells hardware at a large profit, they don't need to rely on ad revenue. Google literally cannot release a voice only assistant that solves all of your problems, it would destroy their ad revenue. This is the same reason why Microsoft never had a chance to win the online market in the early 2000s, they were reliant on large companies buying on-prem licenses for server and client machines. Websites that could be accessed from any device, running any OS, and that could be served from Linux boxes, was against everything MS stood for. Eventually MS figured out they could make bank by hosting those Linux boxes, or by running the productivity infrastructure that all those business machines connect to (hosted Exchange, web versions of office) and still make money on software. But Google is too addicted to ad revenue to ever truly revolutionize the world of computing.
- fooey 2y ago
  only destroys their ad revenue if you assume the results it gives you are unbiased by monetary considerations
myfavoritetings 2y ago
AI is a lot more than LLMs just because they don't have a public LLM doesn't mean they don't have competent AI strategy. Most of their advancements are around image and video. A lot of companies that are "leaders" in AI right now have no path to profitability for their features because they're not actually that useful
- mdhb 2y ago
  They absolutely do not have a competent AI strategy and are many years behind the competition.
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  > just because they don't have a public LLM They have released OpenELM. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM
Atreiden 2y ago
Apple's silicon enables them to run incredibly strong models locally, fully offline. This is a huge win over competition that needs clients to connect to a network-connected GPU farm. Siri wouldn't need to reach out to the web, it's various functions could be abstracted away and driven by embedded models. They've already started positioning for this. The newest M4 Ipad release has a 10 core GPU/16Gi RAM that could be consumed as VRAM. Could run Llama 3 8Gb Instruct with that and get response content much faster than normal speaking cadence.
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  The competition has been running on device models with specialized hardware for longer than Apple has. Even with on-device LLMs, Apple is already far behind. https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-feature-drop-december-2023/ https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-featur...
  - Atreiden 2y ago
    Sure they're quite behind in the model space, but there are plenty of routes for them to catch up quickly in this regard. Licensing, open-source models, etc. Google's hardware is just not as powerful. The Tensor G3 is far less capable than the A16 let alone the A17 Pro or M4 chip that powers the new iPad. Gemini Nano is a tiny model with limited applications. On the page you've linked, it seems like it's mainly used for text summarization, autocomplete, and various image features. It's not used for the Google assistant, likely due to the complexity of that task relative to the strength of the model. Apple's hardware could run more powerful models that make assistant a first-class citizen. And as another poster mentioned, Apple does not have the same incentive structure as Google (which always has to keep their ad revenue business in mind). Apple would happily offer an all-in-one, does-everything assistant to their users, if it were good enough to compel sales. Google likely would not, but would rather bake integrations into their other products in order to "augment them with AI" while preserving their revenue model.
  - jdminhbg 2y ago
    This isn’t really the competition. This is more akin to opening up the OpenAI app than using Siri. Hey Google is, like Siri, still not LLM-based.

Why do people have faith in Apple being competitive in the AI race? It’s like betting on Bing reaching the level of search results that Google provides today, 6 months from now.

gensym 2y ago

AI companies have learned and struggled for a few years, learning how to make a decent model. Phone and laptop guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.

bjtitus 2y ago
> it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI. No need for "phone and laptop guys" to "figure this out" when they can just license the models for use with their massive piles of cash.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
text0404 2y ago
erm... https://machinelearning.apple.com/ https://machinelearning.apple.com/

com2kid 2y ago

Apple sells hardware at a large profit, they don't need to rely on ad revenue. Google literally cannot release a voice only assistant that solves all of your problems, it would destroy their ad revenue. This is the same reason why Microsoft never had a chance to win the online market in the early 2000s, they were reliant on large companies buying on-prem licenses for server and client machines. Websites that could be accessed from any device, running any OS, and that could be served from Linux boxes, was against everything MS stood for. Eventually MS figured out they could make bank by hosting those Linux boxes, or by running the productivity infrastructure that all those business machines connect to (hosted Exchange, web versions of office) and still make money on software. But Google is too addicted to ad revenue to ever truly revolutionize the world of computing.

fooey 2y ago
only destroys their ad revenue if you assume the results it gives you are unbiased by monetary considerations

myfavoritetings 2y ago

AI is a lot more than LLMs just because they don't have a public LLM doesn't mean they don't have competent AI strategy. Most of their advancements are around image and video. A lot of companies that are "leaders" in AI right now have no path to profitability for their features because they're not actually that useful

mdhb 2y ago
They absolutely do not have a competent AI strategy and are many years behind the competition.
cassianoleal 2y ago
> just because they don't have a public LLM They have released OpenELM. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/openelm https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM

Atreiden 2y ago

Apple's silicon enables them to run incredibly strong models locally, fully offline. This is a huge win over competition that needs clients to connect to a network-connected GPU farm. Siri wouldn't need to reach out to the web, it's various functions could be abstracted away and driven by embedded models. They've already started positioning for this. The newest M4 Ipad release has a 10 core GPU/16Gi RAM that could be consumed as VRAM. Could run Llama 3 8Gb Instruct with that and get response content much faster than normal speaking cadence.

lern_too_spel 2y ago
The competition has been running on device models with specialized hardware for longer than Apple has. Even with on-device LLMs, Apple is already far behind. https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-feature-drop-december-2023/ https://store.google.com/intl/en/ideas/articles/pixel-featur...
- Atreiden 2y ago
  Sure they're quite behind in the model space, but there are plenty of routes for them to catch up quickly in this regard. Licensing, open-source models, etc. Google's hardware is just not as powerful. The Tensor G3 is far less capable than the A16 let alone the A17 Pro or M4 chip that powers the new iPad. Gemini Nano is a tiny model with limited applications. On the page you've linked, it seems like it's mainly used for text summarization, autocomplete, and various image features. It's not used for the Google assistant, likely due to the complexity of that task relative to the strength of the model. Apple's hardware could run more powerful models that make assistant a first-class citizen. And as another poster mentioned, Apple does not have the same incentive structure as Google (which always has to keep their ad revenue business in mind). Apple would happily offer an all-in-one, does-everything assistant to their users, if it were good enough to compel sales. Google likely would not, but would rather bake integrations into their other products in order to "augment them with AI" while preserving their revenue model.
- jdminhbg 2y ago
  This isn’t really the competition. This is more akin to opening up the OpenAI app than using Siri. Hey Google is, like Siri, still not LLM-based.