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Tim Cook rallying Apple employees around AI efforts
- andsoitis 1y agoApple Intelligence? Or Artificial Intelligence?
- andrew_lastmile 1y agoApple Intelligence™ is most definitely "theirs to grab"
- krackers 1y agoAlibaba Intelligence.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bpmct 1y agohttps://archive.is/iBtcQ https://archive.is/iBtcQ
- tiahura 1y agoDeep 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.
- bigyabai 1y agoIsn't a larger concern that Tim "Services" Cook failed to skate where the puck was headed on this one? 15 years ago the Mac had Nvidia drivers, OpenCL support and a considerable stake in professional HPC. Today's Macs have none of that. Every business has to make tradeoffs, it's just hard to imagine that any of these decisions were truly worthwhile with the benefit of hindsight. After the botched launch of Vision Pro, Apple has to prove their worth to the wider consumer market again.
- jleyank 1y agoTheir X/OpenGL support has also been in stasis for 10 years or more. There’s not enough money taking over for SGI to move their needle.
- orionblastar 1y agoDon't abandon Intel Macs, then and call them Mac AI systems with NVIDIA chips. Sell them for more than the Apple Silicon Macs.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoNo one would buy slower hotter computers for more money. Most people who own Apple computers today are extremely satisfied with Apple silicon, and AI enthusiasts are an increasing large slice of those people (since there really isn’t anything else and getting a 3090/4099/5090 is still hard and expensive).
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoSilicon Mac’s are great for running LLMs. Unified memory and memory bandwidth of the Max and Ultra processors is very useful in doing inference locally.
- bigyabai 1y agoGreat news, but entirely lost on commercial hyperscalers and much of the PC market. Apple's recalcitrance towards supporting Nvidia drivers basically killed their last shot at real-world rackmount deployment of Apple Silicon. Now you can go buy an ARM Grace CPU that does the same thing, but cheaper and with better software support.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoYou really can’t. NVIDIA’s arm chip still looks nerfed compared to apple’s offering, and…I can run 40GB sized LLMs on the plane with no internet…it’s not something that you can do with any other platform.
- aunty_helen 1y agoOr, apples just so bad at this they’re fumbling the bag. Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money. They have their own hardware like google does but are talking about perplexity??? They have all data but can’t seem to get an llm that can set an alarm and be a chatbot at the same time? Sometimes company’s just don’t do good enough.
- paulpauper 1y agoUndercut the competitors by charging less. Apple can afford to run its product at a loss.
- anon7000 1y ago> Billions in cash on hand each quarter but don’t have the balls that zuck has to pay unreasonable money It remains to be seen whether this was a smart move, or just flailing money at the wall
- aunty_helen 1y agoThe difference is it’s a move. Actually doing something rather than putting out internal PR. Zuck tried and flailed with the metaverse. That was a huge waste, but he can afford it and fortune favours the brave.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoYou don’t think Apple makes moves? Not everyone has to make the same move at the same time.
- SebFender 1y agoApple did many - Just not the right or good ones in the past decade.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
- benoau 1y agoThey don't really have much time to wait, they could be forced to allow default voice assistants and access to private APIs by the DOJ antitrust, the App Store Freedom Act, the Open Markets Act, if any of those come through then OpenAI and Gemini will quickly end up entrenched.
- mips_avatar 1y agoI 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.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoChief Bean Counter Cook doesn't do cool, goodwill, or long term strategy. Only making the same set of products incrementally better and more expensive, and increasingly prone to expensive repair.
- dangus 1y agoApple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy. While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined. Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoLucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products. Excessive greed obliterates goodwill. You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark. Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoTeen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US. I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
- paulpauper 1y agoSome 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.
- pjmlp 1y agoBecause of Azure, Office, Game Pass, Github,.... To detriment of Windows, XBox hardware, .NET team shooting into all directions.
- viraptor 1y ago> 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,
- troad 1y agoThat's actually very consistent for Apple. Apple doesn't generally claim to be the first to do something, but have always taken the line that they're the first to execute it well. Hence their fondness for words like 'reimagine', 'revolutionise', etc.
- Isamu 1y agoYes, dominant smartphones before iPhone were BlackBerry inspired, full physical keyboard with small screen. When the iPhone launched, the Android project changed direction toward a full screen phone and that form became much more dominant and popular than the BlackBerry form. Apple made the bet that they could make the full screen experience much more compelling that people would accept the trade off of losing the keyboard.
- heavyset_go 1y agoThere were several slate phones before the iPhone
- fzzzy 1y agoThey had slider keyboards yeah?
- SebFender 1y ago
- brcmthrowaway 1y agoVery sad results; the end of America's once greatest company?
- lapcat 1y agoOn Thursday, Apple reported yet another record financial quarter.
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y agoThat doesn't seem to help Apple achieve AGI
- lapcat 1y agoApple is not trying to achieve AGI. Not to mention, nobody else has achieved AGI. LLMs are not that.
- rsanheim 1y agoThe top folks at big ai labs and research can't even agree on what AGI means or if it is a useful term or taget. I guarantee the folks building opus 5 or GPT 6oMiniPlus5.5++ are not concerned about if the new model 'achieves AGI', regardless of how much marketing and PR folks want to throw that term around for every new release or blog post.
- bni 1y agoWhat other companies have successfully integrated LLM tech in their mainstream products? To be clear, just having a chatbot website/app does not count.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoAdobe Nvidia
- SebFender 1y agoI have to admit - outside of cost and core values differences - Adobe has been an early player and often overlooked - but the company smells so bad that I guess they're a little looking for it.
- kibwen 1y agoIt looks like the parent was asking about LLMs specifically, in which case I don't think those two count. AFAIK Adobe's image-generation stuff is a diffusion model, not an LLM, and Nvidia's DLSS isn't an LLM either.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoAren’t LLMs distinct from image generation and manipulation models?
- cma 1y agoGoogle AI summaries isn't a chatbot exactly, but probably has been successful in staving off migration to chatgpt search, at least once it improved a lot.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoAre you implying Apple integrated AI successfully? How do you use AI in Apple products?
- potatolicious 1y ago- If you get into a car crash with your iPhone a ML model detects this and automatically calls emergency services. - If you are wearing an Apple Watch a ML model is constantly analyzing your heart rhythm and will alert you to (some types of) irregularities. It's so computationally efficient it can literally do this in the background all day long. - When you take any picture on any iPhone a whole array of ML models immediately run to improve the image. More models are used when manually editing images. - After you save the photo ML models run to analyze and index the photo so it's easily searchable later. That's why you can search for "golden retriever" and get actual results. - When you speak at your device (for example, to dictate a text message) there's a ML model that transcribes that into text. Likewise, when you're hands-free and want to hear an incoming text message, an ML model converts it to audio. All on-device and available offline at that. Or are we playing that stupid game where "AI === LLM"?
- xnx 1y agoMy 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.
- indy 1y agoTim 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.
- reactordev 1y agoExactly, Tim Cook is a finance guy - he knows the numbers and how to keep Apple profitable. What he lacks is product vision. His one opportunity (ironically, vision) fell flat.
- ljlolel 1y agoDon’t downvote this guy! Interesting to note that he probably constantly got criticized for not having vision, so he took that literally and called the product Vision Pro. It’s the kind of mistake an LLM would make. Very Lacanian.
- reactordev 1y agoI wouldn’t go that far. Tim Cook doesn’t really care what people think of him, he only cares about one group of people - shareholders. It was probably marketing that came up with it. Tim is totally fine being the finance guy and the vision he sold the board was “I’ll keep Apple from imploding” which he has been very successful at. Like Nadella, you need someone from the early years, who knows the business, to run it. Cook lacks product vision because 1) he’s no Steve Jobs. He was hired. He didn’t create. 2) He doesn’t have an Jonny Ive to make something as boring as a computer be as sexy as an Italian vase. Or as sleek as a pencil. Or as flat as paper. Or whatever metaphors were used during the Ive years to describe his design process. But he has been there long enough to know how it works.
- nchmy 1y agoNadella seems to have incomparably more vision...
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- lapcat 1y agoSerious question: Did Apple employees need rallying? 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.
- weikju 1y ago> 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
- lapcat 1y agoWhere do you think Mark Gurman's story came from?
- pjmlp 1y agoAnonymous sources that he trusts enough to be Apple employees, which isn't what OP is referring about, rather them saying something here. Naturally then you need the proof any random nickname is actually who they say they are.
- lapcat 1y ago> Naturally then you need the proof any random nickname is actually who they say they are. I don't need proof. I know that Apple employees visit HN and sometimes comment. In any case, this is not a high-stakes product leak: I'm just asking for their personal impressions of this company-wide meeting that has already been reported.
- bentocorp 1y agoFrom the reports from Bloomberg etc, yes, it does sound like some Apple AI employees may need rallying. 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?
- andrewstuart 1y agoI feel like Steve Jobs would have designed what real androids should be. Instead Apple can’t even manage to implement speech to text that works in safari and can’t manage to make Siri not suck.
- pretext-1 1y agoText to speech doesn’t work correctly either. It often highlights different words than what is currently spoken.
- TheJoeMan 1y agoI don’t know if Tim Cook has actually tried Siri day-to-day like most typical users who get frustrated. Half the time I ask siri to convert units of measure, it pulls up a web search? We’re not asking for siri to have LLM abilities to compose sonnets. Interestingly, does anyone remember when siri would use WolframAlpha for answers? Perhaps that’s the company Apple should buy not OpenAI.
- qrios 1y agoCurrent "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. [1] https://gadgetversus.com/graphics-card/apple-a11-bionic-gpu-vs-nvidia-quadro-rtx-6000/ 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.06668 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18466 [Edit: decimal separator mess]
- mingus88 1y agoApple’s answer to that is Private Compute Cloud
- qrios 1y agoIsn't "Private Compute Cloud" just a marketing term with some restrict sec architecture? The real personal assistant LLM would mean to have the realtime data available in hot memory (to make sure to give instant responses). Audio, video, screen recordings, etc. from a single customer could be something between 1 and 10 GByte per day on average. After training you might get something like 3 MByte in additional model size per day. Even with 1 billion active users you would need to store additional data with 1 billion GByte (again on hot storage, like expensive GPU memory). The total amount of the memory of GPUs sold by NVIDIA is not even close to 400mio GByte (NVIDIA 3.8mio data center GPUs in 2023).
- hollerith 1y agoI thank Tim Cook for this information. Till today I did not know the extent of Apple's commitment to or interest in doing frontier AI research. 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.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoYou might enjoy the Aussie saying “pissing into the wind”.
- hollerith 1y agoIt is pissing in the wind, but at least I'm not contributing to the catastrophic outcome by cooperating or doing business with Apple. It's not my fault that the reality in which humanity find itself turned out to be more dangerous than almost anyone suspected. My only moral obligation is to do what I can to make the future turn out okay even though what I can do is very very little.
- pstuart 1y agoI 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.
- hollerith 1y ago>Out of all the industry players I'd put Apple as the least bad option To be the least bad option, Apple would need to publish a plan for keeping an AI under control so that it stays under control even if it undergoes a sharp increase in cognitive capability (e.g., during training) or alternatively a plan to prevent an AI's capability from ever rising to a level that requires the aforementioned control. I haven't seen anything out of Apple suggesting that Apple's leaders understand that a plan of the first kind or the second kind is necessary. Most people who have written about the topic in detail put Anthropic as the least bad option because out of all the groups with competitive offerings, their leadership has written in the most detail about the need for a plan and about their particular (completely inadequate IMHO) plan. I myself put Google as the least bad option -- the slightly less awful option, to be precise -- with large uncertainty because Google wasn't pushing capabilities hard till OpenAI and Anthropic put it in a situation in which it either had to start pushing hard or risk falling so far behind it wouldn't be able to catch up. Consequently, I use Gemini as my LLM service. In particular, Google risked finding itself in a situation in which it cannot create a competitive offering because it doesn't have access to enough data collected from users of LLMs and generative AIs and cannot get enough data because it cannot attract users. While it was the leading lab, Google was proceeding slowly and at least one industry insider claims credibly that the slowness was deliberately chosen to reduce the probability of an AI catastrophe. I must stress that no one has an adequate plan for avoiding an AI catastrophe while continuing to push capabilities, and IMHO no one is likely to devise one in time, so would be great if no one did any more frontier AI research at all till humanity itself becomes more cognitively capable.
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- dimal 1y agoThey 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.
- devinprater 1y agoOh 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.
- unstatusthequo 1y agoIt’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.
- shadowvoxing 1y agoApple could easily acquire Mistral and become competitive fast. And I hope they do. The more AI the better.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoApple failed so hard, and it was so easy to succeed. 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?
- JasonBee 1y agoMaybe it’s not so easy?
- drewbeck 1y agoYou can do it today with the action button and various apps (including OpenAI). And I believe you could do it a year ago as well.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThis is what Apple would say, but it’s not the same. To activate the shortcut I have to unlock the phone whereas Siri works in any situation. The friction of one button press to 3-4 interactions is significant enough to make it not worth the action button, especially since holding the power button is supposed to do the same thing.
- r0fl 1y agoIt’s not hard 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