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I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have "the ability to trans

by Noaidi 1y ago

I am wondering if Apple's focus is off lately with this drive for AI. So far all they are showing in that presentation is that I can have "the ability to transform 2D photos into spatial scenes in the Photos app, or generating a Persona — operate with greater speed and efficiency." And by making Apple AI (which is something I do not use for many reasons, but mainly because of Climate Change) their focus, I am afraid they are losing and making their operating Systems worse. For instance, Liquid Glass, the mess I was lucky enough to uninstall before they put in the embargo against doing so, is, well, a mess. An Aplha release in my opinion which I feel was a distraction from their lack of a robust AI release. So by blowing money on the AI gold rush that they were too late for, will they ultimately ruin their products across the board? I am currently attempting to sell my iPhone 16E and my M1 Macbook Air to move back to Linux because of all of this.

Tagbert 1y ago
Most of the AI and Machine Learning Apple has done so far are primarily done on device so you can see whether there is any climate change concern or not.
steinvakt2 1y ago
If you don’t use AI for climate reasons then you should read the recent reports about how little electricity and water is actually used. It’s basically zero (image and video models excluded). Your information about this is probably related to GPT3.5 or something. Which is now 3 years old - a lifetime in AI world.
- wat10000 1y ago
  Don't newer models use more energy? I thought they were getting bigger and more computationally intensive.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    They use a massive amount of energy during training. During inference they use a tiny amount of energy, less than a web search (turns out you can be really efficient if you don't mind giving wrong answers at random, and can therefore skip expensive database queries!)
    - wat10000 1y ago
      Right, but the comment I was responding to suggested that ChatGPT3.5 used lots of energy and newer models use less.
      - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        Indeed, this is correct. See today's Claude Haiku 4 announcement for an example.
        wat10000 1y ago
        Looking at https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing, GPT 3.5 is $1.50-4 per million output tokens, and GPT 5 is $0.40-120, with plain "gpt-5" with no qualifiers going for $10/million. GPT5 is probably cheaper in the sense that gpt5-nano is at least as capable as 3.5 while costing less, but the "normal" models are more expensive for the newer ones, and thats what people are generally going to be using.
- greekrich92 1y ago
  Big data centers running tons of GPUs and the construction of even bigger ones is not carbon neutral come on
imcritic 1y ago
I think they will continue ruining their products via software updates. That's implied by a walled garden approach they chose to do their business: this forces users to consoom more and thus generates profits. Apple isn't a "lean" company, it needs outrageous profits to stay afloat.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> making Apple AI [...] their focus Are they really doing that? Because if it's the case they have shockingly little to show for it. Their last few attempts at actual innovation seem to have been less than successful. The Vision Pro failed to find a public. Liquid Glass is to put it politely divisive. At that point to me, it seems that good SoC and a captive audience in the US are pretty much all they have remaining and competition on the SoC part is becoming fierce.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  Yeah, I agree, they have a captive audience for sure. But they still need to satisfy share holders. If people are failing to upgrade that is a problem. And the battery drain on my iPhone 16e on Glass was horrific. I know casual users who did not notice until I pointed it out and they were tracking it better. This, unfortunatly, makes me think conspiratorially. Even a modest about of extra battery use and degradation will mean more upgrades in the future. But I think $500 billion is a lot of money for AI: Apple accelerates AI investment with $500B for skills, infrastructure https://www.ciodive.com/news/Apple-AI-infrastructure-investment/740786/ https://www.ciodive.com/news/Apple-AI-infrastructure-investm... Imagine using $500 for the operating system and squashing bugs or making the system even more energy efficient? Or maybe figuring out how to connect to an android tablet's file system natively?
knotimpressed 1y ago
Assuming you've read https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... or the longer full essay/related works, could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence? I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to environmental reasons (amongst others) but I'm curious to hear your opinions on it.
- pcdoodle 1y ago
  For me: unproven trust and no killer feature. If I can't search my Apple Mail without AI, why would I trust AI?
- sylens 1y ago
  > could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence? Why would I trust this when they can't deliver a voice assistant that can parse my sentences beyond "Set a reminder" or "Set a timer"? They have neglected this area of their products for over a decade, they are not owed the benefit of the doubt
- Noaidi 1y ago
  Some commenters already answered for me. To me there is no real use benefit. I am rather a simple user and it seems to take up space on the phone as well. I refuse to use iCloud so space is important to me since photography is what I do the most. Also, I like researching things old school how I learned in college because I think it leads to unintended discoveries. I do not trust the source you linked to. It is an organization buried under organizations for which I cannot seem to find their funding source after looking for a good 15 minutes this morning. It led me back to https://ev.org/ https://ev.org/ where I found out one guy used to work for "Bain and Company", a consulting firm, and was associated with FTX funding: https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-effective-altruism-dream/ https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-eff... Besides "Effective Altruism" makes no sense to me. Altruism is Altruism IMO. Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others There is no way to be ineffective at altruism. The more you have to think about altruism the further you get from it. But the organization stinks as some kind of tech propaganda arm to me.
- 1y ago
jeffbee 1y ago
I'm interested in reading about your low-carbon lifestyle that is so efficient you got to the point of giving up machine inference.
- timeon 1y ago
  Depends where you are. People in some countries have lot of catching up: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Maybe they are in USA - every little think counts there.
  - Noaidi 1y ago
    I am in the US, and thanks for that link. I am of the opinion that the Climate Crisis should be the number one focus for everyone right now. So, to keep this on point, Apple making a faster chip is not on my climate change agenda and anything but negative.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    No, in the USA it is the opposite. The little things do not and cannot add up to anything. The only things that make a difference are motor fuels and hamburgers.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  I live in a van full time. I have a 200w solar panel and a 1500w output solar battery that powers everything I use, mostly for cooking, sometimes heat. I also poop in the woods a lot. :) I do not use the internet much really. Driving is my biggest carbon footprint but I really do not put much more mileage than the average suburban person. Anyway, I try my best. I am permanently disabled so that makes a lot of it easier. Being poor dramatically lowers ones carbon footprint.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    [flagged]
tim333 1y ago
Running AI on the macbook or phone is probably really energy efficient compared to data centers. I think AI hardware makes sense. Dunno about recent software though - glass and apple intelligence both seem useless.
827a 1y ago
At the end of the day, they're building silicon that can do this to be ready for when the software side of the house actually figures this stuff out. Of course, it doesn't seem like the software side is close to this, and a very real risk for Apple is a world where the local AI use-cases don't really grow to justify this level of silicon investment. More specifically: Personal context is a big thing that Apple is uniquely positioned to capitalize on; but will a mobile-sized LLM and mobile-sized memory ever be able to coherently handle the volume of contextual data that might be necessary to be truly great? I have 400gb in iCloud, I don't want to get into the weeds of most of that being images and such; you don't need to in order to recognize that modern data center-scale LLMs can handle, like, less than a megabyte of context. There will always be local-first use-cases, but its also possible that, you know, we're already near the global maxima of those use-cases, and the local AI coprocessors we've had can do it fine. This would be a severe shock to my perceived value of Apple right now, because my view is: their hardware division is firing on all cylinders and totally killing it. But when you're putting supercomputers into the iPad... maybe that doesn't actually matter. Meanwhile, their software is getting worse every year that goes by.

by Noaidi 1y ago

Tagbert 1y ago

Most of the AI and Machine Learning Apple has done so far are primarily done on device so you can see whether there is any climate change concern or not.

steinvakt2 1y ago

If you don’t use AI for climate reasons then you should read the recent reports about how little electricity and water is actually used. It’s basically zero (image and video models excluded). Your information about this is probably related to GPT3.5 or something. Which is now 3 years old - a lifetime in AI world.

wat10000 1y ago
Don't newer models use more energy? I thought they were getting bigger and more computationally intensive.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  They use a massive amount of energy during training. During inference they use a tiny amount of energy, less than a web search (turns out you can be really efficient if you don't mind giving wrong answers at random, and can therefore skip expensive database queries!)
  - wat10000 1y ago
    Right, but the comment I was responding to suggested that ChatGPT3.5 used lots of energy and newer models use less.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      Indeed, this is correct. See today's Claude Haiku 4 announcement for an example.
      - wat10000 1y ago
        Looking at https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing, GPT 3.5 is $1.50-4 per million output tokens, and GPT 5 is $0.40-120, with plain "gpt-5" with no qualifiers going for $10/million. GPT5 is probably cheaper in the sense that gpt5-nano is at least as capable as 3.5 while costing less, but the "normal" models are more expensive for the newer ones, and thats what people are generally going to be using.
greekrich92 1y ago
Big data centers running tons of GPUs and the construction of even bigger ones is not carbon neutral come on

imcritic 1y ago

I think they will continue ruining their products via software updates. That's implied by a walled garden approach they chose to do their business: this forces users to consoom more and thus generates profits. Apple isn't a "lean" company, it needs outrageous profits to stay afloat.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

> making Apple AI [...] their focus Are they really doing that? Because if it's the case they have shockingly little to show for it. Their last few attempts at actual innovation seem to have been less than successful. The Vision Pro failed to find a public. Liquid Glass is to put it politely divisive. At that point to me, it seems that good SoC and a captive audience in the US are pretty much all they have remaining and competition on the SoC part is becoming fierce.

Noaidi 1y ago
Yeah, I agree, they have a captive audience for sure. But they still need to satisfy share holders. If people are failing to upgrade that is a problem. And the battery drain on my iPhone 16e on Glass was horrific. I know casual users who did not notice until I pointed it out and they were tracking it better. This, unfortunatly, makes me think conspiratorially. Even a modest about of extra battery use and degradation will mean more upgrades in the future. But I think $500 billion is a lot of money for AI: Apple accelerates AI investment with $500B for skills, infrastructure https://www.ciodive.com/news/Apple-AI-infrastructure-investment/740786/ https://www.ciodive.com/news/Apple-AI-infrastructure-investm... Imagine using $500 for the operating system and squashing bugs or making the system even more energy efficient? Or maybe figuring out how to connect to an android tablet's file system natively?

knotimpressed 1y ago

Assuming you've read https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa... or the longer full essay/related works, could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence? I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to environmental reasons (amongst others) but I'm curious to hear your opinions on it.

pcdoodle 1y ago
For me: unproven trust and no killer feature. If I can't search my Apple Mail without AI, why would I trust AI?
sylens 1y ago
> could you elaborate on why you don't use Apple Intelligence? Why would I trust this when they can't deliver a voice assistant that can parse my sentences beyond "Set a reminder" or "Set a timer"? They have neglected this area of their products for over a decade, they are not owed the benefit of the doubt
Noaidi 1y ago
Some commenters already answered for me. To me there is no real use benefit. I am rather a simple user and it seems to take up space on the phone as well. I refuse to use iCloud so space is important to me since photography is what I do the most. Also, I like researching things old school how I learned in college because I think it leads to unintended discoveries. I do not trust the source you linked to. It is an organization buried under organizations for which I cannot seem to find their funding source after looking for a good 15 minutes this morning. It led me back to https://ev.org/ https://ev.org/ where I found out one guy used to work for "Bain and Company", a consulting firm, and was associated with FTX funding: https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-effective-altruism-dream/ https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-eff... Besides "Effective Altruism" makes no sense to me. Altruism is Altruism IMO. Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others There is no way to be ineffective at altruism. The more you have to think about altruism the further you get from it. But the organization stinks as some kind of tech propaganda arm to me.
1y ago

jeffbee 1y ago

I'm interested in reading about your low-carbon lifestyle that is so efficient you got to the point of giving up machine inference.

timeon 1y ago
Depends where you are. People in some countries have lot of catching up: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Maybe they are in USA - every little think counts there.
- Noaidi 1y ago
  I am in the US, and thanks for that link. I am of the opinion that the Climate Crisis should be the number one focus for everyone right now. So, to keep this on point, Apple making a faster chip is not on my climate change agenda and anything but negative.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  No, in the USA it is the opposite. The little things do not and cannot add up to anything. The only things that make a difference are motor fuels and hamburgers.
Noaidi 1y ago
I live in a van full time. I have a 200w solar panel and a 1500w output solar battery that powers everything I use, mostly for cooking, sometimes heat. I also poop in the woods a lot. :) I do not use the internet much really. Driving is my biggest carbon footprint but I really do not put much more mileage than the average suburban person. Anyway, I try my best. I am permanently disabled so that makes a lot of it easier. Being poor dramatically lowers ones carbon footprint.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  [flagged]

tim333 1y ago

Running AI on the macbook or phone is probably really energy efficient compared to data centers. I think AI hardware makes sense. Dunno about recent software though - glass and apple intelligence both seem useless.

827a 1y ago

At the end of the day, they're building silicon that can do this to be ready for when the software side of the house actually figures this stuff out. Of course, it doesn't seem like the software side is close to this, and a very real risk for Apple is a world where the local AI use-cases don't really grow to justify this level of silicon investment. More specifically: Personal context is a big thing that Apple is uniquely positioned to capitalize on; but will a mobile-sized LLM and mobile-sized memory ever be able to coherently handle the volume of contextual data that might be necessary to be truly great? I have 400gb in iCloud, I don't want to get into the weeds of most of that being images and such; you don't need to in order to recognize that modern data center-scale LLMs can handle, like, less than a megabyte of context. There will always be local-first use-cases, but its also possible that, you know, we're already near the global maxima of those use-cases, and the local AI coprocessors we've had can do it fine. This would be a severe shock to my perceived value of Apple right now, because my view is: their hardware division is firing on all cylinders and totally killing it. But when you're putting supercomputers into the iPad... maybe that doesn't actually matter. Meanwhile, their software is getting worse every year that goes by.