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I would bet significant money that, within two years, it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company. I can

• twiddlethumbs 10mo ago
  And is any of that based on anything other than “AI is coming really soon!”?
• typewithrhythm 10mo ago
  I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment. From there, AI integration is enough of a different paradigm that the existing apple ecosystem is not a meaningful advantage. Best case Apple is among the fast copies of whoever is actually innovative, but I don't see anything interesting coming from apple or apple devs anytime soon.
  • ceejayoz 10mo ago
    > I don't think the throughput of a general purpose device will make a competitive offering; so being local is a joke. Until the first Cambridge Analytica-sized privacy story hits a major cloud LLM provider, maybe.
  • rickdeckard 10mo ago
    > All the fun stuff is running on servers at the moment. With "Apple Intelligence" it looks like Apple is setting themselves up (again) to be the gatekeeper for these kind of services, "allow" their users to participate and earn a revenue share for this, all while collecting data on what types of tasks are actually in high-demand, ready to in-source something whenever it makes economic sense for them...
  • 7952 10mo ago
    Outside of fun stuff there is potential to just make chat another UI technology that is coupled with a specific API. Surely smaller models could do that, particularly as improvements happen. If that was good enough what would be the benefit of an app developer using an extra API? Particularly if Apple can offer an experience that can be familiar across apps.
  • energy123 10mo ago
    Also why would you want it sucking your battery or heating your room when a data center is only 20 milliseconds away and it's nothing more than a few kilobytes of text. It makes no sense for the large majority of users' preferences which downweight privacy and the ability to tinker.
  • 827a 10mo ago
    People said the same things about mobile gaming [1] and mainframes. Technology keeps pushing forward. Neural coprocessors will get more efficient. Small LLMs will get smarter. New use-cases will emerge that don't need 160IQ super-intellects (most use-cases even today do not) The problem for other companies is not necessarily that data center-borne GPUs aren't technically better; its that the financials might never make sense, much like how the financials behind Stadia never did, or at least need Google-levels of scale to bring in advertising and ultra-enterprise revenue. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-3/id1640630077 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resident-evil-3/id1640630077
    • gowld 10mo ago
      Grammar-check and clip-art work fine locally. There are local use-cases, but the powerful use-cases are very important.
      • kelipso 10mo ago
        Machine translation in Firefox I think works locally. That has to be a neural net and those models can be just a couple of hundred megabytes.
• atonse 10mo ago
  As a sibling poster has said, I don't know how much on-device AI is going to matter. I have pretty strong views on privacy, and I've generally thrown them all out in light of using AIs, because the value I get out of them is just so huge. If Apple actually had executed on their strategy (of running models in privacy-friendly sandboxes) I feel they would've hit it out of the park. But as it stands, these are all bleeding edge technologies and you have to have your best and brightest on them. And even with seemingly infinite money, Apple doesn't seem to have delivered yet. I hope the "yet" is important here. But judging by the various executives leaving (especially rumors of Johnny Srouji leaving), that's a huge red flag that their problem is that they're bleeding talent, and not a lack of money.
  • ebbi 10mo ago
    Johnny Srouji sent out an email to his team confirming he is staying.
    • atonse 10mo ago
      That’s huge. Hope they can continue to keep such people because it isn’t just about one person. It’s all the other smart people that want to work with them.
  • scrollop 10mo ago
    You don't have to abandon privacy when using an eye - use a service that accesses enterprise APIs, which have good privacy policies. I use the service from the guys who create the This day in AI podcast called smithery.ai -we are access to all of the sota models so we can flip between any model including lots of open source ones within one chat or within multiple chats and compared the same query, using various MCPs and lots of other features. If you're interested have a look at the discord to simtheory.ai (I have no connection to the service or to the creators)
  • twoodfin 10mo ago
    I’m much more optimistic on device-side matmul. There’s just so much of it in aggregate and the marginal cost is so low especially since you need to drive fancy graphics to the screen anyway. Somebody will figure out how to use it—complementing Cloud-side matmul, of course—and Apple will be one of the biggest suppliers.
• GeekyBear 10mo ago
  The thing that people seem to have forgotten is that the companies that previously attempted to monetize data center based voice assistants lost massive amounts of money. > Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year... “Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather.” Those questions aren’t monetizable. Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google’s attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven’t worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... Moving to using much more resource intensive models is only going to jack up the datacenter costs.
  • Animats 10mo ago
    > Those questions aren’t monetizable. ... There’s an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make. There lies the problem. Worse, someone may solve it in the wrong way: I'll turn on the light in a minute, but first, a word from our sponsor... Technically, this will eventually be solved by some hierarchical system. The main problem is developing systems with enough "I don't know" capability to decide when to pass a question to a bigger system. LLMs still aren't good at that, and the ones that are require substantial resources. What the world needs is a good $5 LLM that knows when to ask for help. Useful Douglas Adams reference: [1] [1] http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135 http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=135
    • hightrix 10mo ago
      This type of response has been given by Alexa from an echo device in my house. I asked, “play x on y”, the response was something like “ok, but first check out this new…”. I immediately unplugged that device and all other Alexa enabled devices in the house. We have not used it since. This is the monetization wall they have to figure out how to break through. The first inkling of advertising is immediate turn off and destroy, for me.
• notatoad 10mo ago
  i'd have a lot more respect for apple's "cautious" approach to AI if they didn't keep promising and then failing to deliver siri upgrades (while still calling out to cloud backends, despite all the talk about local LLM), or if they hadn't shipped the absolute trash that is notification summaries. i think at this point it's pretty clear that their AI products aren't bad because it's some clever strategy, it's bad because they're bad at it. I agree that their platform puts them in a good place to provide a local LLM experience to developers, but i remain skeptical that they will be able to execute on it.
  • gowld 10mo ago
    They can buy a local LLM from an expert provider.
• rubiquity 10mo ago
  Local AI sounds nice but most of Apple’s PCs and other devices don’t come with enough RAM for a decent price needed for good model performance and macOS itself is incredibly bloated.
  • SchemaLoad 10mo ago
    Depends what you are actually doing. It's not enough to run a chatbot that can answer complex questions. But it's more than enough to index your data for easy searching, to prioritise notifications and hide spam ones, to create home automations from natural language, etc. Apple has the ability and hardware to deeply integrate this stuff behind the scenes without buying in to the hype of a shiny glowing button that promises to do literally everything.
    • gowld 10mo ago
      That might work well for Apple to be the consumer electronic manufacturer that people use to connect to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google for their powerful creative work.
  • veunes 10mo ago
    That's true for current LLMs, but Apple is playing the long game. First, they are masters of quantization optimization (their 3-4 bit models perform surprisingly well). Second, Unified Memory is a cheat code. Even 8GB on M1/M2 allows for things impossible on a discrete GPU with 8GB VRAM due to data transfer overhead. And for serious tasks, there's the Mac Studio with 192GB RAM, which is actually the cheapest way to run Llama-400B locally
    • LoganDark 10mo ago
      The Mac Studio comes with up to 512GB of unified memory now.
• huggnphase 10mo ago
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• euphoria_123 10mo ago
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• cma 10mo ago
  I don't know, I feel like Apple shot themselves in the foot selling 8GB consumer laptops up until around 2024 while packing them with advanced AI inference, and usually had lower RAM on their mobile and ipads. On the other hand all devs having to optimize for lower RAM will help with freeing it up for AI on newer devices with more.
• wiesbadener 10mo ago
  I'd loved to see a strong on-device multi-modal Siri + flexibility with shortcuts. Besides the "best consumer AI story" they could additionally create a strong offering to SMBs with FileMaker + strong foundation models support baked in. Actually rooting for both!
• crazygringo 10mo ago
  I don't think so. Consumers don't care about whether an LLM is local, and one that runs on your phone is always going to be vastly worse than ChatGPT. I see zero indication that Apple is going to replace people going to chatgpt.com or using its app. All I see Apple doing is eventually building a better new generation of Siri, not much different from Google/Alexa.
  • snowwrestler 10mo ago
    An LLM on your phone can know everything else that is on your phone. Even Signal chat plaintexts are visible on the phone itself. People definitely will care that such private data stays safely on the phone. But it’s kind of a moot point since there is no way to share that kind of data with ChatGPT anyway. I think Apple is not trying to compete with the big central “answer machine” LLMs like Google or ChatGPT. Apple is aiming at something more personal. Their AI goal may not be to know everything, but rather to know you better than any other piece of tech in the world. And monetization is easy: just keep selling devices that are more capable than the last one.
    • crazygringo 10mo ago
      Gemini can know everything in my Google account, which is basically synonymous with everything that's on my phone, except for text messages. And I use an iPhone. And then Gemini will work just as well on the web when I use my laptop. So I don't see what unique advantage this gives Apple. These days people's data lives mostly in the cloud. What's on their phone is just a local cache.
      • dickersnoodle 10mo ago
        >Gemini can know everything in my Google account Sorry, this just made shivers run up my back.
        • crazygringo 10mo ago
          ... why? If I ask Gemini a question, I definitely want it to be able to search everything in my calendar, Gmail, Drive. No shivers here. Do you get shivers from using the search box on your Google Drive too?
• danielmarkbruce 10mo ago
  How much, at what odds, who will decide if they do, and who will hold the money?
• mensetmanusman 10mo ago
  Make a poly market bet, you will lose. Siri has been horrible for a decade, no way they fix that in two years.
• Gagarin1917 10mo ago
  Nah it’s going to be Google by most measures
  • 827a 10mo ago
    I said "Consumer AI". Even Apple is likely beating Google in consumer AI DAUs, today. Google has the Pixel and gemini.google.com, and that's it; practically zero strategy.
    • wooger 10mo ago
      You've never heard of google search (with AI), gmail (with ai), google maps (with ai). Not to mention that most android devices come with google-ified apps that are at worst a click away from Google AI being on the device, in many cases the AI search app is bundled. No clue how many google smart speakers sold either, but not reason to think it's lower than homepods really, they're 1/3 the price.
      • solumunus 10mo ago
        Google has search with AI and yet 99% of my search has gone to competitor AI products. Google AI in search is legit terrible.
• createaccount99 10mo ago
  > I would bet significant money that, You can do that right now, on the stock market. Sometimes it's good to put your money where your mouth is, that forces you to correct your world view.
• aurareturn 10mo ago
  it will become Generally Obvious that Apple has the best consumer AI story among any tech company. I love my Macbooks and think they can be great for local LLMs in the future. But the vast majority do not care and they do not want to setup complicated local LLMs. They want something that just works on the computer, tablets, and phones - ideally all synced together. Local LLMs will never be better than cloud LLMs. They can close the gap if/when cloud LLM progress stalls. Let's not conflate Apple's failure in cutting edge transformer models with good strategy.
  • LoganDark 10mo ago
    Apple Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with "set[ting] up complicated local LLMs".
• Jyaif 10mo ago
  I agree with the assessment that Apple has by far the best platform to ship features. That being said, if people spend all their time interacting with LLMs for nearly everything, which is the direction we seem to be going in, what locks them in the Apple ecosystem?
• cyanydeez 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, apple will never ditch its luxury brand, so like its memory, even if its good, their business model will never leverage wide spread adoption. I think you have steve jobs colored glasses.
• iqandjoke 10mo ago
  Have you ever heard of Doubao mobile phone, specifically the Nubia M153? Would Apple willing to do it to give value to customer but not app developer?