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It seems to me that people have been saying that Apple will be left behind since the Apple II. That they keep doing non-obvious things that somehow succeed is

by Lio 8mo ago

It seems to me that people have been saying that Apple will be left behind since the Apple II. That they keep doing non-obvious things that somehow succeed is what makes them an interesting company. I don't know that Apple will dominate AI, personally I dislike Siri and iOS, but I think Apple have a very good shot at delivering workable local AI for professionals. If Apple can lift the inference performance of their forthcoming M5 Ultra chip I think they may become an off the shelf standard for those that want to run large models locally. That in itself is probably enough to keep them relevant until actual useful uses of Apple Intelligence come to light.

alex43578 8mo ago
I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.
- Lio 8mo ago
  I think there's room for multiple approaches here. Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc. There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it. I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    Definitely room for multiple approaches, including local LLMs. But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices. A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers. Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
- rubyn00bie 8mo ago
  I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next logical step is home users. It also makes scaling a lot easier because you don’t need increasingly expensive, complex, and power hungry data centers. It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI. Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
    - einr 8mo ago
      This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers. It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?* And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows. * (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)

by Lio 8mo ago

alex43578 8mo ago

I don’t think Apple or Microsoft (via Windows) will dominate AI. There’s just too much value in the AI being in the cloud (big powerful models vs local) and across your devices (more context on you, running on low powered edge devices like watches, glasses, smart home devices), and the idea of an OS being a decisive factor is already fading with how much work people do in a browser or cloud app.

Lio 8mo ago
I think there's room for multiple approaches here. Cloud based AI obviously has a lot of advantages e.g. batched proccessing on the best hardward, low power edge devices, data sharing, etc. There's still room for local inference though. I don't know that I want "more context on me" all the time. I want some context, some of the time and I want to be in full control of it. I'd pay for that. I don't think it will be for everyone but a number of people would pay a premium for an off shelf product that provides privacy and control that cloud vendors by their nature just can't offer.
- alex43578 8mo ago
  Definitely room for multiple approaches, including local LLMs. But I just don't think for most users that local LLM capabilities will be a deciding factor in either hardware or OS choices. A cloud subscription model will be the premium offering ($20 for consumers, $100 to $1000 or pay-per-token for businesses), and inevitably something ad-supported at a lower price or free for low-end consumers. Once Joe Consumer has access to that subscription ChatGPT or free tier, are they really going to run a far-less-powerful model on their laptop? Outside of a few simple tasks like semantic search in your email, notes, photos; or localized transcription, local models will just be too far behind the curve for the public to make much use of them.
rubyn00bie 8mo ago
I don’t see how AI won’t end up running on personal devices. It’s like how mainframes were the original computing platform and then we had the PC revolution. If anything, I think Apple is uniquely positioned to pull the rug on a lot of these cloud models. It might take ten or 15 years, but eventually we’ll see an arms race to do so. There’s too much money on the table, and once cloud providers are tapped out the next logical step is home users. It also makes scaling a lot easier because you don’t need increasingly expensive, complex, and power hungry data centers. It wasn’t that long ago (ignoring the current DRAM market shenanigans) that it was unthinkable to have a single machine with over terabyte of RAM and 192 physical cores. Now that’s absolutely doable in a single workstation. Heck even my comparatively paltry 96GB of RAM would’ve been absurd in 2010, now there are single prosumer GPUs with that.
- alex43578 8mo ago
  With the rate of progress (and in the opposite direction, the physical limitations Intel/AMD/TSMC/ETC are bumping into), there's no guarantees about what a machine will look like a decade from now. But, simple logic applies: if the user's machine scales to X amounts of RAM, the hyperscaler's rack scales to X*Y RAM and assuming the performance/scaling relationship we've seen holds true, it will be correspondingly far smarter/better/powerful compared to the user's AI. Maybe that won't matter when the user is asking it a 5th grade question, but for any more complex application of AI than "what's the weather" or "turn on a light", users should want a better AI, particularly if they don't have to pay for all that silicon sitting around unused in their machine for most of the day?
  - einr 8mo ago
    This argument would sound nearly identical if you made it in the 70s or early 80s about mainframes and personal computers. It's not that mainframes (or supercomputers, or servers, or the cloud) stopped existing, it's that there was a "good enough" point where the personal computer was powerful enough to do all the things that people care about. Why would this be different?* And aren't we all paying for a bunch of silicon that sits mostly unused? I have a full modern GPU in my Apple SoC capable of throwing a ridiculous number of polygons per second at the screen and I'm using it to display two terminal emulator windows. * (I can think of a number of reasons why it would in fact turn out different, but none of them have to do with the limits of technology -- they are all about control or economic incentives)