6 ms·

This is Apple commoditizing LLMs while keeping control of the UX. They are a hardware company and will keep selling the best machine for AI use. Well done.

klausa 4mo ago
How is this Apple keeping control of the UX?
- matwood 4mo ago
  The betas of the next OS's include a Siri AI chatbot, and the AI features are built into various parts of the OS. A user has no idea what model is powering any of it - Apple controls the UX.
  - klausa 4mo ago
    I'm aware. How is this relevant to the posted article?
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      The article is about (from the eyes of a user) white-labeled usage of Claude models on Apple devices, this subthread is about white-labeled usage of LLMs on Apple devices, how is it not relevant?
      - klausa 4mo ago
        Because that's not what the article is about; this is about a unified API for the _app developers_ to access different kind of models. That API has no user-facing components, and has no influence over UX of what the end-users are interacting with. The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.
        embedding-shape 4mo ago
        > The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly. That's the point! That's the whole "white-labeling" part, and what the commentator earlier is talking about. You're very close in understanding the context here!
        klausa 4mo ago
        I’m sorry, so your position now is that “being completely invisible to the users” is “controlling the UX”?
        embedding-shape 4mo ago
        I think you're taking the written words a bit too literally here. Read it with a more lax filter and less literal word-meaning, and I think the original comment will become a bit clearer.
        klausa 4mo ago
        You know what, I've been a bit too snipe-y in my previous comments, and it led to to discussion devolving in unproductive ways. I'd genuinely like to understand where you're coming from more. I think we're all in agreement that this framework is very much about letting developers swap the models easily, and treat them as commodities. That seems pretty obvious. I do however still don't see how this has anything to do with controlling the UX (or the new Siri for that matter! The new Siri doesn't use Anthropic models, and there are no extensions point for it to do so — that's pretty much the whole reason why it won't be available in the EU). Help me see your point of view!
        geodel 4mo ago
        I don't know if it helps. One way to look at it is branding product. Apple is branding the product. So they supposedly have more value to customers as it stands for quality, awareness, trust etc. As oppose to 100 little components in computer which maybe from different brands, and Apple may switch brand year to year without user noticing. So those components makers have little power over Apple. Same is happening to Claude software package as it would stand behind branded Apple foundation models. From pure software developer thinking this is exactly what Claude offered here so where is the issue? Issue is in larger space where Apple could take steps to block Claude out of their ecosystem if they so wish at some point and there is little Claude / Anthropic would do if Apple Foundation is the only thing that Apple consumers would know about.
  - mr_toad 4mo ago
    I’ll be curious to see if they make the models accessible to Shortcuts, like they do with the current models.
tedggh 4mo ago
Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
- alecco 4mo ago
  In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    > I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous) Truly fascinating ecosystem and community in general, as experiences differ so wildly. Anthropic's models seems far behind OpenAI to me, especially when you get into "Pro" territory, and there doesn't seem to be any worthy competition to Pro Mode available at all. And this is said with someone who use both platforms, and spend a lot of my day interacting with agents and LLMs in various ways. The interesting part is that probably so do you too, and probably your experience and what you share lines up with what you experience! Yet we come away with basically opposite takeaways :) I don't think either of us are wrong either, somehow.
    - alecco 4mo ago
      When you say "Pro" territory, do you include Fable?
      - embedding-shape 4mo ago
        You mean the model that was available for a whole of three days? No, I had played around with it a tiny bit, but not much than that. I guess time will tell if it gets close.
swingboy 4mo ago
Does “the best machine for AI use” apply here considering these models are still server-side?
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  The play here seems pretty evidence, if I may assume. Apple creates an interface that is generalized enough so you can easily swap models, and while Claude is preferred by Apple today, it may be any provider or even local models in the future, and the APIs the developers use remain the same, so "migration" becomes easier.
- brookst 4mo ago
  I would think so, as “use” doesn’t specify implementation. If you use a word processor it may be running locally or remotely. From a user’s perspective, it doesn’t matter.
  - sqquima 4mo ago
    [dead]
- ABS 4mo ago
  for the on-device model, yes it runs on the Neural Engine (at the moment) so a newer chip means faster, cheaper local inference. For the server side path this Claude package is about your machine is irrelevant since it's a network call. The same API covers both, so "best machine for AI" only bites when the session is actually local. But we can imagine that the balance of what's on-device vs what's remote will move continuously towards the former as time, improved HW and improved local models keep progressing
- WorldMaker 4mo ago
  Apple's been trying to make the marketing appeal that "Private Compute Cloud" is also a hardware project. Given it seems to rely on low level details of device Hardware Security Modules, it's maybe even at least a little bit more than just "marketing spin".
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
halJordan 4mo ago
It's been clear for years now that eventually ai will be embedded at the os level. Apple even recognized it way back when they first introduced Apple Intelligence. Yes they're commoditizing llms or whatever. But this has been a user facing feature they've been iterating on for years now
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
amelius 4mo ago
Now we only need to commoditize the hardware.
- hedora 4mo ago
  Check out AMD’s offerings. They’re typically a bit better on high TDP stuff, and a bit worse on low TDP. They mostly match in the middle. I have a $500 AMD NUC and a slightly older $2000 MBP. Inference throughput is within 2x. The comparison is a little messy: AMD currently maxes out at 128GB of RAM vs Apple’s discontinued 512. Apple has nothing to rival the Steam Deck.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  This is what originally made Microsoft the most lucrative tech company of its day. Android succeeded at this to an extent with phones, but Apple has been able to keep its products differentiated enough in the minds of consumers to maintain their premium pricing. So far.
  - Danox 4mo ago
    Vertical computer company operating system plus hardware under one roof.
post-it 4mo ago
> while keeping control of the UX. Extremely tangential, but this is my favourite upshot of AI. For decades, companies have been walling off their services and forcing us into their fuckass UIs. Now over the course of the last twelve months, suddenly everything has an MCP and I can use it through my command line chat interface. Any company that doesn't adapt gets so hammered by people's AI-DIY web scrapers that they have no choice but to cave.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
wuliwong 4mo ago
I think there is an opportunity for a new hardware company to enter the market. I know this is just hypothetical but I believe that AI is revolutionary enough where a new approach to hardware and UI/UX will enable far more value to be derived from AI. I think the incumbents like Apple will stick to their familiar platforms and could get beaten out by a new competitor that is AI native to the core. Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
dlev_pika 4mo ago
Apple’s play was a masterclass - unsure how deliberate it was, or how much of a choice thy actually had, but it’s turning out pretty well IMO. Now if they can further reinforce their angle on Privacy, they might continue to be what they are (or more)

klausa 4mo ago

How is this Apple keeping control of the UX?

matwood 4mo ago
The betas of the next OS's include a Siri AI chatbot, and the AI features are built into various parts of the OS. A user has no idea what model is powering any of it - Apple controls the UX.
- klausa 4mo ago
  I'm aware. How is this relevant to the posted article?
  - embedding-shape 4mo ago
    The article is about (from the eyes of a user) white-labeled usage of Claude models on Apple devices, this subthread is about white-labeled usage of LLMs on Apple devices, how is it not relevant?
    - klausa 4mo ago
      Because that's not what the article is about; this is about a unified API for the _app developers_ to access different kind of models. That API has no user-facing components, and has no influence over UX of what the end-users are interacting with. The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.
      - embedding-shape 4mo ago
        > The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly. That's the point! That's the whole "white-labeling" part, and what the commentator earlier is talking about. You're very close in understanding the context here!
        klausa 4mo ago
        I’m sorry, so your position now is that “being completely invisible to the users” is “controlling the UX”?
        embedding-shape 4mo ago
        I think you're taking the written words a bit too literally here. Read it with a more lax filter and less literal word-meaning, and I think the original comment will become a bit clearer.
        klausa 4mo ago
        You know what, I've been a bit too snipe-y in my previous comments, and it led to to discussion devolving in unproductive ways. I'd genuinely like to understand where you're coming from more. I think we're all in agreement that this framework is very much about letting developers swap the models easily, and treat them as commodities. That seems pretty obvious. I do however still don't see how this has anything to do with controlling the UX (or the new Siri for that matter! The new Siri doesn't use Anthropic models, and there are no extensions point for it to do so — that's pretty much the whole reason why it won't be available in the EU). Help me see your point of view!
        geodel 4mo ago
        I don't know if it helps. One way to look at it is branding product. Apple is branding the product. So they supposedly have more value to customers as it stands for quality, awareness, trust etc. As oppose to 100 little components in computer which maybe from different brands, and Apple may switch brand year to year without user noticing. So those components makers have little power over Apple. Same is happening to Claude software package as it would stand behind branded Apple foundation models. From pure software developer thinking this is exactly what Claude offered here so where is the issue? Issue is in larger space where Apple could take steps to block Claude out of their ecosystem if they so wish at some point and there is little Claude / Anthropic would do if Apple Foundation is the only thing that Apple consumers would know about.
- mr_toad 4mo ago
  I’ll be curious to see if they make the models accessible to Shortcuts, like they do with the current models.

tedggh 4mo ago

Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

alecco 4mo ago
In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind. I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  > I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous) Truly fascinating ecosystem and community in general, as experiences differ so wildly. Anthropic's models seems far behind OpenAI to me, especially when you get into "Pro" territory, and there doesn't seem to be any worthy competition to Pro Mode available at all. And this is said with someone who use both platforms, and spend a lot of my day interacting with agents and LLMs in various ways. The interesting part is that probably so do you too, and probably your experience and what you share lines up with what you experience! Yet we come away with basically opposite takeaways :) I don't think either of us are wrong either, somehow.
  - alecco 4mo ago
    When you say "Pro" territory, do you include Fable?
    - embedding-shape 4mo ago
      You mean the model that was available for a whole of three days? No, I had played around with it a tiny bit, but not much than that. I guess time will tell if it gets close.

swingboy 4mo ago

Does “the best machine for AI use” apply here considering these models are still server-side?

embedding-shape 4mo ago
The play here seems pretty evidence, if I may assume. Apple creates an interface that is generalized enough so you can easily swap models, and while Claude is preferred by Apple today, it may be any provider or even local models in the future, and the APIs the developers use remain the same, so "migration" becomes easier.
brookst 4mo ago
I would think so, as “use” doesn’t specify implementation. If you use a word processor it may be running locally or remotely. From a user’s perspective, it doesn’t matter.
- sqquima 4mo ago
  [dead]
ABS 4mo ago
for the on-device model, yes it runs on the Neural Engine (at the moment) so a newer chip means faster, cheaper local inference. For the server side path this Claude package is about your machine is irrelevant since it's a network call. The same API covers both, so "best machine for AI" only bites when the session is actually local. But we can imagine that the balance of what's on-device vs what's remote will move continuously towards the former as time, improved HW and improved local models keep progressing
WorldMaker 4mo ago
Apple's been trying to make the marketing appeal that "Private Compute Cloud" is also a hardware project. Given it seems to rely on low level details of device Hardware Security Modules, it's maybe even at least a little bit more than just "marketing spin".

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

halJordan 4mo ago

It's been clear for years now that eventually ai will be embedded at the os level. Apple even recognized it way back when they first introduced Apple Intelligence. Yes they're commoditizing llms or whatever. But this has been a user facing feature they've been iterating on for years now

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

amelius 4mo ago

Now we only need to commoditize the hardware.

hedora 4mo ago
Check out AMD’s offerings. They’re typically a bit better on high TDP stuff, and a bit worse on low TDP. They mostly match in the middle. I have a $500 AMD NUC and a slightly older $2000 MBP. Inference throughput is within 2x. The comparison is a little messy: AMD currently maxes out at 128GB of RAM vs Apple’s discontinued 512. Apple has nothing to rival the Steam Deck.
jimbokun 4mo ago
This is what originally made Microsoft the most lucrative tech company of its day. Android succeeded at this to an extent with phones, but Apple has been able to keep its products differentiated enough in the minds of consumers to maintain their premium pricing. So far.
- Danox 4mo ago
  Vertical computer company operating system plus hardware under one roof.

post-it 4mo ago

> while keeping control of the UX. Extremely tangential, but this is my favourite upshot of AI. For decades, companies have been walling off their services and forcing us into their fuckass UIs. Now over the course of the last twelve months, suddenly everything has an MCP and I can use it through my command line chat interface. Any company that doesn't adapt gets so hammered by people's AI-DIY web scrapers that they have no choice but to cave.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

wuliwong 4mo ago

I think there is an opportunity for a new hardware company to enter the market. I know this is just hypothetical but I believe that AI is revolutionary enough where a new approach to hardware and UI/UX will enable far more value to be derived from AI. I think the incumbents like Apple will stick to their familiar platforms and could get beaten out by a new competitor that is AI native to the core. Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dlev_pika 4mo ago

Apple’s play was a masterclass - unsure how deliberate it was, or how much of a choice thy actually had, but it’s turning out pretty well IMO. Now if they can further reinforce their angle on Privacy, they might continue to be what they are (or more)