4 ms·

What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and progr

by ggm 4mo ago

What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? Maybe this strategy works, even in that world. Remember when we all thought (were told we thought) the world was heading to 3D views of our 2D lived experience like a solid Cube of GUI we could rotate around and live inside? Well Apple took the simple 2D square pane of virtual desktops and .. made it a SONY strip. One variable: sideways. So here we are being told AI is the future. Apple seems to be saying "yes but it will run local" which might be a safe bet if AI comes true but I wonder how many of us want the AI outcome, which is morally speaking the 3D immersive GUI cube here: what if we don't want that?

atonse 4mo ago
I can't imagine any world where we put this AI stuff back in the box. It is simply too useful and too powerful. And as we start seeing all his upheaval where models are getting banned, etc, I can even see the appeal of on-device AI increasing for a lot of use cases. So I think Apple has the right instinct. In fact, I've had the thought multiple times that I really want a lot of workflows just running on my device. Workflows like fast vector search (already fast on the m4, but I want it more common place), or realtime transcription and summarization to be even faster, on device, etc.
- enos_feedler 4mo ago
  To me AI is on par with the internet and what made it so powerful was piracy and porn and just the wide spectrum of things that are possible when you connect machines together. We are going to need the same thing again. Freedom to use any model that does any thing we want.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    If it happens it's because of china but it will be forbidden in USA.
    - simianparrot 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - LtWorf 4mo ago
        https://www.aimadetools.com/blog/claude-fable-5-banned-us-export-controls https://www.aimadetools.com/blog/claude-fable-5-banned-us-ex...
        msdz 4mo ago
        Maybe two things can be true at the same time? https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/ https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/
        LtWorf 4mo ago
        They're still the only ones releasing any open model at all? Plus, not like chatgpt is going to reply honestly about sensitive current hot topics in USA politics. Normally it has filters and refuses to respond as well.
    - roncinephile 4mo ago
      Looking to China as a purveyor of laissez faire freedom to do whatever you want is so nonsensical as to be a joke. Both US government and the Chinese government want this newfound power to be on a tight leash.
  - fatata123 4mo ago
    [dead]
olalonde 4mo ago
AI already has massive, growing adoption, whereas "3D immersive GUI cubes" never really had any.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  It has at the current subsidised prices.
  - olalonde 4mo ago
    I doubt inference costs will scale up significantly, but even if they do, it simply strengthens the strategic case for Apple's focus on local inference.
    - mrguyorama 4mo ago
      Inference costs wont increase but inference prices have to go up dramatically. Investors are expecting trillions of dollars to come out of this play. That's only possible through monopoly pricing essentially. "Being a profitable business", which selling tokens could absolutely be, is not sufficient. They need to own a large chunk of the world
jghn 4mo ago
The worst case scenario is that we're at a plateau and LLMs max out around here. And it'd stand to reason that if that happens we'd see local models catch up at least to some extent. Compared to 5 years ago, that's a pretty good world.
jimbokun 4mo ago
Without AI everyone’s computing needs were pretty well satisfied with current phones and laptops. LLMs are the one thing that could drive new demand if they can run locally.
- justincormack 4mo ago
  Not software developers, they were already flocking to Apple M series machines with more RAM and cores before LLMs.
seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
AI was the only reason I bought a new computer (a refurb M3 max with 64GB). Without AI, no idea what we should bother with, it depends on what application comes out to drive local computing power (maybe better games? Yawn).
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
zombot 4mo ago
> what if we don't want that? Do we have a choice? It's being forced upon us by folks who have the power to distort any market they want. Energy prices are rising, and the PC industry is about to be destroyed by component prices. It will be dumb clients that run the software our feudal overlords of the data centers will have the grace to grant us. And the government lets it happen because it furthers their interests.
- nok22kon 4mo ago
  those billion people which use LLMs every week, are they all being forced to use it?
- rhdjcnfj373 4mo ago
  China might be the only spanner in those works, so expect further action taken against them. Most likely sanctions on their hardware
znpy 4mo ago
> What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? I think reducing the die area dedicated to ai stuff is not going to be a problem. And in fairness apple already has essentially ai-less hardware in the form of the MacBook neo and it’s been an astonishing success. I have one and it’s a very good laptop, particularly for the price i paid it.
notatoad 4mo ago
this is the backup strategy. the "AI doesn't pan out" scenario is basically if claude and openai go bankrupt, we continue running local models on our hardware. there isn't a future where we all just decide that nah, we don't want AI anymore. usefuly things don't disappear.
khalic 4mo ago
AI isn't going anywhere, this is akin to the .com bubble. It burst, but the internet didn't go anywhere. While companies can fail, this technology is with us for the long run now, short of societal collapse.
dagmx 4mo ago
Anything AI focused in silicon is also valuable for a ton of other use cases. If LLMs and GenAI don’t pan out, that silicon just gets used for other processing. Then they scale back on the dedicated die space in subsequent generations. It’s all fairly easy bets to make and correct.
khurs 4mo ago
"What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs?" Can't it do both? The M1 Pro with 16gb+ is still more than nearly everyone needs.
friendzis 4mo ago
In between flat material-ish (hehe) design windows and 3d compiz cube with burn effects we have settled on transparency and blur effects with a bit of visual planes thrown in. It's highly unlikely we will end up tokenmaxxing everything, it's highly unlikely the genie can lose enough weight to fit back into the bottle. We will end up somewhere in between that strikes a balance between nice, productive and cost effective.
jmyeet 4mo ago
So I think it's fair to say that AI isn't going away. That doens't mean that SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic won't crash. But I've long believed that within 5 years we'll have access to relatively cheap hardware that can run sufficient but not cutting-edge models locally. You can buy a 5090 PC for <$5000 already so I guess it's already true but I think we'll do even better. So what happens? Nothing. If Apple make M7 Max/Ultra computes with 128-768GB of RAM and nobody buys them then... nobody buys them. Apple isn't betting the entire company on AI just like Google isn't. The rest of the internals are the same Macbook, Mac Mini or Mac Studio. You're just selling something with less RAM.
- subarctic 4mo ago
  I find it very unlikely that nobody buys them, some people will definitely buy them to run giant open LLMS. But there's also not much risk to apple because those configs would probably be made to order
- oblio 4mo ago
  > Google isn't Google sold (will sell?) about $70bn worth of Google shares to fund AI infrastructure build outs. It's also issued bonds (=debt; I forget the number, $30bn?) to pay for more infrastructure. Fairly sure it also has established a shadow company, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to stash away unpleasant financial things it doesn't want to show, also for the AI build out. Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle are overstretching at the moment. They are predicted to become cash flow negative (more money going out than coming in) if they keep going at this rate, some time in 2027 or 2028. Now, they won't go bankrupt but it's possible they will be hit by huge restructuring waves once the dust settles.
  - jmyeet 4mo ago
    Google has a market cap over $4 trillion and it's 2025 financials were $130 billion profit on $400 billion revenue, which was something like 15% Y/Y growth. $100 billion in equity and bond offerings is not betting the farm on AI. Additionally, Google's data centers are notoriously efficient and they build their own networking hardware as as their TPUs. Now their TPUs lag behind NVidia offerings obviously but they'll keep getting better. Google is the company I'm least concerned about in the AI space. As for Amazon, I'm not sure what their split is on in-house AI build out and usage vs AWS. I suspect the majority is for AWS and I also suspect their ROI is insanely short (ie less than 5 years) on any AI capex. A lot of us on HN dismiss Oracle with good reason but it's also fair to say they've survived and thrived through the dot-com crash, the GFC and the pandemic until now. They're clearly doing something right. Meta I think is the Sick Man of Tech. Their social media assets are of declining value (IMHO) and they seem completely unable to adapt to changing conditions. The whole Metaverse was a massive $70B+ boondoggle on something long before they had anything resembling a product-market fit. They seem unable to leverage their social media assets for building any competitive AI products or tech. Plus they seem unable to hire and retain key staff in this space.

by ggm 4mo ago

atonse 4mo ago

I can't imagine any world where we put this AI stuff back in the box. It is simply too useful and too powerful. And as we start seeing all his upheaval where models are getting banned, etc, I can even see the appeal of on-device AI increasing for a lot of use cases. So I think Apple has the right instinct. In fact, I've had the thought multiple times that I really want a lot of workflows just running on my device. Workflows like fast vector search (already fast on the m4, but I want it more common place), or realtime transcription and summarization to be even faster, on device, etc.

enos_feedler 4mo ago
To me AI is on par with the internet and what made it so powerful was piracy and porn and just the wide spectrum of things that are possible when you connect machines together. We are going to need the same thing again. Freedom to use any model that does any thing we want.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  If it happens it's because of china but it will be forbidden in USA.
  - simianparrot 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      https://www.aimadetools.com/blog/claude-fable-5-banned-us-export-controls https://www.aimadetools.com/blog/claude-fable-5-banned-us-ex...
      - msdz 4mo ago
        Maybe two things can be true at the same time? https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/ https://swelljoe.com/post/open-model-censorship/
        LtWorf 4mo ago
        They're still the only ones releasing any open model at all? Plus, not like chatgpt is going to reply honestly about sensitive current hot topics in USA politics. Normally it has filters and refuses to respond as well.
  - roncinephile 4mo ago
    Looking to China as a purveyor of laissez faire freedom to do whatever you want is so nonsensical as to be a joke. Both US government and the Chinese government want this newfound power to be on a tight leash.
- fatata123 4mo ago
  [dead]

olalonde 4mo ago

AI already has massive, growing adoption, whereas "3D immersive GUI cubes" never really had any.

LtWorf 4mo ago
It has at the current subsidised prices.
- olalonde 4mo ago
  I doubt inference costs will scale up significantly, but even if they do, it simply strengthens the strategic case for Apple's focus on local inference.
  - mrguyorama 4mo ago
    Inference costs wont increase but inference prices have to go up dramatically. Investors are expecting trillions of dollars to come out of this play. That's only possible through monopoly pricing essentially. "Being a profitable business", which selling tokens could absolutely be, is not sufficient. They need to own a large chunk of the world

jghn 4mo ago

The worst case scenario is that we're at a plateau and LLMs max out around here. And it'd stand to reason that if that happens we'd see local models catch up at least to some extent. Compared to 5 years ago, that's a pretty good world.

jimbokun 4mo ago

Without AI everyone’s computing needs were pretty well satisfied with current phones and laptops. LLMs are the one thing that could drive new demand if they can run locally.

justincormack 4mo ago
Not software developers, they were already flocking to Apple M series machines with more RAM and cores before LLMs.

seanmcdirmid 4mo ago

AI was the only reason I bought a new computer (a refurb M3 max with 64GB). Without AI, no idea what we should bother with, it depends on what application comes out to drive local computing power (maybe better games? Yawn).

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

zombot 4mo ago

> what if we don't want that? Do we have a choice? It's being forced upon us by folks who have the power to distort any market they want. Energy prices are rising, and the PC industry is about to be destroyed by component prices. It will be dumb clients that run the software our feudal overlords of the data centers will have the grace to grant us. And the government lets it happen because it furthers their interests.

nok22kon 4mo ago
those billion people which use LLMs every week, are they all being forced to use it?
rhdjcnfj373 4mo ago
China might be the only spanner in those works, so expect further action taken against them. Most likely sanctions on their hardware

znpy 4mo ago

> What's their backup plan if the AI world doesn't pan out? What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs? I think reducing the die area dedicated to ai stuff is not going to be a problem. And in fairness apple already has essentially ai-less hardware in the form of the MacBook neo and it’s been an astonishing success. I have one and it’s a very good laptop, particularly for the price i paid it.

notatoad 4mo ago

this is the backup strategy. the "AI doesn't pan out" scenario is basically if claude and openai go bankrupt, we continue running local models on our hardware. there isn't a future where we all just decide that nah, we don't want AI anymore. usefuly things don't disappear.

khalic 4mo ago

AI isn't going anywhere, this is akin to the .com bubble. It burst, but the internet didn't go anywhere. While companies can fail, this technology is with us for the long run now, short of societal collapse.

dagmx 4mo ago

Anything AI focused in silicon is also valuable for a ton of other use cases. If LLMs and GenAI don’t pan out, that silicon just gets used for other processing. Then they scale back on the dedicated die space in subsequent generations. It’s all fairly easy bets to make and correct.

khurs 4mo ago

"What if it turns out people want base compute capability and lots of RAM for filestore cache and programs?" Can't it do both? The M1 Pro with 16gb+ is still more than nearly everyone needs.

friendzis 4mo ago

In between flat material-ish (hehe) design windows and 3d compiz cube with burn effects we have settled on transparency and blur effects with a bit of visual planes thrown in. It's highly unlikely we will end up tokenmaxxing everything, it's highly unlikely the genie can lose enough weight to fit back into the bottle. We will end up somewhere in between that strikes a balance between nice, productive and cost effective.

jmyeet 4mo ago

So I think it's fair to say that AI isn't going away. That doens't mean that SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic won't crash. But I've long believed that within 5 years we'll have access to relatively cheap hardware that can run sufficient but not cutting-edge models locally. You can buy a 5090 PC for <$5000 already so I guess it's already true but I think we'll do even better. So what happens? Nothing. If Apple make M7 Max/Ultra computes with 128-768GB of RAM and nobody buys them then... nobody buys them. Apple isn't betting the entire company on AI just like Google isn't. The rest of the internals are the same Macbook, Mac Mini or Mac Studio. You're just selling something with less RAM.

subarctic 4mo ago
I find it very unlikely that nobody buys them, some people will definitely buy them to run giant open LLMS. But there's also not much risk to apple because those configs would probably be made to order
oblio 4mo ago
> Google isn't Google sold (will sell?) about $70bn worth of Google shares to fund AI infrastructure build outs. It's also issued bonds (=debt; I forget the number, $30bn?) to pay for more infrastructure. Fairly sure it also has established a shadow company, a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to stash away unpleasant financial things it doesn't want to show, also for the AI build out. Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle are overstretching at the moment. They are predicted to become cash flow negative (more money going out than coming in) if they keep going at this rate, some time in 2027 or 2028. Now, they won't go bankrupt but it's possible they will be hit by huge restructuring waves once the dust settles.
- jmyeet 4mo ago
  Google has a market cap over $4 trillion and it's 2025 financials were $130 billion profit on $400 billion revenue, which was something like 15% Y/Y growth. $100 billion in equity and bond offerings is not betting the farm on AI. Additionally, Google's data centers are notoriously efficient and they build their own networking hardware as as their TPUs. Now their TPUs lag behind NVidia offerings obviously but they'll keep getting better. Google is the company I'm least concerned about in the AI space. As for Amazon, I'm not sure what their split is on in-house AI build out and usage vs AWS. I suspect the majority is for AWS and I also suspect their ROI is insanely short (ie less than 5 years) on any AI capex. A lot of us on HN dismiss Oracle with good reason but it's also fair to say they've survived and thrived through the dot-com crash, the GFC and the pandemic until now. They're clearly doing something right. Meta I think is the Sick Man of Tech. Their social media assets are of declining value (IMHO) and they seem completely unable to adapt to changing conditions. The whole Metaverse was a massive $70B+ boondoggle on something long before they had anything resembling a product-market fit. They seem unable to leverage their social media assets for building any competitive AI products or tech. Plus they seem unable to hire and retain key staff in this space.