Comment by concinds

Comment by concinds a day ago

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An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Invented-Here syndrome/handicap in this case.

blitzar a day ago

Apple might have gotten very lucky here ... the money might be in finding uses, and selling physical products rather than burning piles of cash training models that are SOTA for 5 minutes before being yet another model in a crowded field.

My money is still on Apple and Google to be the winners from LLMs.

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  • illiac786 6 hours ago

    I agree. That’s why I think EU‘s DMA is visionary, even if not perfect. LLM wars will prove EU regulators right I anticipate.

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  • lamontcg a day ago

    And when the cost of training LLMs starts to come down to under $1B/yr, Apple can jump on board, having saved >$100B in not trying to chase after everyone else to try to get there first.

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  • Melatonic 21 hours ago

    Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ?

    I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.

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    • jnaina 15 hours ago

      Mostly AWS actually. Apple uses Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips to serve search services. "Fruit Stand" is the internal name for Apple at AWS.

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    • ghaff 20 hours ago

      Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.

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      • no_wizard 19 hours ago

        I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.

        Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.

        Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.

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        • ghaff 13 hours ago

          Companies were still figuring out Linux with servers at the time. Xserve seemed like it might be something of interest to at least academia but Apple never really had their heart in it as I wrote at the time.

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      • simondotau 15 hours ago

        How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.

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      • pstuart 18 hours ago

        With Thunderbolt 5 and M5 Ultras, Apple could be building lower cost clusters that could possibly scale enough while keeping a lower power budget. Obviously that can't compete with NVIDIA racks, but for mobile consumer inference maybe that would be enough?

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  • DrewADesign 15 hours ago

    Yeah… there’s this “bro— do you even business?” vibe in the tech world right now pointed at any tech firm not burning oil tankers full of cash (and oil, for that matter,) training a giant model. That money isn’t free — the economic consequences of burning billions to make a product that will be several steps behind, at best, are giant. There’s a very real chance these companies won’t recoup that money if their product isn’t attractive to hoards of users willing to pay more money for AI than anyone currently is. It doesn’t even make them look cool to regular people — their customers hate hearing about AI. Since there are viable third party options available, I think Apple would have to be out of their goddamned minds to try and jump in that race right now. They’re a product company. Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.

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    • jhee3 14 hours ago

      Something weird has gone wrong in the psyche of humans.

      Why are we even talking about 'AI'? When I heat up food in a microwave, I dont care about the technology - I care about whether it heats up the food or not.

      For some bizarre reason people keep talking about the technology (LLMs) - the consumers/buyers in the market for the most part dont give a hoot about it. They want to know how the thing fits in their life and most importantly what are the benefits.

      Ive unfortunately been exposed to some Google Ads re. Gemini and let me tell you - their marketing capabilities are god awful.

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    • 46493168 14 hours ago

      >Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.

      You're right, and this is proven. Apple has fumbled a whole release cycle on AI and severely curbed expectations, and they still sell 200m iPhones a year and lead the market [0]

      [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/apple-leads-g...

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      • mschuster91 14 hours ago

        Easy enough. Most people abhor AI and want nothing to do with it. The only ones who actually love AI (or what's being sold to them under that banner) are clueless and/or greedy executives, propagandists, and a select few legitimate AI artists doing pretty nice remixes of Star Wars, Harry Potter and the likes in a quality not seen before.

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microtherion 19 hours ago

Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).

So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.

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  • EgregiousCube 15 hours ago

    Why would paying everyone $300M across the board be healthier than using it as a tool to (attempt to) attract the best of the best?

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