Can't we have hardware companies that make hardware, software (AI) companies that make software, and data companies (or government institutions) that run the software on the hardware and deal with our data?
I switched from Mac to Linux precisely for this reason and the biggest surprise has been that whenever I touch a Mac again it feels like poverty.
Not because the UX is bad but because I know how the company behind it operates and I have zero trust for anything that happens on the machine.
> Not because the UX is bad
I don’t see the connection. The first sentence says that walled gardens create bad UX, but Macs are the premier mainstream walled gardens and you don’t find their UX bad.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...
Which is why the EU has decided to break up the walled gardens - although IMHO they could ramp up their efforts a bit.
Using my Apple Silicon Macbook is a way better user experience than my Intel Macbook ever was. It certainly feels like they invested in user experience well after the walls were up around the garden.
Just because vertical integration occasionally works doesn't mean it is actually good for the consumer.
Omg this, can Apple please stop sabotaging Google Maps and Google Photos :(
Source: former Xoogler PM
I fully believe Google holds back differentiating features and DSPA is certainly mismanaged, but I'd hope these basic functionalities are not the ones since there's always the tradeoff between serving 50%+ of your mobile users and trying to differentiate Android/Pixel...
Apple does shit like make it impossible for Google Fi to set up easily on iPhone, so I just assumed most of the UX idiocy came from Apple's anticompetitive review process.
the eu disagrees in that it views itself as representative of the consumer. similar to how us states set laws that may be more strict than others.
get a large enough government of a populace with a large enough portion of the sales, and companies can be made to act. which can be good, but isn’t a guarantee.
just because companies can be forced to act doesn’t mean the forced actions are actually good for the consumer.
(plus a decent amount is political theatre.)
If Nvidia, Amd and Intel were in a battle for offering the best VFM, none of these companies would be hopping into hardware. Apple's strong commitment to chip making coincides with years of stagnation from Qualcomm and Intel.
From my experience, companies love nothing more than a 3rd party that solves your problem for you, better than you and at a price that's easily cheaper than what I'd cost to build it in-house. This is especially true when the 3rd party product is an internal spec (gpu, cpu) rather than a competing platform (android auto)
There is a reason car companies don't build their own speakers or tires....but still try to build their own UI (no matter how bad)
If you have an algorithm that works and need scale, you must vertically integrate to maintain an edge over those using more general compute architectures.
OpenAI wanting to vertically merge to make their own AI chips may seem harmless enough (it's a good business move, we can cut expenses)! But we can't forget that Sam Altman just a few months ago told Congress he supports making an organization that companies need permission from to being creating/utilizing advanced AI systems. And he's such a kind man he's willing to lead that organization himself.
Obviously someone integrating the chips to train AI, and having the ability to approve/deny his own competition is a huge red flag.
NVidia has a near monopoly on the AI hardware market right now, so some vertical integration of alternative AI hardware doesn't seem nearly as big if a deal if it is needed to fight that current monopoly.
Let's instead go back to when we actually enforced the anti-trust laws that we have. That was nice.
Ideally what we would see is OpenAI investing in a new but independently operated chip manufacturer that makes chips to their standards. Though is it also possible that a chip of such standard would be so specialized that it wouldn't be usable by others? I'm not a hardware person, so that's a genuine question.
That's competition. Apple Silicon completes with Intel at an ecosystem level.
Because anything to do with hardware, particularly anything with silicon, has immense startup costs.
As of today, I say if they go into consumer market they will fail.
If they go into specialised server chips, then they would have a chance, with some sort of accelerator over some arm-based chip - similar to what Nvidia is doing with Grace. Still big money to be spent on supporting the existing ecosystem on their hardware.
a 3mn mask costs what, $20 million each time?
using AI generated vomit for that would get expensive pretty quickly
It doesn't work out all the time, for sure. In fact it probably fails more than it succeeds. But the motivation is pretty clear.
Right now nvidia completely owns the AI market, and is exploiting that absolute monopoly with ever escalating pricing, licensing and restrictive usage models. Everyone keeps trying to escape this -- see Tesla and their super-hyped and now apparently abandoned Dojo thing, while they put in their orders for tens of thousands of H100s -- but instead they keep being beholden to nvidia.
Don't like the way OpenAI treats your data, or how you can only run it in the cloud and not on an on-premises server? Or what dataset they used for training? You're out of luck!
But if the market were more modular, and lots of small companies could use the same hardware in their products, you'd have something to choose from!