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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

After Vision Pro, and recent news on auto, I am starting to wonder if Apple is too old to make anything good. They’re so behind in AI and they refuse to make key acquisitions. This corporate culture cuts both ways.

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> They’re so behind in AI…

Just as they were in laptops, MP3 players, smartphones, and wearables. That Apple is "behind" means nothing in terms of future success.

> …and they refuse to make key acquisitions.

In fact, Apple bought 30+ AI startups last year, more than any other tech giant. This HN post is about yet another AI aquisition.

> Just as they were in laptops, MP3 players, smartphones, and wearables. That Apple is "behind" means nothing in terms of future success.

The difference is the things that you mentioned are hardware.

AI is software and data dependent. First movers have a big advantage in that space.

AI is heavily bottlenecked by hardware right now, the good stuff requires non-consumer GPUs, the hobbyist stuff requires high end gaming GPUs. The user wants to run these things locally.

Vision Pro is pretty fantastic. It never really made sense for Apple to get into automotive manufacturing, so it was good they shut that project down, and moved part of the team over to AI.

One could argue that the AVP was made possible or at least improved by the work on the car.

How's that?

The both fall under "spatial computing".

Specifically camera/lidar technology, sensing and making sense of the world around them. Also the realtime chip/OS almost certainly has crossover with the car since they need a RTOS as well.

Maybe they're concerned with the current limits of LLMs and hallucinations and don't want to provide a product that returns false information? Also AI is too general a term, we should be talking about specifics areas they could use specific technologies like NLP, machine learning, computer vision, etc

Auto got pivoted to this project. The new keyboard uses a transformers architecture and I feel that the keyboard is much more accurate than before.

Also, there was a ton of overlap from day 1. Battery tech, attention monitoring, LIDAR, object recognition, hands-free UX research, etc. Basically the only tech with no overlap is the ultra-dense screens and accompanying lenses.

Oh man, I hate the new swipe keyboard! It tries too hard to select the next word the language model thinks is likely, and seems to disregard the actual swipes to get there.

That aside, Apple has been doing a lot of AI for quite a while now, and executing most of it very well.

Aren’t they running some GPT2 version in iPhone 15. The also stopped this car thing and decided to move all the AI researches from the Apple car into implementing something for AI on AI for Apple devices

Not saying that’s cutting edge but there is more to the AI division than meets the eye.

They didn't specify exactly, but iOS 17's keyboard features mention transformers by name under Keyboard improvements:

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-17/pdf/iOS_All_New_Features.pd...

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