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Comment by brcmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

If I was Apple I'd be quaking in my boots. They are getting too far behind to ever catch up. Nokia in 2010 vibes.

They'll just do what they have been doing for ~20 years, they wait, pick the "winner", polish the "user experience", call it Apple magic and incorporate that into their product cycles.

Some day will be the day their joke book becomes so mediocre it will not stick anymore, but I think they are safe on this one, for now..

True for hardware, but their record on software is far less convincing.

I expect apple to have local LLMs in hardware in five years or less.

Considering that experiments cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a pop this may be not that bad strategy.

There is enormous value in polishing the user experience, especially if no one else is doing it (or maybe capable of doing it?). It will never get old as long as they are the only ones doing it.

I don't think MS has a special sauce here, just a willingness to publish. To the extent MS has disclosed the bulk of what they are doing with Phi, it's a combination of really nice initial idea "Use written texts + GPT-4 to generate high quality prompts where we know the answer is great because it's written down" and engineering.

To me this is advancing the state of the art as to the impact of data quality, but it doesn't look to me like the phi series have some magical special sauce otherwise. Data of quality and synthetic data creation are not magical moats that Apple can't cross.

I'll say too that I'm psyched to try Phi-3; the sweet spot for me is a model that can be a local coding assistant and still answer random q&a questions with some sophistication. I'm skeptical that 3-8b parameter models will bring the high-level of sophistication sometimes needed in this cycle; there's still a very large gap with the larger models in daily use, despite some often close benchmark scores.

Anyway, Apple-Phi-3 is in no way an impossibility.

I tore my hair out developing a SwiftUI app that could run llama.cpp and whisper.cpp simultaneously. Was able to run a Q3_K Mistral 7B along with a smaller whisper model eventually, but grinding through XCode is a nightmare.

They're working on MLX but it only recently got swift bindings. They just don't have the DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS coked out attitude i guess

Did they ever claim to be a powerhouse in foundation models? Did your MacBook or iPhone become obsolete or stop working? They use the models, they don't release them because they don't hoard data.

The opposite is the case, with all the advancements, even by doing nothing, Apple (like everyone, including hobbyists) is moving closer to the frontier. Hopefully this trend stays alive!

If anything this is good for them. Apple's play here has always been getting their devices ready for running LLMs locally. This makes it way easier.

They have something like 140 billion dollars in cash.

They’ll be fine.

How exactly does publicized research lead to them not being able to catch up? I don't think anything in this paper is patentable.

I don't recall Nokia being a 3 trillion dollar company. Your vibes may vary, though.

I think that when people release new interesting software products it's good for hardware companies.

If I were apple, I would be developing something in total secrecy and then release something ahead of the rest of competition when people least expect it. very big ifs but siri can be updated everywhere overnight and I dont see them rushing into anything like this

If I were apple, I would just buy one of the major LLM companies. They have the cash.

They've been buying AI companies and have nothing to show for it.

Why do you think that is? Do you think their culture is an obstacle or is it something else?

Showing off work in progress is not really their thing.

Apple's advantage is that their devices are safeguarding people from the dangers of AI

How so? And what dangers?

That's a very eloquent variation on the word "censorship"

Are you next going to tell us that the CIA's access to iCloud data protects their users from terrorism too?

Eh, I think it’s showing that this class of model is becoming commoditized given there is a new one launching every week.

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