Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

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> AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows?

This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.

Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.

I think the key here is the ability to focus on the privacy-first nature of local LLMs. A cloud-based service will always be more powerful (and markedly so), but Apple is very cautious about pursuing cloud-based solutions when user data is involved - privacy is a selling point of their products, after all. This is a double-edged sword, as you get to sell your services as privacy-friendly, but your offerings can be significantly less capable than your competitors' (see the iOS messages summary debacle, for example). The advantage of waiting is that smaller AI models are becoming much more powerful all the time.

Of course, Microsoft is also at this with its Copilot programme for laptops, where an onboard Neural Processing Unit has to be a particular speed to qualify. This lets you do local AI things like content-aware image snipping, text summaries and...er, Recall.

As to whether Apple will come out of this looking good or not, I think they're currently regretting rolling out a shitty initial AI offering, and will get better with the next release. It'll be like Apple Maps. Or the butterfly keyboard. Or any number of other broken version 1 Apple things.

An interesting question is to whether Apple Intelligence can be cancelled or pared back now the landscape is so AI dominated, i.e. will the lack of AI offerings be seen as a competitive disadvantage, or are people so sick of AI by now that it isn't a factor.

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