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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Amazon and Apple have never had fundamental research groups. Even before LLMs, the top big-tech fundamental labs were FAIR, Google Research and MSR.

It has never been in Amazon or Apple's DNA to chase a product that doesn't have clear revenue outcomes (as long as adoption lands). AI is no different.

IMO, it's the right decision for Amazon and wrong decision for Apple.

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They got burned by over-promising Apple Intelligence and then embarking on a so-far failed, rudderless journey to land features regular people actually gave a shit about. I’m no expert, but I reckon the exact right move is concentrating on their actual deliverable products and features and letting everyone else blow their cash on a maybe months-long moat for dubiously useful advances in categories most of their customers wish everyone would stop talking about.

yeah what IS the deal w/ Apple Intelligence falling off the world?

Beats me. My best guess is they let the hype blind them to the reality that this tech wasn’t merely a few months away from the production-level reliability they needed from it. After a while, it sank in that they couldn’t play this up as a ‘just around the corner’ release and stopped hyping up every useless beta-at-best feature like it was a huge deal. Then, when the “we’re nowhere close” internal communique was leaked, it was officially time to bow out of the hype cycle for a while.

First, I’d like to know what is the deal with Siri not being able to tell me the date without a network connection.

Or providing info from 2016 when asked about US college sizes.

I’m pretty sure it can’t process voice commands on-device other than whichever ones you use to activate it. The thin client architecture was the only option for most of its existence and the only one that works for older devices, which they’ve actually been great about supporting since the battery-life processor throttling bs like a decade ago. It also makes sense that they wouldn’t constantly update their architecture. Now that they’re putting their money on on-device NN stuff I imagine that will change. But let’s be real: using a smartphone without a network connection is an edge case to begin with. On-device processing makes sense for a lot of reasons, but optimizing for smartphone users without data only makes sense if you’ve got a hiking map app or something.

Apple’s biggest problem is their commitment to privacy. Delivering effective AI requires a substantial amount of user data that Apple doesn’t collect.

Their other problem is they value designers and product managers more than engineers (especially top tier AI engineers).

Both problems are basically the death knell of any hope for Apple to have good AI, but combined? It’s never gonna happen. Which is sad because Apple’s on-device hardware is quite good.

Didn’t Amazon invest a total of $8 billion in Anthropic? Seems like a much better choice than trying to do things in-house.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.

That’s an investment that’s going to be a write off.

Was it an investment of actual dollars, or "just" cloud compute credits? Microsoft's investment in OpenAI was over 90% Azure credits, we're told. Which raises the possibility that the whole business is mostly about making your cloud compute business look better than it really is...

Of course it’s probably credits, but it’s still beneficial to both of them — having such huge customers is ideal to stress test your product offering.

Also, just yesterday, they appear to have raised $13B from actual investors, so it seems like they’re going to be fine.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-...

What about Amazon’s work in formal verification research and Apple’s machine learning research?

[1] https://www.amazon.science/tag/formal-verification

[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research

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