Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

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>If you are a consumer and you have a Mac or an iPhone, what do you need from AI that Apple's new offering won't provide? Why would you pay for ChatGPT, or even tolerate its inevitably increasingly desperate ad placements?

Probably the same reason the Gemini app is still well behind ChatGPT in consumer usage and adoption despite being preinstalled on android phones worldwide ? Why are people using GPT on Windows. There's even a copilot button on new keyboards!

Or maybe its the same reason Microsoft Edge is not the most popular Windows browser ? Maybe its the same reason Instagram threads did not even dent Tiktok ?

You are asking the question the wrong way around. People use and like what they like and have a strong preference to continue doing so.

This is just human behaviour. You don't need mind blowing moat. You begin to have problems only when:

- Users are constantly using your product unsatisifed.

- There's a competitor(s) with a significantly better offering that people are talking about.

Will Apple's offering be providing any meaningful/significant benefit over just using GPT ? If not, don't expect any miracles.

> Will Apple's offering be providing any meaningful/significant benefit over just using GPT ? If not, don't expect any miracles.

Judging by the announcements today about its integration into the OSes? They are offering useful things ChatGPT cannot offer unless they write an "everything app".

One can (maybe should) make the argument that this is the browser monopoly again, but given that the USA has seemingly no intention of ever litigating that question again even if the EU does, there are clearly features here that OpenAI is effectively locked out of offering.

Just because Apple said they're 'integrating into the OS' (which can really mean a lot of things) doesn't mean they'll offer something users will actually care about that Open AI can't match.

> that Open AI can't match.

Open AI can match it but at what price?

I don't understand what you are saying here

likely cheaper than buying an apple product

> Apple said they're 'integrating into the OS' (which can really mean a lot of things)

Well, it can mean a lot of things, which is why Apple outlined plenty of specific use-cases and details of what they meant by "integrating into the OS" here.

What did they outline? We had "browser use" for a while now, but it is still way too slow to be usable. Not to mention whatever OS integration they are making.

Windows has been pushing the same thing hard without much success.

Why do I care if AI is integrated into my OS when I can choose my preferred AI and it can use the OS directly?

This.

The other day I wrote up some notes for a presentation. Opened Google Slides, clicked the gemini button, pasted the notes in and asked it to make the slides. Nope; gemini can only modify a single slide at a time in Google Slides.

Pasted the same notes into claude, it wrote a pptx file, I imported that into Slides, job done.

Being integrated into the product doesn't always mean a better result.

Yeah!

Not being integrated can be an advantage because it gives you the freedom to think outside the box.

Meanwhile an AI engineer embedded into an incumbent slide app team has to ask permission and get cross functional alignment for every little feature. And deal with neckbeard tech leads lecturing them on what the right architecture is

That's progress, last time I tried that a month or something ago gemini (the web app) crashed when trying to generate slides.

Well I sure hope that the gemini developers don't have access to agentic development tools because they might read this comment, build the multi slide editing feature using 450M tokens and ship it yesterday removing that Claude edge forever.

I hate that I am defending apple here but Microslop has been pushing a garbage tacked on integration of AI into Windows. By all accounts of the last 20 years of Apple, they are much much better at integrating different services into one fluid system.

I guess, but I haven’t been thrilled by anything apple has released in a long time either. The status quo has just remained unchanged.

I admit to not having yet taken a deep dive on Apple's privacy claims (i.e. on device, private cloud etc) but one thing that Apple is going to be providing in this case is an actual privacy commitment that takes into consideration the level of sensitivity of data being uploaded into these AI chat interfaces.

OpenAI's commitment to privacy is absymal relative to the sensitivity of the data people are dumping onto the platform. The CEO also has a reputation for being untrustworthy.

The biggest threat to ChatGPT's moat may be a brilliant marketing campaign by Apple that really gets people thinking about what platform they want to be upload their secrets to.

That's all true... however the point that Google will get just $1 billion per year from Apple for the AI service is still insightful.

If AI use via Apple represents 10% of the total that vaguely implies that the total AI market is worth around $10 billion per year (which admittedly seems a bit low), and if it is just 1% (which also seems low) then we get $100 billion per year upper-end estimate.

Which just is not enough to justify the current valuations of AI companies.

Uber was recently said to have a $1500 per head per month AI budget (1). Business use dwarfs consumer spend.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383056

If AI use via Apple represents 10% of the total that vaguely implies that the total AI market is worth around $10 billion per year (which admittedly seems a bit low), and if it is just 1% (which also seems low) then we get $100 billion per year upper-end estimate.

This is a bizarre way to try and estimate market size.

Maybe Apple’s AI represents 100% of the market! Maybe it represents 0.000001%! We can make up any numbers we want!

Anthropic subscriptions alone already dwarf your $10 billion number.

> There's even a copilot button on new keyboards!

But not because anybody asked for that. It is part of the force feeding so execs can make this exact argument, and pretend that demand is there.

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