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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

Notably, PrismML CEO Babak Hassibi told CNBC this, so it’s either (1) bullshit, or (2) he just ended any chance of a relationship by leaking news of the talks.

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The 2000 ATI leak showed up here a few weeks ago.

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2000/08/02/jobs-snubs-at...

Apple would punish him severely unless they cleared it in advance, it might be to their advantage for some reason (negotiating with Google for Gemma rights? idk).

Apple is too desperate to be making demands. You confuse the Apple of yesterday and of today. Things change fast and things have changed.

You’re right, Apple only has 68 billion dollars in cash, up 40% since last year. Definitely on their last legs.

I remember the infographics of 5-10 years ago. They had 200 billion. What happened? Sinking ship?

They never had $200 billion in cash in any quarter. Not at least since 2014. Besides, how much cash to hold is an executive decision. If the cash balance went down, it doesn't mean their business is not doing well. Cash can be used for Capex, like what the hyperscalers are doing right now. It can be used for buying back equity.

They spent close to $100 billion in stock buybacks during the last 10ish years :-)

How does that compare to other companies?

What do you think?

Free cash? Crazy. I think I can live with the interest of that in the bank.

you could live (100k a year) with the interest of 0.004% of that in the bank.

> Apple is too desperate to be making demands

They don't give a F about AI or any new AI model that was announced this morning. Wasn't there news a while ago about them buying Perplexity?

They do, they are low key panicking.

And if they aren't, they should be. They ship some of the cheapest, most capable, and easiest to buy/set up AI hardware out there, and then don't ship any AI software worth speaking of. Apple needs to fix this.

"Apple needs to get into gold prospecting, this funny business of selling the best shovels just can't work out"

I do not believe they are panicking, not least because I don't think they've finished adjusting Apple Silicon for the task; it will be very interesting to see what happens in the M6 and M7.

I think their strategy is broadly correct, actually; I think there's still a bit of scope for "sit and wait and do it right" here. But acquiring more edge AI tech and edge AI people would potentially be in their interest.

They didn't buy Perplexity and it indeed rather seems like Perplexity may have damaged the deal by blurting.

Whether things are different now I don't know, but Prism would potentially be a good acquisition.

This is not the first Bonsai model from Prism using this technology, and they've also applied this technology to an image model.

The model aspect isn't that significant (even in this news), because it is Qwen, under the hood. The encoding efficiency is.

Prism's technology might be valuable, and their team could well be.

And they very evidently do care a lot about efficient on-device AI; they just don't care about developing frontier cloud models.

I would be slightly surprised if anything Apple wanted to do with Gemma they couldn't do with Gemini, which they have the right to make various derivatives of.

They could more or less redistribute Gemma as-is in the developer program; they are unlikely to be troubled by any of the licence terms.

either way, maybe a portent for the times.

apple’s secrecy agenda has been defeated to an extent by the practicalities of ubiquitous technology?

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