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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc.

As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the project by underestimating what it takes budget-wise.

And they blew it. Maybe they blew it by not realizing that even long time Apple employees could get arrogant about security. Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general. Whatever is it the root or the problem, they set billions of dollars on fire maybe tens of billions, by being unnecessarily cute about Apple proprietary information when they could've been above reproach. They had the resources to hire all the right people with the right knowledge and probably already had them on board.

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“ Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general”

Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics.

There has to be a reason why almost every single important partnership OpenAI had, abruptly ended, except for maybe Nvidia.

Just recently Satya Nadella publicly implied that OpenAI should not be trusted.

They are slowly becoming the STD of the AI industry, it’s like they think they are too big and awesome to need friends.

Maybe pissing Apple off will teach them a lesson?

"Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics."

Do those exist? I'm usually happy to see a mild candle flicker in the ethics window.

They exist but their defining characteristic seems to be that they are not well-known and generally much less wealthy than celebrity CEOs.

Similar to the music world, the better you are, usually the more obscure you are as well. (e.g., Allan Holdsworth is a name known to most pros but the average Jack or Jill have no idea who he is or why he's considered important.)

When Intel was on top of the world I was fortunate enough to work at one of the partner companies on a project that was a pet project of Andy Grove. I would nominate him and his whole C suite as a beacon of ethics and fair dealing.

When Intel was on top of the world they tried every trick to destroy the competition so that definitely didn't stemmed from the top...

Andry Grove was great, but Intel really was the epitome of "competition is for losers"

In the early days all their products were explicitly designed to only work with each other to create a hardware walled garden.

Compared to Apple/DEC/Sun/SGI, the Intel ecosystem was remarkably open.

Open to Microsoft…

That’s an argument against Microsoft, not Intel. Intel’s main anti-competitive sin was against rival CPU/chipset/graphics manufacturers.

They commoditized their compliment, but made sure their chips only worked with their accessory products, particularly in the 70s

I think it's fair to say absorbing functions onto the CPU die, reducing the part count of motherboards, was a natural evolution of the PC and made sense. So I don't really fault Intel for that. But they definitely had other tricks up their sleeve...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....

I would say Patagonia would be considered such a flicker.

Maybe?

https://transformativeprivatelaw.com/the-transfer-of-ownersh...

Every Wall Street bank is run by guys who get that there are rules to this game and you don't squeeze the unsophisticated the same way. The same can't be said for Silicon Valleys contribution to the brokerage world.

is this a joke?

The average private banking or wealth management client gets sold things far less destructive than the Robin Hood client who is far less able to withstand it.

Yes, all corporations have their obscure interests and don’t profit from being ethical. But we can also agree there’s a distinction between companies like Enron, Purdue Pharma, Meta, Lehman Brothers, Flock and Apple, Walmart, Verizon and Ford. They are all unethical to some degree, but the first group actually conspired to commit terrible crimes or are borderline criminal. We don’t know yet where OpenAI belongs to but it’s looking more and more like they want to join the first group.

> Walmart

I'm a little surprised to see the company that locked employees into their buildings during night shifts[1] in your "more ethical" list.

[1] https://archive.is/Fx9S

At this point in his career, Jony Ive is best suited for doing deep dive studies on the corner-radius of new products. And even then, you might as well just default it to that of an ipad, because that seems to be his preference for all things, including $650k Ferraris.

He has no taste anymore. He was right once, made too much money, and lost touch with everything. Now he's a tasteless boomer.

I would say he isn't what he once was, age will get us all. However 'has no taste anymore' is too far the other way AND 'tasteless boomer' is in itself a tasteless comment.

Even that's a stretch. Without Dieter Rams Braun designs, he likely wouldn't have anything

Rams was part of a whole movement that certainly inspired Ive. But really he's come up with great original work.

Especially the fruity era that brought apple back from the brink was not Rams inspired at all. And it was pretty genius. I still see his work from that time as a retro icon in hipster coffee shops. I owned a blue iBook from that time and it was really comfortable to work on due to its smooth edges (though carrying it by its handle had a bit too much of a handbag look)

One thing I do criticise him for is that he's always been form over function. The puck mouse is one good example from that era, anyone who has used it will understand that round is not a good shape for a mouse.

But originality, yes. He was inspired sure but nobody exists in a vacuum.

Imagine what he'll be able to charge if he does one of those pepsi logo analyses things for a large corp...

I don't think the new Ferrari looks bad, just not like a Ferrari.

It looks like someone went to 2060 and brought back a Beetle

It would make a nice 35,000$ Nissan as designed. Not a 650,000$ Ferrari

AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race.

I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.

I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)

> The real value is and going to be in hardware

Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.

I'm privy to dozens of people working on this problem every day and I imagine there's many more people working on this problem out of sight. I'm bullish on this idea, but it's going to be a slow burn.

> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.

That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.

I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.

The trick is antitrust style bundling. The massive pile of documents and processes tied to GSuite is a moat which makes it hard to switch to something like o365. Since a company might effectively be locked into GSuite (the primary product), if Google forces companies to buy Gemini (the secondary product) by bundling it with GSuite, they've given themselves a moat in the LLM space using their document/email moat from GSuite.

This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.

It can be if it’s really sticky. But I don’t think ai models themselves will ever be sticky, the harnesses might be. But there is very little money to make in the harness itself, and they are also very easy to copy, so yeah, no moat

There is a time window when it will flip. When Internet came along, we had a number of businesses that did not survive over the next years.

This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.

Just out of curiosity, what is the change and how are you measuring its rate?

From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.

At least from some smaller marketing companies I know that isn't necessarily true. They often have Gemini or Copilot and Claude nowadays and before Claude it was ChatGPT.

The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. I'm not in the tech sector. As an outsider, it seems to me that OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing government and the defense industry as their main clients. Google and Microsoft are chasing business clients and educational institutions. Amazon and Apple are chasing consumers.

Isn’t Anthropic literally flagged as a supply chain threat?

in the US only insofar as they wont let claude decide who to kill.

from a non-US perspective yes, but so are the rest of the major providers

No, what I mean is that the pentagon is still labeling anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning it shouldn’t be used for government contract work and anything military related. I don’t see how they can have a strong presence in the defense sector when that’s the case

Copilot isn’t a model per se, no? It’s a harness that can use any model that supports tool calls from what I understand. It’s the way Microsoft commoditize ai models

Another casualty of Microsoft using Copilot to describe so many different things.

Actually surprising that windows hasn’t been renamed CopilotWorkbench yet

Agreed, the common Joe isn't switching the second Anthropic drops a new SOTA

Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.

Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.

Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.

There's virtually no platform play available to them.

> there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point

Yeah it almost certainly won't be captured by them. That value is going to be captured by the folks/companies that shrink wrap the capabilities into a nice SaaS or other tool, that a business can buy off the shelf and give to their employees.

The model makers are on a fast track to just becoming dumb pipes, not unlike ISPs.

> as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race

China is obviously in the GPU/RAM race. Heard of Huawei, Moore Threads, Lisuan Tech, CXMT?

Not to mention with each iteration of every model you get lower cost per token. It’s really a race to the bottom for hyperscalers and neoclouds at this point, with technically only two paying customers.

Idiotic US policy has led to China entering the GPU/RAM race.

You ban access, other countries aren't just going to give up. They'll start innovating and at some point likely outinnovating you

As far as I can tell Ive's expertise isn't "build a platform".

All they seem to have gotten out of it is some creepy blogpost:

https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

I think the other thing folks underestimate is how important Jobs was as an editor for Ive's designs. Ive always leaned more to form over function IMO, and Jobs (or the Apple environment in general as it existed under Jobs) helped temper that. I don't think the butterfly keyboard would have seen the light of day under Jobs, and the released Ferrari interior doesn't seem like a stroke of genius to me. Easy to say from the peanut gallery I know, but I still think Jobs was best able to harness Ive's greatness.

Ive has potential that needs to be steered, and if Altman has shown one thing it's that he can't direct this employees.

I don't get this "build a platform" nonsense. He's a designer. A good one. Who ripped off much of his aethetics from vintage Braun products.

I also wonder where that idea came from. Dude is about design last I checked.

> they could've been above reproach.

This is hilarious. The company run by sama? The company that started as the largest copyright violation ever? How can you be above reproach when you start with such disregard like that?

Forgive me, but what does Jony Ive know about building platforms?

being an exec at apple for decades you probably pick up on a few things, even if they're beyond your department

The Luce seems to disprove that, at least in his case.

I believe "Luce" is correctly pronounced "Apple Car"

It's the Apple Watch Edition of cars.

It’s the Apple Watch Edsel of cars.

The car that has sold out in almost every market outside the US?

Aren't there like a hundred of them? And yeah, sure, it'll obviously be a collector's item. Provides no evidence to this discussion.

A hundred? That's a big run for Ferrari isn't it?

Yeah but thankfully it can be manufactured in a Hasbro factory, if need be

Not anymore. Their numbers are higher nowadays.

IIRC the expectation is that the yearly production run will be about 10x that. The initial China volume was 88 units.

Ferrari tends to sell well, partially due to allocation requirements so you have to factor that in.

There will be a market for the car, but Ferrari is a mix of a car company, a lifestyle brand, and a jewelery company. The Luce doesn't really fit the image they've cultivated and is not distinctive enough from the rest of the market. It's almost too pedestrian. The inside is nice, but you can't flex on others with a nice interior. It also doesn't have fun features that are proving to be desirable, like the faux shifting that the Hyundai has and that other brands are gonna start adopting. It feels like a car Ferrari made to say they made an EV. Its like they felt they had to, either due to internal or external pressures.

> allocation requirements

If I am understanding you correctly, it seems the Luce does not factor in to that equation. There are no requirements for anyone to buy a Luce in order to unlock the privilege of buying higher tier models.

I actually didn't know that. If not, then cool!

It's not the least bit true, of course.

According to Ferrari it is…

It's more complicated than that. Ferrari dealers will be told that their allocations for more desirable cars will be limited if they don't accept the Luce for their inventory. This gold-plated, diamond-encrusted, crystal-studded bullshit will roll downhill towards the dealers' customers, who will be expected to buy the turkeys in order to get the cars they really want.

So it won't be Ferrari SpA who applies the pressure, it'll be their dealers. Who, as always, are "independent businesses" over which the company has "no control."

Same thing that played out when Maserati first returned to the US market under Ferrari distribution, basically.

Both the cybertruck and apple vision pro basically sold out upon release... Selling out does not mean shit. Just proves there are many fools out there with too much money.

Which one was sold at a loss?

That’s extremely easy for Ferrari to do, here is how it works:

“Hey, it’s your friendly Ferrari dealer. About your position on the list for an F80… we’re going to need you to buy a Luce to maintain your position and ensure you are eligible to purchase an F80 when we get an allocation.”

And that’s how you sell out a production run for a Ferrari that looks like a Kia. Force rich people to buy it to get the car they actually want, just like a Rolex AD does with Lady Datejusts if you want a Daytona allocation.

Not really, hubris is a real thing and not just a plot point.

> being an exec at apple for decades you probably pick up on a few things, even if they're beyond your department

It's also possible to lose touch (e.g., butterfly keyboards).

How is that losing touch?

Chasing a thinner product at all costs?

Oh so now we are paying billions of dollars for one guy who 'might have picked up a few things'

Nothing says idiotic bubble more than this

> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.

Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion.

Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.

Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.

Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."

> Meta didn't buy pants

They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.

VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.

Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.

Ehh, Tomi Ahonen always came across as someone who was letting his emotions cloud his judgment (maybe the N9 was his pet project?) which was not great for a "consultant." Sure enough when I looked around there was substantial criticism to be found, e.g. https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten...

Also wasted spending is not quite the same as "not wanting to spend" -- it's more, to GP's point, "spending a lot unsuccessfully." I got the sense a lot of the friction Nokia and Windows Phone faced were due to Google (and to some extent Apple) using the market dominance of their properties (Android, YouTube, Search, Maps) to suppress competition.

I suppose it's fair play for what MSFT did in the OS and browser wars, but they got dinged pretty hard by Antitrust and played nice for a decade+ after that. Google is starting to see the antitrust blowback for it's actions only now, long after the competition has been crushed.

I don't know. Some of it did seem like short attention spans and not enough perseverence. But what do I know being far from an insider.

> Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense.

It makes a lot of sense to get into a massive legal battle with one of the most deep-pocketed companies on the planet?

I don't think they intended for that part to happen. Once that becomes an eventuality, it is obviously no longer a good idea, but you don't get to know if you hit the jackpot before you pull that lever.

One would expect that the consequences for committing illegal acts to make money should be somewhat obvious up front and part of the calculus for whether it "makes a lot of sense"

The last vertical computer company left from the 1980s when they were several American companies that designed the operating system and the hardware to go with it.

> And they blew it

This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him.

The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.

Maybe, but remember what happened last time The Board tried to demote sama?

Sama was kept because of the cheddar to be lost if he left. If this interferes with the IPO, he'll get removed for the same reason.

> remember what happened last time The Board tried to demote sama?

That was a board. Not the Board. The Board represents shareholders. The board that tried to fire him was some B-corp wannabe bullshit.

Small nit.

> they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them

If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally).

Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.

I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.

> Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.

Is there any reason to think this is roque employees doing something? We know Altman is ethically challenged. It is equally or even more likely that management welcommed employees to doing this.

I maintain that if Humane wasn’t arrogant as hell and had just put a screen on their device, theyd have been PERFECTLY placed to become the open-platform AI Phone

Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol

the rot starts from the top.

sama plays loose with the truth. so likely the employees are gonna follow their boss in cutting corners.

you see it everywhere in gvt/large organizations - if you come from a poor country - if the president is corrupt - the whole gvt gets corrupted.

You don't need to "come from a poor country" to have seen this

A decade ago Uber seemed poised to be the big tech powerhouse. Maybe not a platform per se (certainly not an ecosystem as other companies had it) but a major provider of software for all kinds of verticals beyond their core business. What happened to that?

Many of them left and turned into startups around that tech, like Temporal.

Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.

Uber managed to make the business by lobbying so hard. In some countries they broke the regulation of tax drivers and made the environment like wild jungle. Now, people don't feel "safe" anymore for random Taxis and prefer Uber in many places.

While I agree that OpenAI is run by thieves, you can't tell me that Apple wouldn't have tried the same shit on a more scrupulous attempt at building a platform competitor?

Like, this is the same Apple that tried to tell a judge "a touch is a zero-length swipe" when suing the shit out of Android vendors, right? In their eyes, all the competition was supposed to stick with styluses and Windows Mobile 6.x.

Gotta come back with more than "whataboutism."

One got caught, one got away, but Sam when came the judgement day, did break the law and sent the blokes, to jail cells four, with fruity locks.

> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.

That's why Apple used open-source software to build a kernel.

And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.

> And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.

Isn't that the very definition of a platform?

Platform must be the most abused word ever

Apparently, everyone is building the platform all the time, even when it’s just a user facing application

Apple originally was gonna use the Internet for apps on the iPhone, but the third party developers convinced Apple otherwise?

At which point do we stop blaming individual employees for corporate governance failures. Has Meta not taught us anything.

I don't think Jony Ive has this skillset either. They might make a very nice device (I'd expect it to be polarising).

Unnecessarily cute? It's a documented campaign of industrial-scale theft...

What does that have to do with employees stealing documents?

The Fire Phone did exactly what it was designed to do. It contained technologies that Apple fans were crowing about a decade later! Its major problems were the braindead carrier lock-in and the moronic pricing.

[Citation Needed]. Demand letters are one thing. Proof is another. And California laws are, to my understanding, pretty employee friendly as a matter of policy. We'll see where this ends, but I wouldn't assume right now this is anything but typical corporate engagement.

This is the logical take. I would bet that this doesn’t doom anything, they’ll just quietly settle it, likely for a relatively small amount.

People here are way too invested in hating Sam to be remotely rational on this topic.

This lawsuit alleges violation of federal, not state, law.

Yes, but how do we know specific manufacturing processes weren’t in employee contracts like, “If you leave Apple you can’t utilize the invisible weld process invented here for the iMac.”

I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying.

There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.

> There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy

Except there are. It’s why clean-room design [1] is a thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

Clean-room design isn’t a thing in manufacturing.

> Clean-room design isn’t a thing in manufacturing

What are you basing this on? Source?!?

I've personally done this in an aerospace context.

By the time you’re sawzall’ing a design it’s not a clean room process.

> There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing

And unsurprisingly, that's not what the lawsuit is over!

Your comment assumes they have stolen some propietary info or trade secrets but it hasn't been determined yet that they have, no?

> it hasn't been determined yet that they have

Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-en...

It is ambiguous still at this stage though. There's no proof he used this info at his job or that he was directed to take it by anyone (he may have thought it helpful to his career in a way OpenAI never asked for or even invited).

> There's no proof he used this info at his job

LOL Liu hasn’t—to my knowledge—been fired. When OpenAI was notified of his conduct, they didn’t confidentially settle. Instead, OpenAI’s legal went cold on Apple.

It’s not legally certain. But you really have to stretch the facts to make this seem ambiguous.

He should not be fired while trials are going on to determine if his conduct was criminal, against policies or not. That would open them up to wrongful termination if he prevails in court.

Why would they settle if they never directed employees to do any of these actions?

The court of public opinion is a thing, and the onus isn't on us to not trust a rich tech bro to not be an unethical person. That's on them to fix their image + avoiding jail time.

The rest of us are allowed to rightfully laugh at them.

But he stole it, no? What's ambiguous about that?

He is not OpenAI. I can steal trade secrets from my employer and get a job as a Ben and Jerry's Ice cream scooper, it doesn't mean Ben and Jerry's has stolen those secrets

He's getting sued too.

If Ben and Jerry's didn't disseminate your memo on how to steal trade secrets from your former employer to its new hires, I'd think you'd have a better point.

> If Ben and Jerry's didn't disseminate your memo on how to steal trade secrets from your former employer to its new hires, I'd think you'd have a better point.

Did OpenAI do this? And is there proof of it?

Did you read the complaint? Maybe start there if you're going to be asking questions like this.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28453229-apple-v-ope...

That's alleged by Apple and it again is alleged behavior of the employee not of OpenAI itself. Hilarious of you to say "read the complaint" when you don't yourself understand it!

Why are we taking Apple’s side here? They made accusations, nothing had been proven yet.

Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.

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