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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree, but I do feel the need to point out this was not Apple's plan A. Luckily for them they have so many tools and options at their disposal, that they are able to massively fail at developing their own models and still end up in a good position.

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Apple “genius” has been to accept their plan A failed (the original Apple Intelligence), and instead of doubling down, let the others explore the space, then offer a good interface (I say that, I haven’t seen if it’s actually good).

So many other actors in the industry would have just doubled down and follow the race to the bottom

Genius would have been for Apple to get Siri in a better state after so many years.

This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.

They didn’t invest in Siri and became the most valuable company in history. I don’t think Siri being better would have mattered much to be honest. Not joining the financial black hole that is AI training seems to have benefited them well so far. But yes, it’s definitely a case of failing upwards.

Adding quotes around “genius” as it seems you misunderstood what I meant

> They didn’t invest in Siri...

What makes you think that? They insisted on Siri for so long and even made a big deal of Apple Intelligence in WWDC.

Then Apple threw the towel and waved the white flag with regards to Siri and replaced their efforts with third party AI.

Because Siri didn’t seem to change over time. If they worked on it over the past decade it’s not to the point where it was visible to users.

What a way to go falling upward with Apple Silicon, five Operating systems, and five ecosystems. In comparison to their competition who are all currently burning billions of dollars.

Their advantage is they are the last vertical computer from the 1980's.

One problem they do have memory will need to come in house.

Meh, AI is deep in it's diversification stage -- there are soooooooo many players in the game right now and basically one maybe two will survive once the dust settles. All these frontier labs are fighting tooth and nail to be the one left standing. Apple is making a measured approach saying "hey, we're probably not going to be the Google of AI, but the smartest thing for us to do is to put infrastructure in place so that once there is a contraction (which there will be, think the search engine landscape in the 2000s) we're relatively ahead for relatively little effort/cost."

I imagine that Google assistant only makes money for Google because they’re an advertising company. Alexa loses money for Amazon and it’s becoming more gated to Prime subscription features as a result. Amazon thought everyone would be buying stuff with their voice and that future never panned out.

It turns out that voice assistants aren’t all that important. Customers aren’t willing to pay for them and they’re more of a nice to have convenience feature.

>This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.

This would be insulting if it even mattered. Apple has fumbled AI while having record breaking quarterly profits. The market does not care.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're spot on.

Almost everyone developing their own AI is doomed to fail. I would not be surprised that when the dust settles, Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini will be left standing while OpenAI and Anthropic fade away. They will get what they need and then throw them away.

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" is the same playbook for decades, and you can only do that when you make money. Yes, making money still matters and post-capitalism is a big fat lie.

I don't think Nadella will survive Copilot if it isn't a roaring success.

Copilot is part of the enterprise suite, so like everything else Microsoft does in that regard it's never been anything but a roaring success by its own definition.

Of course that's relative to how these kinds of things are used, but it really does get used. It might be the best feature of MS Teams.

Copilot is the cockroach of corporate AI. It ain't going nowhere.

maybe wait until their plan B succeeds before calling it genius. all we know so far is that plan A has failed.

It’s a very low risk and low effort plan, even if it fails it’s fine. To be contrasted with all the AI players accumulating costs and risks for the AI rollout

So basically do what they have always done for decades?

Apple Intelligence was an outlier in how they historically operate. I mean they literally just put out a folding phone after waiting what, a decade, for others to perfect it first.

Yep. I will never understand why none of their competitors follow that strategy. It’s good we have first movers ready to take some risk Apple has shown over and over again how well their approach to product works. Wait for the market to be discovered and the technology to mature, then enter with a clear vision and high quality product

How can you perfect it when you don't have control of an effective in house operating system or in house chip design. When the dust settles Apple will be number 1 or 1A and number 1 in hardware/software integration.

Are you serious. As a left handed person apparently I'm like a witch or something and can't use Apple's folding phone anyway.

You call that perfect?

And by your logic where do you draw the line. Apple do not have control over TSMC's internal processes. Or Samsung who make the display for them. So your statements reek of culty faff than objective truths.

It's the same plan. Apple's model is:

Handle the query on device. If the device cannot handle the query, push the query to Private Cloud, If Private Cloud cannot handle the query, push the query to a third party of the users choosing.

Which is pretty much the same as what they announced a few years ago.

Apple underestimated the amount of time and work needed to get to work and really the only bit that I think changed is that Private Cloud (and possibly the on device model) is a white label Google model rather than being developed in-house by Apple.

The problem with that approach is that “how do I handle this query”, and “did I handle that query ok” are both AI-hard problems, and must be tackled near the user, where the large model is not.

It also requires a relatively complex distributed architecture.

I worry about how successful they can be with this approach, in terms of best user experience.

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