All comes back to failed leadership at Apple. Changes are need immediately, starting with Tim Cook.
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NYT: Apple's AI Struggles Began with 2023 Chip Budget Dispute
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Imagine working at a trillion-dollar company and having to beg for resources for a project that could be vital to the future of the company. Greed is a neurological disorder.
It’s always the bean counters. I’m not saying Apple should be wasteful, but this is a trillion dollar company with multiple tens of billions in profit every quarter.
This is really not a good sign. With you let the finance people control the company it’s doomed to fail.
This is really not a good sign. With you let the finance people control the company it’s doomed to fail.
Yeah I'm far from an AI expert but a lack of GPUs is pretty clearly not the problem. This is a standard software development issue, not a resource issue.
At this point and given how much processing power AI requires I begin to question “is it really worth it?”. Yeah Nvidia and AMD get increased value on the market, what else, an Internet flooded with cringeworthy AI-generated images? I dunno. Good photographer is still better than an army of AI tools.
Citing the classics, “It is unsustainable!”. What sustainability can we talk about if kilowatts of power are being wasted for people making brainrot “memes” like a shark wearing Nike Air sneakers or dinosaurs on skateboards sippin’ their iced frappe. Sanity quit the chat.
In my opinion, Apple should pursuit something much more sustainable than this. AI is cool but I doubt it is a killer feature, people still buy smartphones to chat, surf the web and make calls, not to ask AI to tell some jokes or help them with their insecurities
He's already been reassigned and fixers have been brought in to take over duties that used to fall to him. That's basically Tim Cook giving his project leadership a vote of no confidence, so it wouldn't surprise me people close to him are trying to pin some blame on Maestri, who is no longer with the company. It's all still a cluster----, but these press reports are 100% different teams at Apple covering their behinds and throwing others under the bus over this.
It's baffling: a company that burned billions on ambitious failures (I see you, Apple Car and Vision Pro) now pinching pennies on AI—the very frontier shaping the future of technology
Just a minor point that, for Apple in particular, microeconomic events may be more a near term threat than macroeconomics.
100% this
It's just a matter of the speed and degree of decline, but not the inevitability of it.
I love that their dirty laundry is being aired out for everyone to see how power plays, greed and dysfunction are affecting product releases. Will it change things at Apple? 🤷♂️
I completely agree. If Tim Cook isn’t strong enough to control his CFO, the time for change at the top is overdue. Gratitude for his outstanding work in the years following Steve's death should not stand in the way of a necessary change. All good things must come to an end.
Um, kinda disagree here. Compute power is really quite essential to AI.
Well it fits in with that feeling of Apple getting managed via spreadsheet.
I understand what you meant but now I can't help picturing someone leaning over to their Echo Dot, whispering lovingly to it "You're better than Siri."
This is the main reason why Apple cant develop their own AI thanks to poor Apple Silicon chip's expandability and chip design. We all know that and they have to use GPU from other companies instead. Since they are struggling with making Ultra chips and even Extreme chips, it was only a matter of time.
At this point, they really need to change the chip design as M6 series are expected to have a whole new chip design that I mentioned multiple times before and start making higher-end chips as Apple is refusing to use Nvidia GPU for a while.
At this point, they really need to change the chip design as M6 series are expected to have a whole new chip design that I mentioned multiple times before and start making higher-end chips as Apple is refusing to use Nvidia GPU for a while.
Apple should aqui-hire DeepSeek and focus on efficiency and working smarter instead of focusing on size. And use all their cabbage to pay all creators for their content used in LLMs since creators are a core customer. Otherwise it's like "heyyy creators, use our LLMs as we partake of and fund companies hell bent on devaluing your life." Thinking different means not copying ClosedAI and the rest of the TESCREAL set.
and people cry foul when people say the bean counters run this company.
I mostly agree, and the situation is made worse by Apple's long noted RAM stinginess. After all, they basically admitted you need 16 GB RAM for a real OS to use AI and do anything else at the same time.
The privacy point is a real problem and might offer Apple a way out. The user has three options;
1) No AI at all.
2) Very limited AI on machines with sufficient resources that fully respects privacy and security. Personal data never leaves the Mac.
3) Full AI with the full admission that all your data will sent to a central server and therefore privacy and security can not be guaranteed. Such a treasure trove of data will be under continuous attack by nearly every government and criminal organization on the planet.
Future improvements should make option 2 more useful over time, and you should be able to set up a Secure (AI free) user account for your financial data and also have a Full AI user account that only has data you don't mind sharing with the planet (cat videos?) or your programming code you were going to post on GitHub anyway. Keeping the AI from your data is an Apple task to keep AI sandboxed from the OS and other user accounts.