Not surprising. You only get to 1 trillion, 2 trillion and 3 trillion market cap with the largest cash hoard of any tech company in existence by being frugal. But now…Tim hasn’t got the memo yet that you need to spend money to make money. A lot more than what they have been recently.
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Report: Apple Bleeding Talent to OpenAI
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OpenAI is bleeding money left and right. They have yet to do their IPO and are targeting $1 Trillion. That's absurd. They're overextending themselves and are taking every third hand site to drum up support and drive more venture capital investment.
Bleeding employees going to a company that is bleeding money with no path to profitability.
Why?
I honestly wouldn't see that as a bad thing. Google's cloud + AI services are great. Apple devices are great.
Must be tooling around in the Tesla with the final release version of FSD.
Building an ecosystem is much more interesting than maintaining one. Apple has a strong, established ecosystem, so companies like OpenAI and Meta that are in the midst of building their own are going to look more appealing.
Apple isn’t supposed to be a company which ever goes into maintenance mode though. They are supposed to innovate and have a constantly evolving ecosystem of devices and services with significant trend-setting new products lines once in a while which typically take years for talented engineers and designers to develop through experimentation.
This is what I meant when I said it would be worrying about the future products pipeline if engineers don’t find any interesting projects internally.
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Welcome to Enron...pretty much Open AI will go the same way.
You speak of engineers as if they are a mono-block of all the same people with the same interest and skills. That's not how humans roll.
Of course, if Apple was losing talents related to old boring product lines while attracting new talents to work on new exciting product lines this would balance out.
But I don’t think this is what we are saying is happening here. They seem to be both losing out on the old stuff and struggling to attract/retain related to the new stuff.
I’d argue they are still doing that, as evidenced by the Vision Pro. The price makes it hard to have a real discussion about it, but it certainly fits the bill of what you’ve described. The way competitors seem to be copying it, especially from the software side, show’s its impacting its industry.
I would think the rumored true AR glasses initiative (beyond what Meta is shipping) would also fall into that.
Edit: I just remember this same sentiment in the mid 2010’s when Microsoft and Google were building out their ecosystems with the Surface Studio (iMac) and Pixel (iPhone), respectively. Apple was “boring” because they’d already been there.
I definitely hope they are, but that’s my point: if they are developing new cool stuff they should have plenty of exciting work internally and not just boring maintenance stuff.
My view on the Vision Pro is that the concept is very promising and the same OS would be very successful on smaller and lighter hardware. But IMO the 2000s era Apple would have kept it as a prototype for longer until they can miniaturise the hardware more to make it more comfortable to wear, and produce it for a cheaper price. As it is, it undoubtedly is one of the worse product line launch they have had in a long time, because of a combination of high price, poor long term confort, and lack of sufficient use cases for the general public (reading online feedback, it seems that a significant proportion of purchasers end up using it less and less even though the paid a high price and were initially enthusiastic about it, while I would argue for most other major product lines they launched since the iPod an overwhelming majority early adopters did stick to using the product and even increased their usage over time).
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This is exactly the approach that Apple took in the 00's under Jobs. They didn't try to do everything from scratch, they looked to see if there was a solution they could buy or leaverage existing open source resources.
When Apple wanted to make their own browser as Internet Explorer for Mac languished they didn't try to build their own browser engine from scratch, they forked KHTML and made it into Safari. When Jobs was at NeXT he didn't try to build an OS from scratch he started with FreeBSD and used that as the basis for NeXTSTEP, and when he took over as CEO of Apple and Apple needed a new OS foundation NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X and its derivatives.
Apple partnering with a company with a proven AI model to develop a customized solution is what they should have done from the beginning.
If these employees don’t see that OpenAI is the next Atari. A nice concept and PoC, but ultimately technology without an ecosystem, and now facing competitors like Gemini 3 within an ecosystem. Then they’re free to leave as far as I’m concerned.
Besides, Apple could genuinely implement everything in AI if it wanted to. Apple understands that it’s not worth jumping on the AI hype train, and that it’s really just about features and solutions like it’s always been. They’re only branded as “AI” now.
Apple designs innovative solutions based on users’ needs, not AI tech demos made for the sake of the hype.
Besides, Apple could genuinely implement everything in AI if it wanted to. Apple understands that it’s not worth jumping on the AI hype train, and that it’s really just about features and solutions like it’s always been. They’re only branded as “AI” now.
Apple designs innovative solutions based on users’ needs, not AI tech demos made for the sake of the hype.
Doesn’t matter, their Job at OpenAI will still be to make things that can be consumed by Apple users.
“Employees currently working on the delivery of solutions to Apple products… will still be working on the delivery of solutions to Apple products. As well as other things, yes, but Apple will still be part of their job.
Ah, I can see it now, IOS27 with it's new and exciting Liquid Skibidi theme!
I’m actually happy to hear that, I would actually love it if Appled abandoned all their genAI/LLM efforts entirely
It’s not like you won’t be able to use that stuff on your phone, just load chatGPT or whatever you want
But if Apple gives up and stops bloating their devices with useless features I can only be happy
I’m not a shareholder so all I care about is that my user experience and my privacy are not hindered, I don’t need Apple to integrate any AI whatsoever when I can just install an app and use it whenever I need it
Then they can keep working on stuff like automatically cutting the subject out of photos or erasing unwanted objects or people from your photos - you know, the kind of stuff we used to call AI before the buzzword kind of AI that makes investor’s pants tingle came around
That would actually be a great outcome for me
It’s not like you won’t be able to use that stuff on your phone, just load chatGPT or whatever you want
But if Apple gives up and stops bloating their devices with useless features I can only be happy
I’m not a shareholder so all I care about is that my user experience and my privacy are not hindered, I don’t need Apple to integrate any AI whatsoever when I can just install an app and use it whenever I need it
Then they can keep working on stuff like automatically cutting the subject out of photos or erasing unwanted objects or people from your photos - you know, the kind of stuff we used to call AI before the buzzword kind of AI that makes investor’s pants tingle came around
That would actually be a great outcome for me