I see it as the opposite. Apple is absolutely positioned to own "chat". I am not worried they'll soon sort things out — and eventually we'll have an LLM integrated into the iPhone; call it Siri or otherwise.

With my history encrypted in the cloud, and the trust that Apple has built around privacy ... I think they're going to come out alright.

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martinald 12 hours ago | parent [-]

But they have de facto admitted failure of most of the strategy if the rumours are true that they are switching much harder to OpenAI/Anthropic for upcoming LLM products.

This is the first time in 10+ years I've seen Apple so far on the back foot. They usually launch category defining products that are so far ahead of the competition, even by the time they work through the 'drawbacks' in the first versions of them they are still far ahead. OS X, the iPhone and the iPad were all like that. They are still way ahead of the competition on Apple Silicon as well.

I am not very confident on their on device strategy at least in the short to medium term. Nearly all their devices do not have enough RAM and even if they did SLMs are very far behind what users "know" as AI - even the free ChatGPT plan is leap years ahead of the best 3B param on device model. Maybe there will be huge efficiency gains.

Private cloud is used AFIAK for virtually 0 use cases so far. Perhaps it will be more interesting longer term but not very useful at the moment given the lack of a suitable (ie: non Chinese), large (>500b param) model. They would also struggle to scale it if they roll it out to billions of iOS devices especially if they put features that use a lot of tokens.

Then they've got OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic via API. But this completely goes against all their private cloud messaging and gives those providers enormous potential control over Apple, which is not a position Apple usually finds itself in. It will also be extremely expensive to pay someone per token for OS level features for billions of iOS/Mac devices and unless they can recoup this via some sort of subscription will hit services margins badly.

To me its clear the future of "OS" is going to involve a lot of agentic tool calling. These require good models, with large context windows and a lot of tokens - this will definitely not work on device. Indeed this is exactly what the Siri vapourware demo was.

I'm sure they can potentially get to a great UX (though these missteps are making me question this). But having such a core feature outsourced does not leave them in a good position.

	▲	JKCalhoun 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You're right about the RAM, of course. Apple will no doubt have to run that up. At the same time it's an obvious "top tier" feature for the "Apple aiPhone 17 Max". And it will cost dearly.
	▲	alwillis 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Private cloud is used AFIAK for virtually 0 use cases so far. Applications using Apple's foundation models can seamlessly switch from on-device models to Private Compute Cloud. Research is already showing the use of LLMs for people's most intimate relationship and medical issues. The usual suspects will try to monetize that, which why Private Cloud Compute is a thing from the jump. > Then they've got OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic via API. But this completely goes against all their private cloud messaging Using ChatGPT via Siri today, no personally identifying information is shared with OpenAI and those prompts aren't used for training. I suspect Apple would want something similar for Google, Anthropic, etc. At some point, there will be the inevitable enshitification of AI platforms to recoup the billions VCs have invested, which means ads, which won't happen to Apple users using foundation model-based apps. > Nearly all their devices do not have enough RAM and Every Apple Silicon Mac (going back to the M1 in 2020) can run Apple Intelligence. 8 GB RAM is all they need. Every iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max and the entire 16 line can all run Apple Intelligence. Flagship iPhone 17 models are expected to come with 12 GB of RAM and all current Mac models come with at least 16 GB. Apple sells over 200 million iPhones in a given year. There's no doubt Apple stumbled out of the gate regarding AI; these are early days. They can't be counted out.