It’s a real concern that the best Apple can do is use OpenAI instead of its own technology.

woah 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe, but being a foundation model provider means running neck to neck with small incremental improvements twice a year at astronomical expense. Maybe Apple has intentionally decided to sit it out and swoop in later once things have settled down.

This strategy makes a lot of sense if you believe that progress will plateau at the current level with small incremental improvements in reliability and UX. Apple really only pays a price if failing to develop their own foundation model results in their phones not selling, which doesn't seem to be the case, regardless of how much of an embarrassment Siri is. Right now, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Grok are all bludgeoning each other with trillions of dollars and creating a perfect situation for Apple to swoop in in a couple years when reliability is sorted out and GPU compute has crashed to rock-bottom prices.

	▲	lelanthran 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, exactly. "Providing tokens" is the bottom layer of the value chain. If you can't build a moat around it, it's a race to the bottom because you can only compete on price. Apple doesn't compete on the bottom of the value chain.
	▲	bmau5 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This makes a lot of sense

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nicce 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple doesn't need to build reputation and burn billions of dollars to get a name. They can wait and see what the real potential is. Then, in the end, they publish their own close-enough model and it will become de-facto model in Apple ecosystem.

Google must keep up with others because it is ad company. And oh boy the potential of influence with AI models.

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Terretta 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Shame the best they can do is use Corning instead of their own glass.”

Neither of these seem like a shame so much as leveraging SOTA.

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WorldPeas 3 days ago | parent [-]

The difference is that nobody chooses Apple explicitly for their glass. They choose them because they provide a bleeding edge experience without the effort one would need to maintain something like a Linux install, Google now beats them to the punch on several parts of this with their AI approach, especially on-device.

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acdha 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

People choose Apple devices because they work well and let them do things they want to do (they don’t buy for the Corning name, they buy for durability). Google has a lot of marketing and we follow developments closely here on HN but I have never heard anyone other than nerds who already included Android in their personal identity say that Gemini does anything substantial for them, and they sound exactly like the way their grandfathers sounded having quasi-religious debates about Ford vs. Chevy while everyone else tried to change the subject.

That doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t be following the space closely but I think it’s a mistake to think that normal people are changing their buying decisions based on any of this yet. One trade off here is that Google is spending a ton of money but as of yet is massively in the red on that investment, which means they’ll stick with their own LLM while Apple is free to switch to whoever the market leader is without a large sunk cost factoring into the decision.

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expensive_news 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is interesting seeing the difference in model perception between “normal” people and the Hacker News crowd.

My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.

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andrewstuart 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ummm I use Gemini heavily for AI development I have found it to be superb.

I am very very far from a google fanboi.

	▲	acdha 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, only that the crowd here obsessively following things aren’t representative of how most buyers decide what phone to buy.

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russelldjimmy 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One might argue that no one chooses Pixels for Gemini (yet).

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weikju 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s an addition to their own AI offering