The crashing and burning of Nvidia stock has been predicted for a while now and keeps not really happening. It’s gone pretty flat and volatile up there around $180 but they keep delivering the results to back it up. I was thinking this week that Apple is really primed to make a killing from people who want to run their LLM on-device coupled with an agent in the next couple of years. We’re a long way off being able to train the models – this is going to need an Nvidia-powered datacentre for the foreseeable future, but the local inference seems absolutely like a market that Apple could capture, gutting all the most premium revenue from Anthropic and OpenAI by selling Macs with a large amount of integrated memory to anyone who wants to give them the money to run their native OpenClaw/agent instead of paying ever-growing monthly bills for tokens.

It is definitely a case that they will fall a long way but Nvidia will not fail as a whole. They have a way of maximizing their position relentlessly. CUDA turns out to endlessly put them in amazing positions on things like image recognition, AR, Crypto and now AI.

For all the faults of them leaning in hard on these things for stock market and personal gains, Nvidia still has some of the best quality products around. That is their saving grace.

They will not be the world most valuable company once the bubble pops, will probably never get back there again, but they will continue to be a decent enough business. I just want them going back to talking about graphics more than AI again, that will be nice.

I might as well say that no, it is not going to happen.

As handwriting code is rapidly going out of fashion this year, it seems likely AI is coming for most of knowledge work next.

And who is to say that manual labor is safe for long?

It is more important. Both for the customer base that actually buys Apple machines as well as the cache and mindshare of being used by the people that create American culture.

Even if Apple had an amazing GPU for AI it wouldn’t matter hugely - local inference hasn’t taken off yet and cloud inference and training all uses servers where Apple has no market share and wasn’t going to get it since people had already built all the stacks around CUDA before Apple could even have awoken to that.

Some people at Apple see it. That’s why they added matmul to M5 GPU and keep mentioning LMStudio in their marketing.

Those back log orders are wild! One does wonder that if the bubble collapses or more global upsets happen in that time, how many of those will ever be fulfilled? Reality might be not so impressive, but considering if it fell even 80%, that is still $200 B in revenue and that is huge.

Remember when a $1 billion valuation used to be a big thing? That is nothing compared with nowadays.

The Apple I was a pretty poor predictor of what mainstream mass-market computing was going to end up looking like. I don't think anybody has yet come up with the Apple II of local LLMs, let alone the VisiCalc or Windows 95.

Cool? And it has nothing to do with what kind of consumer hardware Apple should sell. If your use cases are literally "bigger model better" then the you should always use cloud. No matter how much computing power Apple squeezes into their device it won't be a mighty data center.

What "tooling" do you use to let AIs work unattended for long periods?

I don’t think it’s about literally shrinking the models via quantization, but rather training smaller/more efficient models from scratch

Smaller models have gotten much more powerful the last 2 years. Qwen 3.5 is one example of this. The cost/compute requirements of running the same level intelligence is going down

Not all enterprises are the same, I imagine many companies have different departments working with local optimums, so someone who could benefit from it to get more productivity might not have access to it because the department that is doing hardware acquisition is being measured in isolation.

Drop that down to 5k, and make it useful.

Give every iPhone family a in house Siri that will deal with canceling services and pursuing refunds.

Your customer screw up results in your site getting an agent drive DDOS on its CS department till you give in.

Siri: "Hey User, here's your daily update, I see you haven't been to the gym, would you like me to harass their customer service department till they let you out of their onerous contract?"