Apple has a fascinating history of waiting and seeing how a market develops before entering with a better product and eventually dominating, the iPod and iPhone are two examples. It seems they may be building a strong position to pull that off again in the personal assistant AI category ChatGPT is trying to dominate.

I enjoy watching the slow burn approach Apple is deploying as they quietly gear up to offer some % of local inference on iPhones to provide most of the AI services consumers want. Local inference could enable a very low price point for AI services that Apple would leverage alongside their massive ecosystem advantages and privacy claims to compete very effectively for personal assistant AI subscriptions.

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QuantumNomad_ 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> the personal assistant AI category

Didn’t Apple sort of already enter this market early-on with their subpar Siri?

I’ve been an iPhone and MacBook Pro user for years, but each time when I set up a new Apple device the first thing I do is say no to anything Siri, and also turning off additional Siri related settings. To the best of my knowledge, Siri is worse than useless, and I haven’t regretted staying away from it.

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elpakal 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed, but I wonder how that plays out without them entering the frontier model space. I just downloaded the new foundation models cli and ran some inference on my Mac, it wasn't great, but it was neat to see. I asked which model it was using and it said gpt 4o mini.

An on-device, 100% private AI assistant seems like it could be so big that it could be a legitimate threat to the frontier model providers they are partnering with right now, imho.

	▲	makmanalp 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it'd be foolish to assume that they aren't already - they have a reputation of doing a lot more internally than ever comes to light. Smaller companies like mistral or thinking machines show that you don't even need that much resources to be semi-competitive, and comparatively Apple is a vertically integrated behemoth. That said in a pinch they could also acquire / acquihire both of those companies without much thought.
	▲	andriy_koval 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I wonder how that plays out without them entering the frontier model space bet could be that this space will be commoditized: many good enough open weight models and multiple competing provides.

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joshheitzman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple or Steve Jobs? It seems like that was Steve Jobs doing as Apple hasn't done it without him.