[bitpush]

The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller.

And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled.

This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.

[halJordan]

Apple's ambitions are actually bigger than openai or anthropopic. Only Google's ambition (surprise surprise) is similar. Apple fundamentally wants the llm to be a tool. It doesn't want the llm to be the product.

[slashnode]

I think it's the right strategy for Apple.

They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand.

Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy one of the open source models. Makes more sense than burning billions of dollars training a new foundation model

[bitpush]

This is a reasonable approach, but unfortunately misses what made Apple soooo successful. Apple is the master of controlling the brand. Apple DOES NOT like to highlight their suppliers. Nobody knows who makes iPhones displays, or sensors, or RAMs.

They love to "invent" brands that they control, so that they can commodotize the underlying supplier. Hey user, it is a retina display and dont worry whether it is LG or Samsung is making it.

Apple tried this with AI, calling it "Apple Intelligence". Unfortunately that faltered. Now Apple will have to come out and say "iPhone with ChatGPT" or "Siri with Claude". AND APPLE HATES THAT. HATES IT WITH PASSION.

People will start to associate smartness with ChatGPT or Claude, and Apple loses control and OpenAI/Anthropic's leverage goes up.

Apple has painted themselves into a corner. And as I said elsewhere, it is a train-wreck happening in slowmotion.

[snowwrestler]

Please go rewatch the iPhone keynote by Steve Jobs. Everyone remembers the beginning; few seem to remember that he brings out 3 other CEOs to highlight the integrations between the iPhone and those companies.

Or consider that they spent a decade highlighting that their computers were powered by Intel, after leaving their proprietary PowerPC architecture—again, under Steve Jobs.

Or go all the way back to 1997 when Steve Jobs had Bill Gates on the screen at Macworld and announced that IE would be the default browser on Mac.

It’s easy to fall into a caricature of Apple, where they insist on making everything themselves. What is more accurate is to say that they are not afraid to make things themselves, when they think they have a better idea. But they are also not afraid to do deals when it is the best way forward right now.

[thebytefairy]

They already deployed half-baked models (eg needing to disable news summaries because they were so bad), and haven't delivered on other aspects of apple intelligence. This is hard to call being cautious, this is them not being able to keep up.

[steve-atx-7600]

Exactly. Another mobile.me moment that adversely impacts customers is worse than making something useful that works. Anyone that “needs” AI can use an app.

[ewoodrich]

Apple’s AI summary mangled a BBC headline about Luigi Mangione

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/13/24320689/apple-intellige...

Apple urged to withdraw 'out of control' AI news alerts

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o

iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1i2w65j/ios_183_temp...

[outworlder]

Only if you think they _must_ compete with large models on the internet.

[specialist]

I'm fine with Apple chilling on the sidelines for a bit.

[Uehreka]

I wouldn’t go as far as GP, but yes, absolutely, they must compete with large models on the internet. Customers are now used to being able to ask a computer a question and get something better than “I just ran a web search for what you said, here are the uncurated, unsummarized results”.

Yes, this is in fact what people want. Apple is the biggest company in the world (don’t quibble this y’all, you know what I mean) and should be able to deliver this experience. And sure, if they could do it on device that would be aces, but that’s not an item on the menu, and customers seem fine with web-based things like ChatGPT for now. To act like Apple is doing anything other than fumbling right now is cope.

[avianlyric]

Erm, have you heard of these things called apps? It’s this magical concept where other companies can run code your iPhone, and deliver all the features you just talked about.

I don’t really understand why Apple has to provide a ChatGPT product, baked directly into their software. Why on earth would Apple want to get involved in the race to the bottom for the cheapest LLMs? Apple doesn’t produce commodity products, they package commodities into something much more unique that gives them a real competitive advantage, so people are willing to pay a premium for the Apple’s product, rather than just buying the cheapest commodity equivalent.

There is no point Apple just delivering an LLM. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc already do that, and Apple is never going to get into the pay-per-call API service they all offer. Delivering AI experiences using on-device only compute, that’s something OpenAI, Anthropic and Google can’t build, which means Apple can easily charge an premium for it, assuming they build it.

[bitpush]

> I don’t really understand why Apple has to provide a ChatGPT product

Control. It boils down to control. If you own a platform, you want to make your "suppliers" (apps in this case) as substitutable as possible.

If people start associating ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini as the main reasons to buy a phone, at some point in the future, they'll think - gee, most of what I'm doing on the phone is interacting with $app, and I can get the $app elsewhere.

[const_cast]

This usecase is run of the mill for someone like Google, who used to store and show you your location forever, but it's not in Apple style.

It's hard to be like "uhhh privacy" when you send all requests to a remote server where they're stored in clear text for god knows how long.

As of right now, there is no way to run big LLMs in a privacy preserving manner. It just doesn't exist. You can't E2EE encrypt these services, because the compute is done on the server, so it has to decrypt it.

There are some services which will randomize your instance and things like that, but that kind of defeats the a big part of what makes LLMs useful, context. Until we can run these models locally, there's no way to get around the privacy nightmare aspects of it.

[astrange]

Read https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu.... It's very thorough and as good as you could possibly do this.

[bitpush]

Doesnt matter if it doesnt work. And by all accounts, Apple Intelligence has been a garbage fire.

Siri, even after decades of investment, is a joke. Apple does NOT have the talent or capability to deliver what people want.

[GeekyBear]

> I wouldn’t go as far as GP, but yes, absolutely, they must compete with large models on the internet

The people running large models want to charge a monthly fee for that.

I'm fine with having a free model that runs on device without slurping up my data.

[JKCalhoun]

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.

[martinald]

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]

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]

> 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.

[martinald]

8GB RAM is not enough for a semi-decent model IMO. 12/16GB is better (4GB for model and 8GB for OS) and really if you were going hard on device you'd probably want more like 32GB (24GB for model + 8GB for everything else - you'd be able to run a 13b param model with larger context size with that).

Even still though people are used to the quality of huge frontier models, so it will feel like a massive downgrade on many tasks. The _big_ problem with all this is chained tool calling. It uses context SO quickly and context needs a lot of (V)RAM. This also completely undermines the privacy argument you make, because it will need to ask personal data if using OpenAI and put it in the prompt.

Yes I noticed Apple shipping higher RAM but it will take years for this to feed through to a sizeable userbase, and people are quickly getting ingrained to use an app like ChatGPT instead of OS level features. Even more so given what a flop Apple Intelligence 1.0 has been.

The key problem they've got is they've went hard on privacy (which means it is hard to square that with going all in on 3rd party APIs) but they've also been incredibly stingy with RAM historically, which really nerfs their on device options. Private compute is an interesting middle ground but their model options are incredibly limited currently.

[alwillis]

> 8GB RAM is not enough for a semi-decent model IMO.

Apple's ~3 billion parameter on-device model is about as good as it gets on a smartphone, especially for the functions it was designed for: writing and refining text, prioritizing and summarizing notifications, creating images for conversations, and taking in-app actions.

Every Mac comes with at least 16 GB of RAM; while every iPhone comes with 8 GB of RAM, some models of the iPhone 17 will have 12 GB.

Remember, an app using the on-device model can seamlessly shift to a much bigger model via Private Cloud Compute without the user having to do anything.

If the user enables it, Apple's Foundation Model can use ChatGPT in a privacy preserving way. By the fall, Gemini and Sonnet/Opus could be options as well.

Again, ChatGPT is used in a privacy preserving way; you don't need an account: "Use ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence on iPhone" [1].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl...

[dialup_sounds]

Apple is only "behind" if you think they're in the same race. They haven't shown any interest in developing frontier models or taking on the enormous costs of doing so.

[bitpush]

Did you even watch Apple Intelligence ads? They were very much in the race, just that they got ahead of themselves a bit.

They were touting the same features that other companies are now delivering. Point the phone at something, and it'll tell you what you're looking at. Or summarize news articles etc. Instead we got .. emojithingy

[j_timberlake]

I'm having trouble understanding, do you think people are going to stop buying iPhones because Siri isn't as good as ChatGPT? Do you think Apple users are going to flood over to the Pixel phone to use Gemini?

What is this train-wreck you are hallucinating?

[visarga]

The paper was a very nice read, and they did many creative things. It's a pity this model won't be directly accessible, only integrated in some apps.

[alwillis]

> It's a pity this model won't be directly accessible, only integrated in some apps.

It's already accessible using Shortcuts, even to non-developers "iOS 26 Shortcuts + Apple Intelligence is POWERFUL " (Youtube) [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/Msde-lZwOxg?si=KJqTgtWjpdNDxneh

[robotresearcher]

When the Blackberry ruled the Earth, people asked 'Why doesn't Apple do a smartphone?'.