[altmanaltman]

No Apple was not sitting there and waiting as if its some grand plan. They tried their VR device which they don't even talk about now. They were late to AI and yes if the bubble bursts they will be at a better position but it's not some grand master strategy. Even inside apple there's been a lot of talk about how badly the company handled AI.

As for laughing all the way to the bank, I am sure memory manufacturers and Nvidia was definitely join them regardless of what happens.

Also comparing Apple (literally one of the largest companies in the world) to a company burning VC money makes no sense.

[njovin]

A better way to frame this might be that Apple tried VR and quickly realized the market wasn't there and moved on.

Compare that to Meta, who went all-in (so much so that they changed the company name) despite apparent overwhelming user apathy toward the product.

The estimates I've seen say that Apple spent ~$10b on their VR program, whereas Meta is in for about $80b.

[Danox]

The Apple Vision is at least two or three generations away hardware wise, it not only has to be several times faster (M8, M9 with a R2 or R3 processors) than what it is. The battery life needs to be better a lot better and it has to be half its current size weight wise.

And the price has to be half as much with all of those improvements. And last but not least the software needs to get even better all of that sounds like iteration over what? 3-4 years.

Fortunate for Apple, the competition is even further away…

[bigyabai]

Meta had more than 10x the install base of Apple's headset. And they shipped real VR that was compatible day-1 with standards like OpenXR; Apple didn't.

If we're being actually honest with ourselves, Apple did not even try to make a VR headset. They tried to carve out a nonexistent niche with AR, and bashfully wrote it off as a Tim Cook folly like the Apple Car or Airpower.

[insane_dreamer]

you saying Vision Pro is dead?

[rsynnott]

I mean… it seems _fairly_ dead.

[altmanaltman]

It would be a better way to frame it if we were strictly talking about VR. But my point was to show Apple is not some infallible genius company, they make plenty of mistakes. Why are we assuming being behind on AI is not a mistake but rather amazing foresight is the issue? We are only considering yeah the bubble bursts and apple is like oh yeah dude we told you hahahaha, but what if the bubble doesn't burst? What if there isn't a bubble and it just evolves naturally into something less exciting and fundamentally useful? Wouldn't it be fair to say Apple was wrong in that case? Why are we congragulating them for a hypothetical right and not worried about the hypothetical wrong, both of which are possibilities.

Yes Meta spent 80 billion sure, but did you know Meta never had a loss-making quarter in their entire history as a public company?

My overall point is that its not as clear cut as Apple is smart for willingly not being good at AI and they will win in the end.

[Danox]

I’m laughing right now, Apple is in a very good position and it was a grand plan because OpenAI, i.e. Sam Altman pitched Apple and got nothing, you cannot tell me going into that meeting with Tim Cook at Apple that Sam thought he could squeeze Apple for 50 billion dollars? Like he squeezed Microsoft?

And what about Google? They probably thought for sure when they met with Apple that they would wipe out that $20 billion yearly payment to Apple every year for the default search position but the best they could do was to come out with a measly $1 billion a year refund both scenarios sound like Apple took it in consideration and determined that it was not worth the price, that does sound like a plan (The Art of War type) when the rest of tech is going crazy over AI.

[stasomatic]

"Feature, not a product". SJ's comment when Apple investigated purchasing Dropbox.

[cmiles8]

VR wasn’t AI.

As for the rest, they’re the only major tech company to not have a serious case of AI FOMO and dumping all their cash into that FOMO. Thats not an accident.

[budsniffer952]

Yeah, VR was very clearly useless, and yet...

Do you even know what FOMO is? The money is being spent in physical infrastructure, not the the metaverse.

[cloverich]

I believe their argument is: What happens to the value of that infrastructure when the value of the models is commoditized or more specifically, when everyone can run the "Good enough" model on their phone or laptop, instead of on Anthropic/Spacex/Google/OpenAI owned hardware?

Its a fair one to make both ways imho. Clearly the compute is being used for value generating purposes. And also clearly higher tier models are becoming runnable on local hardware.

(edit) I think also a comparable argument could be: What happens to the value of all that infra when the model is so commoditized, that Apple can delegate the more compute expensive tasks to whichever service is the cheapest on that day? Is Anthropic still valuable if they need to drop the prices of their models by 10x?

[jen20]

They certainly were not late to AI, unless you narrowly define AI as “LLMs”. See [1] as a single example among many.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1609/aimag.v19i1.1355

[altmanaltman]

Given the context of this conversation, one would naturally assume we are talking about commercial public-facing LLMs and not AI as a field.