gatorguy

twolf2919 said:

blastdoor said:

I haven't discounted that.  I have no doubt, any existing Apple users - including myself - will appreciate any significant  new features Apple bestows on them.  But if Apple's great AI announcement turns out to be a partnership with OpenAI, where interactions are sent off-device to ChatGPT servers, it's hard to see how that would lead to some great "super" upgrade cycle as analysts are currently predicting.  After all, if all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, why would you need a new phone?  Just install iOS 18 on your existing device and you're ready to go!

On the other hand, if Siri received a real overhaul using AI and finally became a really useful personal assistant - with my privacy kept intact by using an on-device LLM - I'd certainly stand in line for a new phone that has the required power/RAM to do this.

People don’t care how/why the feature is there, only that it is there. The how/why is interesting to nerds, but not to normals. Mac sales went up when Apple switched to Intel because switching to Intel made the Mac better — people didn’t care that Apple was abandoning a processor they helped develop for the dreaded x86. 

It’s true that if all new features can be accessed from existing phones then there is little reason to upgrade BUT working with OpenAI doesn’t mean that’s the case. There will likely be many features that require, or work better on, a new iPhone.

Note that Microsoft heavily uses OpenAI but still requires a beefy NPU for a new PC to meet their new AI branding requirements. They aren’t just doing that to help out the chip guys. 

Exactly - except that iPhones, unlike most PCs, have already been including the Neural Engine - aka NPU - for the last 7 years.   So other than Siri, it's not clear to me what other *user visible*  AIfeatures Apple could be adding that couldn't already be done with NPUs of the last couple years.  I guess we'll have to wait.

Google's Tensor TPU performs essentially the same tasks on their phones as Apple's Neural Engine NPU on iPhones. Neither is (yet) capable of running compute-intensive AI tasks on device. They can of course be tweaked to match up better with certain features, which Google has, but that won't mean backward-compatibility.

Rumor has it that new Apple AI features can only be accomplished with this year's iPhone Pro and perhaps all versions of the iPhone 16. Everyone will know soon enough if that pans out. If true, "processors not powerful enough" will be the claim.  Personally, I'll be blaming it more on accountants and marketing. 

Anyone curious about the difference between an NPU like Apple, Samsung, and Huawei (among others) use and a TPU as used on Pixel Phones can read about it here. Each has its strengths. 
https://medium.com/@craigadebanji46/npu-vs-tpu-the-future-of-ai-hardware-explained-c532c12913fd#:~:text

Shouldn't it be Christmas of 2023 and not 2022? I don't think Copilot had been released until middle of last year had it?

If so Craig played with it 6 months ago, not a year and a half back, and thus Apple didn't get serious until earlier this year, perhaps the last 4-5 months. 

EDIT: Verified that Copilot wasn't announced until March of last year. But apparently Mr. Federighi was playing around with pre-release Github code on the project. 

In my reports today...

Kierkegaarden said:

Seems to be the wrong focus for Microsoft — why not put r&d into chips that power your data centers?  

They already developed and are using their own server chip, which focuses on AI. The same is true for Google and Amazon. 

EDIT: 
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-develops-ai-server-gear-lessen-reliance-nvidia-information-reports-2024-02-20/
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-reaches-self-developed-data-center-server-chip-milestone
https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/news/google-ai-cpu-chips/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-announces-new-data-center-chip-microsoft-rivalry-intensifies-2023-11-28/

danox said:

Vestager is still sore from that encounter.......

On that appeals front:

"According to the (EU) Advocate General, the General Court committed a series of errors in law when it ruled that the commission had not shown to the required legal standard that the intellectual property licences held by Apple subsidiaries based in Ireland and related profits generated by the sales of Apple products outside the USA, had to be attributed for tax purposes to the Irish branches.

The Advocate General also says the General Court failed to assess correctly the substance and consequences of certain methodological errors that, according to the Commission decision, undermined the validity of the tax rulings.

The Advocate General therefore says that in his view it is necessary for the General Court to carry out a new assessment."

It's rare that the court does not follow the Advocate Generals opinion.  It's entirely possible Vesteger wins in the end. We'll know the general direction in a matter of weeks, a few months at worst.