Marvin

Mike Wuerthele said:

ssfe11 said:

Maybe I’m missing something but Tim meeting with Trump and in Feb and then both announcing the 500b US investment has total exemption written all over it. Again am I missing something? Would welcome comments. 

You're missing the fact that the President said yesterday that there were no exemptions.

There are some exemptions listed on the site:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

"Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/semiconductors-are-exempt-from-trump-s-massive-32-tariff-on-taiwan-though-pc-gamers-will-still-feel-the-heat/ar-AA1Cev7t

It's not clear how much impact it will have on Apple's products.

This move is being widely criticized but other countries have been unfairly locking US companies out of trade for a long time. While this likely won't have a good outcome, continuing to let other countries engage in unfair business practices shouldn't just be accepted either. These tariffs are in response to the unfair trading practises of other countries. The expected outcome is that other countries start trading fairly and drop their original unfair business practises and tariffs and the US can do the same.

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

If the US tariffs were removed tomorrow, all that happens is US businesses go back to being taken advantage of. It's clearly a ham-fisted approach with the intent of trying to get a quick fix similar to the war negotiations but the US has a huge debt running out of control:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-could-hit-debt-ceiling-as-early-as-mid-july-study-shows/ar-AA1ByPeh

This is what the government spending cuts and tariffs are about. If there's a better way to fix the debt issue other than cutting spending and trying to make up trade deficits, they'd probably like to hear some ideas. These moves suggest they don't have any better ones.

michelb76 said:

I had high expectations, but my god this runs bad. 23fps on an M4 MacBook air at the low preset to 500p render target. Barely hitting 40fps on the medium preset on my M3 Max, with a lot of low fps moments. Crazy.

There were a few Macs tested here and they all run pretty badly:



M3 Max looks playable around 50FPS after turning raytracing down but it doesn't look good without raytracing effects.

It runs poorly on low-end PCs too, the Nvidia 3050 is just above the performance of the Air and gets around 30FPS:



At 3:43 they enable frame-gen and get 60FPS. MetalFX will have frame-gen at some point, Cyberpunk 2077 was reported to support it, maybe they will enable it at a later date.

It should perform better on the M3 Max chip, maybe they haven't used the Metal hardware RT APIs properly and it's falling back to software RT.

The minimum requirements for the game at 1080p/30 are actually pretty high, roughly 8TFLOPs GPU. Only the Max chips and latest Pro chips are at this level.
Recommended GPU is around 13TFLOPs, which is essentially M3 Max or above.

This is why Apple having a reference renderer library would help developers. On Mac and iOS, game devs could use Apple's rendering engine and know it will perform ok. They probably have one internally already that they use to help 3rd party developers out with their proprietary engines. If they partnered with Microsoft, Sony and Valve, maybe Pixar, they could make a reference renderer that supports DirectX, Metal and Vulkan. This would support path tracing, approximated path tracing, shadow maps, mesh shading and multi-pass rendering. Royalty-free, possibly open-source so game studios can modify it. Post-production rendering software has multiple rendering engines like V-Ray, Redshift, Arnold, Octane etc, game engines should have the same.

brianus said:

tiredskills said:

Why on earth would I want to run an AI model?  Locally or otherwise?

I’m sure this was meant to be snarky, but for me it’s a genuine question: what are the envisioned real world use cases? What might a business (even a home one) use a local LLM for?

The article mentions a hospital in the context of patient privacy, but what would that model actually be *doing*?

In hospitals, AI models are reviewing patient scans to detect cancer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mur70YjInmI

This is image analysis rather than text but text models can be used for medicine. There's an online AI for free here:

https://duckduckgo.com/chat

It can be asked about medical issues like if there's a pain somewhere, what could it be and what treatments are available e.g 'What medicine is typically used to treat acid reflux?'.

In a clinical setting, a doctor would review the recommendations.

In business, they'd be better off using a custom AI model that is trained on high quality data. A legal company might train a model on past cases and they can quickly find similar cases to use as references.

Local models are usually more responsive (if the hardware is fast enough), don't get timeouts and you can save past prompts more easily. They would likely still be cloud-based so that all employees can access them from lightweight clients, just a company cloud server.

blastdoor said:

At about 5 minutes and 30 seconds he says that building this with consumer PC hardware would be "quite expensive." I was looking for a fair bit more precision than that. 

Specs are listed here:

https://geekbacon.com/2025/02/20/running-deepseek-r1-671b-locally-a-comprehensive-look/

It needs multiple 3090 or higher GPUs + 512GB RAM. There's a video here showing a $2000 setup but it only runs at 3 tokens/s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_cmN4j2yY&t=2822s

Another uses an Nvidia 6000 that costs around $7k for the GPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-EG3B5Uj78&t=560s
https://www.newegg.com/pny-vcnrtx6000ada-pb/p/N82E16814133886

Performance is 4 tokens/s. The video in the article mentioned the M3 Ultra was around 17 tokens/s.

This is one area where Nvidia and AMD are worse value and they do it on purpose because they make a lot of their revenue from this where they lower the memory in the consumer GPUs and charge a lot for enterprise GPUs with more memory that is needed for AI.

This video tests Nvidia H100 GPUs x8 ($28k each - https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892002 ), which gets 25 tokens/s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOp9ggH4ztE&t=433s

If Nvidia sold a model of the H100 with 512GB of memory, it could probably compete with M3 Ultra but would cost more than $30k just for the GPU.

Applications that need lots of unified memory is where Apple's hardware design is very competitive and they knew this when designing it.

tht said:

Still confused on how AI or AGI is going to benefit us.

Like, these AI companies are offering a service for subscription money. That type of business model will limit revenue and seems doubtful they can make money that way? It ultimately will be powered by ads. So the race is really to be in the position that Google is in right now? Ads, ads, ads?

The race is to build the software and hardware to replace humans in factories? Humans are probably cheaper. The race to replace desk and service workers? Desk work has been whittled down so much. So, it’s just the continuing trend. Humans are probably cheaper? Service workers? Humans are probably cheaper. 

Perhaps it will allow an auteur to make a movie with a million budget look like a movie with a billion dollar budget? Sounds like that would make the movie business be like YouTube? Time wasters. But the ads!

I think my position has settled on Butlerian jihad. It’s really just a normal resistance to robber barons, but Butlerian Jihad sounds apropos. 

Companies are using it to replace some jobs. Duolingo replaced some contractors with AI being used for translations:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/09/tech/duolingo-layoffs-due-to-ai/index.html

Klarna replaced customer service staff with AI:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/klarna-ceo-ai-chatbot-replacing-workers-sebastian-siemiatkowski/

Employees are expensive:
100 employees x $50,000 = $5m/year
100 x M3 Ultra ($4k) = $400k over multiple years

The code-generating AI is very useful and boosts productivity:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/google-ceo-says-over-25-of-new-google-code-is-generated-by-ai/

It's like having a user manual on steroids.

For media, it is being used for VFX and audio. The fake celebrity video on the following site was AI generated:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/kanye-west-viral-video-scarlett-johansson-1236134290/

It has been used for de-aging actors:



James Earl Jones who was the voice of Darth Vader died and AI is now being used to replicate his voice. The voice in the Obi-Wan TV show was AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogNzvIoD2Qo&t=51s

It's most useful and reliable as a tool to help with tasks that are tedious and repetitive. Transcribing audio for subtitles for example.

People are not aware just now of the impact AGI will have because AI doesn't seem reliable enough to replace a human. It doesn't have to though, it only has to replace a job role and it can replace a significant amount of job roles that make up a huge segment of the economy. This will mainly benefit corporations at the expense of lower skilled jobs but it can also empower individuals to compete with companies. Game studios hire thousands of people. When an AI can replace a lot of the job roles, an individual will be able to spool up a digital army of workers and be able to manage a virtual game studio. This will allow individuals to make millions or even billions in revenue where they never could before. It will also create a flood of mediocre content way bigger than we see already.

charlesn said:

The SE selling proposition was certainly a whole lot easier for customers to immediately grasp: a brand new iPhone for a dramatically lower price. Everybody gets that. An SE was 46% cheaper than the base iPhone 16. The 16e is only 25% cheaper--that's a huge difference and takes what was an easy decision for price-sensitive shoppers and makes it much more complicated. Do you want the full feature set of the 16 for $200 more? Or the full feature set of the 15 for $100 more? OR: maybe all the new iPhones are too expensive now and you'd rather shop refurbs. Or go to Android. The 16e certainly gives buyers a lot more to think about before making a purchase decision.

All we know for certain right now is that competing in the aggressively lower price point arena was not good business for Apple and so they have abandoned that effort completely. Sales of the SE never equaled those of any of Apple's more expensive iPhones, even the Plus, which is itself on the chopping block due to reported low sales. I'll be very curious to see how Apple markets the 16e and what they'll choose to emphasize about the phone. I think the greatest risk with this phone is the degree to which it might cannibalize sales of the regular iPhone 16. I could imagine that for many shoppers considering the 16, the "e" in the 16e might very well mean it's "enough." 

Apple has a comparison page with the iPhone 14:

https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,iphone-14,iphone-16

The 16e is effectively a replacement for the iPhone 14, which was also sold at $599.

Instead of an older model at a lower price, it's a cut down version of the main model at a lower price. The old SE had an IPS display, moving to OLED had to increase the cost.

There have been some marketshare reports showing the low-end and mini models don't make up much of the overall sales:



https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figures-show-the-pro-models-have-become-the-default

It's still a lot of people as the total is 250m units so 6% = 15m. Most of these people will eventually buy a larger model, very few would move to Android as they have large screens too.

A lot of people buy on contracts so the price difference is negligible:

https://www.att.com/brand/apple/iphone/

The 6.1" size is bulky but it's the most popular size. There was a poll done here that had 6.1" as the top choice:

https://www.gsmarena.com/weekly_poll_what_is_the_ideal_screen_size_for_a_smartphone-news-57173.php

After using larger displays for a while, the 5.4" mini display felt cramped, especially when typing in portrait but the 5.8" on the iPhone X felt like the largest usable single-handed size. Larger phones (above 2.8" wide) have to be shuffled around or held with one hand to type with the other because they are too wide and it's difficult to do gestures like swipe back on a browser.

If they make a mini model again, it would be good to see a 5.6-5.8" model that is thinner and lighter. It probably still wouldn't be lower than $599 due to the OLED display and higher spec components.