elijahg

Blaurieter said:

There have also been a lot of distractions: Project Titan - the $10 billion vanity project to develop an automated EV. Apple Vision while promising seemed to suck up a lot of R&D. My experience with Siri was not that it just floated for years, it actually went backwards. At one point it had, for sake of a better word, "endearing" elements. For example: "Beam me up Siri" would come back with an almost snarky funny line. Similarly, "Open the Pod Bay Doors" had the semblance of cultural awareness. There were also practical queries like "Siri, what planes are overhead" which would bring up exactly the flight information for the aircraft above you. Now you just get a dump link to FlightAware - not even with a GPS data point. Sir is now just an irritant with HomePods - it is easier to search for music and then hover transfer playing from an iphone without ever using Siri.

No, Siri has been going down hill for a long time - who can say what "vision" Apple has left - just more distractions.

clexman said:

I don't want the BBC's logo to appear when I use another company's app. It makes perfect sense the way it currently works.

kju3 said:

blastdoor said:

avon b7 said:

No doubt CUDA is vital here as I haven't heard anything about a complete Apple AI training stack for use with the heavy lifting.

Nvidia has CUDA. Huawei has CANN. 

Has Apple released an equivalent solution? 

Apple has Metal Performance Shaders and MLX. 

I'm not qualified to say whether they are 'equivalent' to CUDA. But I believe they are focused on doing the same general job. 

Metal Performance Shaders? No. MLX? Yes. The issue with CUDA is that it has been around since 2007, no one else had an incentive to put out a competitor for most of that time so the best software toolkits have been built on top of what was the only game in town, plus it is what the most experienced programmers, engineers etc use. So what Apple needs to create competitive AI applications doesn't work with MLX and not enough people know the stuff that does work with MLX. Now if this was 3 years ago before Microsoft triggered this genAI boom and had Apple made this a huge priority it wouldn't have been a problem: Apple could have created whatever they need for MLX/Apple Silicon and trained enough developers to do the work. As neither was the case and Apple finds itself needing to make as much progress as quickly as possible, they need to go with a solution that allows them to just plug it in, hire proven programmers and engineers who have done this job in the past and get going. 

Everyone is just going nuts over this because it is Nvidia, who is on the rather long list of companies that Apple fans are supposed to despise (along with Microsoft, Google, Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, Masimo, Amazon and I am certain that I am leaving out a lot more) despite Apple's own, er, history of doing stuff. Such as Steve Jobs accusing Nvidia of IP theft and Apple getting upset at Nvidia's refusal to make custom MacBook GPUs under terms that likely would have bankrupted Nvidia. But honestly, it is only 250 servers for less than $1 billion. Lots of companies far smaller than Apple are paying far more to buy way more.

They are just going to be used to cover gaps that Apple can't immediately fill with their own tech: short term stuff. Other companies have already spent far more time and money being among the first to do what Apple needs to get done now. Apple will be able to trace their steps at a fraction of the time and cost while avoiding their mistakes. Once they are finished using the servers and CUDA to play catch-up they'll be done with them and will probably donate them to some university or nonprofit for a tax writeoff, and the engineers that they hire to work on this will make top dollar for a relatively brief gig and will leave with the Apple experience on their resumes that will allow them to work wherever Apple's noncompete clause allows. And yes, this means next time they will actually go with Nvidia when they want to instead of when they have to, which is the way that it should be anyway. As Apple is working with companies that they have literally sued (or threatened to) like Microsoft, Samsung, Google and Amazon then there was never any reason to try to freeze Nvidia out in the first place. That MacBook GPU thing? Well Apple wound up using AMD GPUs that weren't nearly as good, which forced a ton of people who needed the best graphics to buy Windows machines with Nvidia cards instead. So Apple really showed them, didn't they?