timmillea

Three awful mistakes in a row - the wedge-less MBA, the monstrosity Studio and now the Mac Pro which alienates all its key markets. I was present for the second coming of Apple but I feel that golden era has sadly passed. I doubt the 'Vision Pro', with such limited use cases and such a high entry price will alter Apple's destiny. 

As an investor, I would start buying up unopened Macs from a few years ago and putting them into storage. They will never be as good again. 

The Mac Studio is a design monstrosity and should never have been produced by Apple. I agree that it was probably an interim product before the Apple Silicon Mac Pro could be released. Even so, it was a terrible mistake, tarnishing the design credentials of a design-focussed brand. 

A 15" MacBook Air, if true, would be a further dilution of the brand. The MBA is a small and light laptop that fits in an envelope. 

Since Sir Jony Ive left, Apple appears to have lost its way.

There is a momentum from previous successes but any more crap from Apple will start to impact. 

'Basis points' is unnecessary jargon taken from the financial world to make us think that they have some intelligence.  "110bps, or basis points" is best just put as 1.1%. 

 No jargon please. We are not idiots. 

I worked on LOLITA (Large-scale, Object-based, Linguistic Interactor, Translator, and Analyser) at the University of Durham (UK) in the 1990's. Half my undergraduate education was in AI. Then.  I worked in artificial intelligence before anyone I knew knew what it meant. I think they still don't. "Simulating successful human, external behaviour" - like composing a great symphony, writing and directing a film, and so on. Not cheating in politics or killing people. 

LOLITA read the Wall Street Journal everyday and answered questions on it. It could answer questions in Chinese as easily as English, without any translation. My role was to optimise the 'dialogue' module.

The difference between those efforts and the latest LLMs, and other buzzwords, is that LOLITA attempted to model a deep, semantic understanding of the material while current AI only uses big and now-abundant data to imitate a human response.

As ever in the UK, research funding ran out and no attempt was made to exploit the project commercially. In the US, I feel it would have been a little different and the World may have been different.

Neural net based AI only replicates all the mistakes and failings of the average human. AI can achieve so much more. 

This stunt appears to be self-publicity. Neural nets being trained on big data can only achieve mediocrity at best. Neural nets are never going to be the leap in AI - it is provably impossible. Perhaps this guy ditched out while his going was good and he can get a book/film out of it? 

I graduated from Durham in 1996. Half my degree had been in artificial intelligence, the other half in software engineering. 'Higher intelligence' does not come from copying trends in big data, it comes from evolving things unimaginable, to us. The Luddites have returned to oppose false progress. This guy is a Trump character to provoke. Best ignored IMHO.