Apple backs out of investment in OpenAI

PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat to Technology@lemmy.ml – 337 points –
Apple backs out of backing OpenAI, report claims
arstechnica.com
54

This will definitely cause pause amongst the non-cost sunk companies. They will be wondering what Apple knows.

IMO this signals the lack of clear ROI versus maintenance costs. Silicone Valley is used to funding huge projects like Amazon which took years to choke out the competition and make money. But AI is a new market which is more interesting to investors than people who didn’t want it in their mouse.

Silicone Valley

didn’t want it in their mouse.

Huh?

You know what they meant by the first one. The second one is about people not being interested in dumb products like the Logitech AI mouse. Corporations are all jamming AI into their products and marketing materials not because users like it (they don't) but because they hope it will attract investors. So AI is more interesting to investors than to people who don't want it in their mouse.

…the Logitech AI mouse.

That should be false advertising; both to consumers and investors. There is nothing AI about a dedicated button preprogrammed to launch an application that does the AI for you.

But I guess that further demonstrates your point about companies cramming shit in consumer’s faces to appease investors. It’s still a huge WTF in my book though.

But it's only four easy interest-free payments of $12.49!

Holy crap! When he said “AI mouse” I thought it was a joke. I mean it is, but, like, I thought it was an amusing fictional story.

And then here I am still waiting for an AI to correct my horrible typing accuracy on my phone...

It’s the Data Science craze all over again. Hope we’re done with this soon.

As someone who works in data privacy, I don’t think the DS crazy ever died down. It’s bigger and more complex than ever. People just got tired of saying “big data” at Silicon Valley bars.

we'll be done with it exactly when the next fad picks up steam

Not only is AI a new market but it's the only market where someone with way less investment can leapfrog the shit out of you and that group can just release shit for free just to stab you in the dick after billions of investment. Open AI only has a hope if it can get massive state level contracts to fund it, likely by offering some type of surveillance service which they aren't even specced for but models like these are great at. Just all round bad investment decision to buy into them unless you know what they're planning.

the current tech is really unsustainable with its cost to usefulness ratio

needs a lot of optimisation to make it work and less "brute forcing" the models

I don't care for a lot of what Apple does, but there's no denying they understand how to make money--and how to avoid losing it.

Bubble burst soon?

I would be so happy if AI burst like the dotcom boom on steroids.

You know the Internet didn’t die, right?

A whole bunch of the companies that boomed died though.

Anyone remember bigwords.com? Or pets.com?

I don't think LLMs and other models will ever go away I just want them to not be shoe horned into absolutely everything. They're actively useful for certain analyses and tasks, they just aren't a panacea.

Will they let go off the greed?

they will move on to the next topic and leech that. Lets just hope next time it is not something whose proper development could have benefited humanity more.

There are a lot of reasons why Apple would back out. I wish we had more info.

I'd guess the 3 key staff members leaving all at once without notice had something to do with it.

Not to mention TSMC told Sammy a couple days ago that his business isn't worth $7T spent on scaling up their operations. Major companies do not see the value in AI. It's a flash in the pan technology and solves few if any problems.

probably just price. OpenAI does not have the edge over competition it once had.

Too late to the grift...

Why even collab with that clown, when apply has money to hire talent and buy NVIDIA cards to do the job...

Apple and Nvidia hate each other due to some failed business history between them. Apple didn't like Nvidia chips failing and hurting the MacBook reputation. Nvidia didn't like being thrown under the bus when the MacBook problem started to surface.

Since 2008/09 they have refused to even joke about doing business together.

It'd be easier to list who Nvidia hasn't pissed off

learn something new everyday... well apple better tuck that dick and buy these GPUs then it seems, i doubt their own design can compete tbh.. .if it did, nvidia would not be running a train on the global GPU market.

Considering how long Apple has been putting neural cores in all their chips, and the speed at which their in house chips have outpaced competitors (like the M series for example), I feel like not only will Apple beat nvidia at this, Apple will do so by a decent amount.

That said, nvidia will continue to sell world wide in this market as Apple will keep their chips in only their own hardware, so if you’re not running a Mac/IOS device, you’ll be using nvidia chips.

Either way, even if Apple just keeps up, competition is still best for everyone, so I welcome this development.

The m chips are only good for inference and not for training. That is still unparalleled with CUDA. Pun intended.

That is still unparalleled with CUDA.

I still don’t understand how an open source alternative with better hardware support hasn’t happened yet.

The problem has two sides: software and hardware. You can open source the software side all you want, it's not gonna go very far when it has to fight against the hardware instead of working with it.

ROCm is open source, but it's AMD. Their hardware has historically not been as powerful and therefore attractive to the target audience, so it's been going slow.

yes.. apple is reserving their market leader to not capture a new market...

They can and they are making their own chip designs to do the job.

The cloud part of Apple Intelligence runs on their own designed hardware.

That's good marketing. OpenAI recently went for profit on steroids. They are increasing chatgpt plus price, they backed out of providing free credits to startups, they also made it so Sam Altman would have full control over the company (basically non-profit board is no longer involved).

Not to mention sama first made outrageous claims about how he needs a crazy amount of energy for AI training and now that MS and other governments are starting to fulfill those requirements, he is changing the goal post to even more outrageous claims. Like literally he said if the world does not do this, there will be wars fought over AI in the future and only rich people will have access to AI.

Well, that's 2 of the biggest companies on Earth, TSMC and Apple, within a week to tell Sam A to kick rocks.

So what does this mean for the so called apple intelligence that was coning out later next year?

Apple intelligence is their own project, with their own models. They bought a company specialized in AI at the edge (or on device). All the "AI" that will interact with user's data is Apple's.

Still waiting to see what the chat-gpt integration is exactly, but the more I read about it the more it seems it just the usual writing assistant that we will soon find in every text and image editor. And the hint that they will offer Gemini or other model as well really mean they haven't tied any real features to it.

According to the keynote at least, the integration is literally just Siri offering to defer to ChatGPT for some requests. Basically a more advanced version of "here's what I found on the web" if it doesn't know what to do otherwise.

Funnily enough, Apple isn't even paying OpenAI for that, they're literally saying it's for exposure.

Such an apple thing to do. They are full of themselves as usual

It's their inhouse project, so if they'll probably focus their efforts on it if they're no longer investing in 3rd party.

As a degenerate who bought the new iphone for a much needed upgrade, this sounds promising

Neural Net AI peaked last year, there is nothing new of that same magnitude to be mined

This is not suprising. Anthropic models are clearly better than OpenAI ones. OpenAI no longer has a secret sauce that everyone wants to pay billions for.

Okay, I have no idea what the hell is going on here. I don't follow this stuff, and last I heard, Sam Altman was the good guy who was kicked out of OpenAI because he was focused on ethics while they were focused on profit.

he was focused on ethics

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

Sorry this was my first laugh of the day.

Yes, but that got reversed completely and now Sam Altman is still in charge and the company is prioritizing profits