The fuck I will.
There is no cloud, only other people's hard drives.
-- your increasingly crusty and curmudgeonly old Unix admin who is not paranoid because they are out to get you
Ewww, that's fucking gross. Please don't say such things when I'm about to eat.
Is Microsoft's device "vaporware" even comparable to a live demo?
iPhone AI comes via AI-safe pipes: private by design, on device or not, accelerated via MLX. Given that vectoring an AI request to GPU/NPU/CPU/private cloud takes non-trivial engineering, is anyone else as advanced as Apple? It seems wishful to believe interactive UI's will be superseded by untethered, non-interactive (pay by the token) workflows.
iPhone AI is last-mile; the value depends entirely on what you're trying to do. Apple can demo features for their own apps (esp. with personal knowledge), but the real question is what independent developers can do with Apple pipes.
He can say enterprise (not consumers) is the only way to recoup the Nvidia capex, but free local coding models run well enough now on mid-range Apple Macs to make me doubt the business model of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, and the upside for Nvidia.
I'm glad Apple will be investing that capex into their own chips.
Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.
Edit: missing words, thinking faster than typing
first paragraph begins the article upon 2 very big and flawed statements:
> Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware.
maybe some would, but as a whole I would say this is not a common thing
> After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game
no it's not
I didn't know about Project Solara so learned a new thing from the article, but I got the impression that it's not as big as the author tried to make it seem, felt very distant and forced.
While I don't necessarily disagree with their vision but if implemented like "Copilot for Windows" I don't see me or anyone wanting to go anywhere near it.
Apple being slow is just fine, at least they didn't launch "Copilot for Mac".
Sometimes the lack of certain feature is the feature.
From what I can tell, this means any app that is using their foundation model is sharing against a user's pooled usage quota & Apple takes all the revenue upside if a user chooses to upgrade their plan.
Why would an app developer choose their model which has a minuscule 32K context window, might get throttled because of usage in another app, and doesn't share revenue over any frontier model vendor (where you can package/pass along token costs to your customers)?
Certainly the copilot button in ms paint did nothing to attract the clawbot ecosystem to windows
You might re-title the article instead, "The iPhone holds its ground", and it would be a more realistic title. But perhaps garnering less clicks.
I've always thought Ben Thompson is strong on enterprise and b2b topics but super weak on everything consumer related, he simply doesn't seem to understand consumer behavior (he has zero empathy or ability to project his mind into the average person's mind)
E.g. Ben was sure iPhone air would be a massive hit because he himself loved it. (It's struggled as people don't like the smaller battery life).
Ben was sure the Vision Pro would be a huge hit because he himself loved it. (It was a total failure as the average person doesnt want to pay huge amounts for a ridiculous looking dork helmet).
Ben raving about Meta's hand controller which he was sure was going to be the future of consumer electronics (The Neural Band). He was discussing how you could use it while your hand is in your jeans/pants pocket. Not quite thinking about how this would look while you're sat on the subway with someone sat opposite you.
Ben discussing how the future of watching sports is in VR. Not considering how weird it would be to go to a friends house to watch the game and everyone has their own VR headset. Also not considering the fun of watching sports is doing it with other people.
Basically, he has a huge issue with extracting his own liking of techy products to the average consumer who are basically nothing like Ben Thompson.
you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of
devices, none of which stand alone, but are
more like portals to interact with your agents
I would be really happy with my phone + headphones as the device I use most. But only if I could use Gemini (or ChatGPT or Grok or any other chat agent) in voice mode and say "SSH into my GitHub Codespace soandso and implement feature soandso.". And it replies "Did it. I told copilot (or codex or whatever coding agent lives on that VM) to implement the feature".And then a minute later I could ask it "Is copilot done yet?" and it replies "No, looks like it is still working on it". And then a minute later I ask again. It replies "Yes, it finished. It changed chart.py and styles.css. Do you want me to tell you what specific changes it made to the files?".
But it looks like none of the chat agents with voice interface have such a connector at the moment? An SSH connector would be the most useful. But a "GitHub Codespace connector" or something like that would also do.
I wonder if that will be a missing piece for long. If so, I would build an agent with voice mode and ssh connector myself. But I guess it should come out from the big guys any moment now?
- iPhone Air to cram everything into a small space
- Vision pro - a new OS for looking at things and interacting
- Better Siri and AI that works with voice
- Smart local model / routing to big models in the cloud
- integration with wearables (air pods and watches)
iPadOS also did not receive any product specific updates because I think Apple understands that device well: it’s also a consumption device with a bit more productivity capability. They know they can ship a full macOS on iPad, as witnessed by the lower performance A18 chip in the Neo running the full OS, but what’s the point? Using a desktop UI with a touch interface is terrible. So you’d need a mouse and keyboard. By the time you get that accessory, you’ve already exceeded the cost of a Neo or MacBook Air. There’s also no size, weight or space difference between a fully accessorized iPad and MacBook Neo, Air or 14” Pro.
I think Apple will be fine regardless of whether this new Siri AI stuff actually works well or not. I think deep down they don’t really care because they don’t have to. All of their devices are perfect clients that can interact perfectly fine with cloud inference. And their devices are such a joy to use. That’s what Apple is good at.
Now the confusing part is the new Microsoft hardware project. Is Solara a laptop? Tablet? 2-in-1? Phone? They already have a great hardware run with Surface, so I wonder if this new project is a more powerful local inference push?
I came here to talk about this, like some other commenters did, too :) I think that this _is_ a predominant view amongst most of Silicon Valley but I think it's kind of a local maxima view... Easy to agree with, easy to see that it's a functional idea, but... people... (i.e. consumers) do lots more than just waste time on their phones even though I bet that's a huge amount of what people are doing across the US right now.
I guess the thing that _is_ true about this nugget is the "at scale" part. It's hard to find things _at scale_ that people would pay for on a phone. So the phone sort of falls back into this easy to monetize thing via advertising. But I think people (qua consumers) probably can clearly be a sustainable market for way more than attention harvesting (or dopamine fracking!) but it requires a lot more effort to think of things that you can build a market out of there. So people sort of lazy-back into attention harvesting via ads.
I don't trust microsoft with hardware anymore, nor do i trust them with software.
Apple has been smart by keeping iOS only for them and not work with partners as Android does, it helps keeping it optimized.
If someone could do the same, it'd be a game changer in the next 10 years.
I wonder if the bigger question is what happens to us.
Convenience is great, but if we optimize away every moment of reflection, tradeoff, and decision-making, we risk becoming passengers in our own lives. The goal shouldn’t be to hand over our judgment to increasingly capable systems. It should be to use those systems to help us think more clearly and act more intentionally.
The future I want isn’t one where AI lives my life for me. It’s one where it helps me live it better.
But when it comes to anything around consumer behavior, individuals, etc, i.e. the average family in America, he is often completely and utterly wrong in all his takes and predictions. In fact, so wrong it's often laughable, and amazes me that he is so confident in his predictions.
Also, in the podcast I've noticed that he talks almost every podcast about his "hits", i.e. his times in the past where he predicted something accurately. But never, ever mentions the times where he was completely wrong. He's like the dictionary definition of confirmation bias (or survivorship bias).
It's like he's gotten overly confident (or a little arrogant) as he's become more of a tech celebrity, to the point where he thinks he's some sort of Nostradamus now and doesn't recognize his weaknesses or failures. And I've personally stopped listening to the podcasts as much as it's getting a little tiresome.
BTW, I also noticed how often he is wrong on deep tech topics, e.g. his explanation of IP addresses and routing in one podcast. It's like he thinks his business knowledge + Claude is enough for him to authoritatively discuss how technical systems work, and he often is mistaken...
He was disappointed in the Apple vision pro for just being an entertainment device (it seems like you two agree there?)
And then the interviews by media of tech should be viewed as an iterated game. He can ask interesting questions for an analyst, but he (and Nilay) do depend on access and that fundamentally constrains what types of questions they can ask if they want continued access
> Just not doing it for me. Think I'm gonna stop reading anything he says.
Pretty sane take tbh
I disagree strongly here. The chatbot is the furthest thing from sufficient for the average consumer. Take the newly announced feature that groups your compromised passwords together and offers to agentically change them all for you. Really cool! Could you do that via a chatbot interface? Sure. Would the average consumer? No.
Of all the things they could build, why must they pick this future...
> The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive
Is that why there are billions dollars wasted in useless Microsoft subscriptions and services?
> consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.
What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids?
> What they do want to do is watch short-form video
Yeah, it seems so.
I think agents are scary and complicated and dangerous enough that it is genuinely scary to give an agent an instruction like go buy this ticket. It’s okay and apple can easily simplify and eventually win. The mainstream hasn’t really started using agents yet and no one has come close to delivering a platform that will get them there.
I almost reverse this. Its not that Microsoft cant sell hardware, its that no one trusts them to keep making it long term. Everyone is just waiting for the end of XBox, Surface is presumed to have a ticking clock. They bought a phone company and ended all the products they purchased. They set up a concept lab to create an iPad Killer, in the Courier, hired a fancy apple hardware guy and killed the project because the office team was worried about competition. All they need to do is support a product long term and the market will start to accept them as hardware guys again.
Yeah might as well cancel your subscription if you’re not gonna read it
Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.
And even if the assumption turns out to be wrong, they can just scale down and serve dumber and cheaper models. Shrinkflation is not a novel idea.
The case of smartphones is completely different: Android is actually a good OS and there's plenty of excellent devices and high quality brands in the mid range.
I honestly think the use of the word "consumer" is intentionally dehumanizing, a way for corporate figureheads to ignore the humanity of the people they interact with directly or indirectly. This in turn makes them numb to the markets and institutions they are degrading.
Same reason developers continue to use Apple payments even when they have to shell out 30% of the revenue.
I can see Apple, setting App store rules around declaring AI usage, or could start labeling apps not using their models with strong language designed to amplify the increasing user concerns around AI and so on.
The product strategy has to be better the product itself does not have to be objectively better for the developer for them to have to choose it.
They have no ground to make up on AI, and changing their operating system to center on AI would piss off every iPhone user I know outside of tech, and probably half of them within tech.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/13/apple-q1-market-share-g...
things there don't seem to be going well
If Apple had to be the best at AI, it would be out of business already. But it just has to make things people want and the customers will use them to run local or remote LLMs.
The Air was interesting because everyone I've seen hold it, loves it. But, everyone also loves battery life and the best camera more. The Air is proof of that (similar with the mini lovers).
Just because you like something, doesn't mean it will succeed. These people will more likely using some sort of industry knowledge to form conclusion which conforms with their bias.
On the flip side, just because you hated something doesn't mean it will fail. There are plenty of Apple haters who will write things that seems to make sense but completely misses the mark every single time.
People spend several thousand on Lasik so they don't have to wear glasses all the time.
I don't see glasses as the ultimate form factor that everyone uses.
Obviously it'll be a big cultural conflict for a while. But again... the usefulness is too great for it not to happen. Cultural objections will give way, I think. Maybe it'll have to wait for a generation to die off.
They’ve done a very good job at proving the required tech with stuff like putting LiDAR in iPhones which is key to the Vision Pro….which is their AR interaction model testing ground. They are taking a pretty measured approach.
I just don’t think the physical tech is ready for AR glasses that reach a level of polish that Apple would ship mass market. But all the other pieces are there.
lol no you did not. A whole lot of nothing.
For stuff that can't be run on phones, some of it will be run on Apple's servers, which I'm assuming Apple is eating the cost of for the time being.
Stuff that needs heavy reasoning or external knowledge will be processed by google, in exchange for $1 billion a year. However Google already pays Apple $20 billion a year for google to be the default iOS search engine, so you could view this as just changing to google paying $19 billion a year instead.
Yes the chassis had to be designed, but that can be used in common for future iterations. That's much harder for phones where the chassis is very tightly coupled to the specific circuit board design.
The 17e already is the cheap iPhone and it's $599. Putting it's internals in a different shell is one thing. Designing and building a half price internal board is quite another, especially as it would either require an entirely new SOC, or mean continuing production of a legacy SOC thus taking up valuable die production pipeline capacity.
Even if they did use an older SOC. Now they'd have to continue supporting that anaemic underpowered SOC with OS updates for years to come, and these future OS updates would have to run well on it.
I don't see it happening.
Sometimes it's a curse. Apple might be a 2-3 trillion dollar business right now, if they didn't refuse to sign CUDA drivers for their ARM servers.
Is this not what Apple Intelligence is?
Its definitely the case that Apple said that some AI capabilities will rely on cloud hosted models; and that some of these capabilities will be metered; and that "some paid iCloud+ plans" include increased usage. Its unclear what the full extent of capabilities that rely on cloud models are. We know that Spatial Reframing is a capability that relies on cloud models and will be metered; this was stated on-stage. The typical conversations with Siri are, supposedly, a mix, possibly based on how complex the query is? We know there are two cloud-hosted models (what they call internally "Cloud" and "Cloud Pro"); are both of these metered? Does it depend on the use-case (e.g. is Spatial Reframing metered because of its use-case or because of which model it uses?)
A lot of this would be easier to figure out if there was, somewhere, a "meter" you could see drop every time you used a metered feature; but there isn't. There is zero indication of metered AI usage anywhere in the settings that I have found (I am on the 27 dev beta). There is also zero indication that any of the iCloud+ plans include metered AI usage. It is also of note that Apple very specifically said on-stage that "some iCloud+ plans" include increased usage; implying that the $2.99/mo plan likely does not.
Apple has also announced that developers under a certain revenue number can use their foundation models in private cloud compute for free [1]. This implies: third party developers will pay for it. In other words: it might be the case that your shared iCloud+ pool of AI usage only applies to AI capabilities from first-party Apple apps, while in third-party apps the developers are expected to front the bill. Which further reinforces your point: Why would anyone choose to integrate with these cloud models?
Strange situation, and unlike Apple; they seem very frantic.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/08/apple-bets-cheaper-ai-will...
Apple doesn't leak much but there has been coverage of this:
https://spyglass.org/apple-ai-fail/ (April 2025)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apple-fumbled-siris-... (paywalled)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/06/07/one-fateful-meeti... (2 days ago)
I know people are desperate for a Siri that works. The convince of just talking to your phone is priceless. If Apple gets this right, this is a huge deal – which it seems they are on the right track.
People are still talking to Siri for basic stuff like timers and alarms because it works, doesn't need an app, works when phone is locked or even away from you. If this works for more complex tasks like texting and general questions Apple will have the upper hand over Meta and Google in this new way of using computers/internet.
Apple also took a very clever approach for Capex and general AI strategy. Everyone knows that the best intelligence will eventually become a commodity and Apple decided to step aside from this expensive experiment. That's worth pointing out too.
A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.
With the right set-top-box, you tvs become just another display for whatever you want to send their way. We are extremely close to startrek tng style spaces. I'm sure there is a github repo out there that may even be there.
Why do you think apple has the appletv, the apple watch, the phone itself is essentially a pocketwatch with an addressable display.
I think we have all the parts it's just now about knitting them all together and building up a ux that works for normal people.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
For what its worth I wish Apple would care more about those of us that want to use AI to actually do work and not these weird contrived examples asking if focaccia can be made gluten free. And I personally couldn't care less what Microsoft does as I'm lucky enough to never have to use their products outside of Github.
Microsoft is still simply one of the very best at enterprise dealmaking.
It's not a "callous view," it's reality. Social media, entertainment/streaming/media, gaming, and porn make up the vast majority of minutes spent on the internet, and it's not even close.
Once again, early 1990's General Magic looks prescient.
They were working on smartphones with agents capable of completing remote transactions before we had wireless data networks.
> General Magic: The Greatest Tech Company You’ve Never Heard Of
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tuFl4WEXBrk
> allowing end-user equipment with limited capabilities to upload Telescript programs to servers to allow them to take advantage of the server's capabilities. Telescript could even migrate a running program... transfer it to another Telescript engine (on a device or a server) to continue execution, and finally return to the originating client or server device to deliver its output.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_langu...
I don't care about a twice a week podcast about the NBA and national parks, or the other 5? podcasts about random stuff.
brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.
Saving time (==saving money) is something you can sell to companies. But above all, they are willing to spend on saving their managers time. The higher up the hierarchy, the better. If that involves wasting a lot more time for the underlings, then so be it. The underlings aren't the ones making the purchasing decisions after all
These ones also seem really weird because the baseline is most often someone using the iOS app to do the same thing, and the agent demos are usually slower in addition to being riskier. One of the Chrome demos had someone buying groceries at pretty hefty markup, which seemed to be targeting a narrow demographic of people who a) don’t worry about paying 50% more for produce and b) can spend time writing a prompt but not 30 second opening an app and just doing it with zero chance of getting scammed.
Wrong. It definitely wasn't 50%. This number seems to grow each time I see it referenced. The Stasi directly or indirectly employed about 2% of the population, which is still huge. But /The Lives of Others/ takes a lot of artistic license. The true levels will never be known, but the largest and most widely quoted figure is 1 in 6.5 or about 15%. That derives from one historian's estimate, which was that at the upper bound, 1 in 6.5 people had in some way made a report to the government that in some way made it to the Stasi. I'm sure 15% of the people in any developed country have called the police at some point in their life.
This is also assuming no duplicates, you really think the Stasi could uniquely identify and disambiguate informants at this scale? And that every Stasi low level officer tasked with recruiting new informants or else actually recruited new informants instead of making them up and keeping the payouts for themselves?
And because I have to say it: authoritarian surveillance is bad, the Stasi was bad, this is not an apology or minimization, but a correction of historical facts.
> PCC delivers a powerful server model without compromising privacy: data is never stored, used only for the request, and independently verified. It's integrated with the OS and iCloud, so there's no authentication or API keys, no token cost to developers, a daily per-user limit (higher with iCloud+), and eligibility for apps under 2M downloads.
Source: summary on https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/319/
I haven’t seen any information about what’s happening with apps over 2M downloads, who graduate from the Small Business Program. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
Nobody would have guessed that Apple could ever produce the Neo, so you can't say Apple isn't looking into an iPhone Neo.
Once you get enough downloads to where Apple starts wanting to charge you money, you can consider switching to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Deepseek or whatever. Sounds like they've even made that relatively easy to do in the Foundation Models framework -- just implement the LanguageModel protocol. I expect open-source or provider-written adapters to pop up that would let you use your vendor of choice.
Not all use cases will be big agentic coding things that will use millions of tokens.
Some on device (or on server) stuff might be small one shot calls that just use what’s the OS provides.
Well, the results[1] are[2] actually[3] in. Samsung of course did do that and the results are what you'd expect.
So in a sense Apple 'could' have released what they had, after all Samsung and others have, but almost certainly not at the level of quality Apple expects. In which case arguably not releasing until it is capable of reaching that quality bar is the right call. The wrong call was announcing it in the first place when it wasn't ready.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/1b4zc1j/new_ai_tex... [2] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/awful-galaxy-s24-feature-... [3] https://www.androidauthority.com/im-tired-pretending-galaxy-...
Most definitely _not_ a cleverer system that sometimes hallucinates or goes off on tangents, or sends my personal information to parties unknown.
What if the glasses are display only and paired to an iphone for most of it's 'senses'?
My problem is part style, and part content. Stratechery reads like it's written to be narrated - rather than exist first as writing. There's verbosity, pauses, long sentences, etc. And then you listen to the narration it makes sense.
But that complexity makes reading harder. Not saying everything needs to be 5th-grade-level, but complexity isn't required. Paste a Stratechery article into Hemingway Editor to visualize my point.
The stats below:
Readibility - Post-Graduate (aim for 9)
26 of 44 sentences very hard to read
8 of 88 sentences hard to read
31 weakeners
6 words with simpler alternatives
What a chore to cover, and that's without commenting on the ideas/concepts in the content.
I'm sure some folks like this writing style but I don't. And try hard to write my newsletter and other prose with far less complexity.
You could be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be Microsoft that’ll be the leader here.
I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
I don't expect to go for that, but other people might. Especially if AI stuff continues to improve.
"It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".
At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.
Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
but they will gladly take the productivity hit from that time sink because it gives them teh ability to track employees. they'd rather know that everybody is working at 80% productivity than release that burden and just trust them. it's either this or filling out frustrating timesheets.
I would actually be willing to use AI to purchase groceries if it could provide me with some assurance that it would choose the items better than a shopping cart.
As for now, I'm only willing to purchase non-perishable goods that are difficult to screw up online.
Might be a service idea for AI.
so yeah, it's interesting to watch microsoft pitch a piece of hardware or something, see a couple coworkers gawk at it, sometimes buy it, only to have it repeatedly turn into vaporware rarely with a refresh from microsoft or to end up in another line of products thats sunset forever. microsoft appreciates their business tho, i'm sure. i just wish they could see how funny their relentless hope looks from the outside that microsoft might someday reign supreme and be everyones computer sweetheart again. i had a coworker actually express frustration because we didn't select the microsoft fabric solution or whatever for a datalake. took a hot minute to just get him to relent on trying to only champion microsoft services and products at every corner it's wild to me that someone should have so much allegience to a massive tech company. especially one that is not just hostile to it's users but the industry at large, microsoft has kinda always been a hostile part of the computing history story.
Much more needs to be said and discussed about this; in comparison, Siri AI is boring and predictable. Siri AI is Apple being Classic Apple: shipping a solid, decent product that works as advertised and isn't that surprising. That's Apple. They lost their bearing as well for a couple years, but they re-found it. Good on them. Meanwhile Microsoft is in meltdown mode behind them shrieking buzzwords and everyone is pretending that everything is fine because they're microsoft, they'll figure it out.
Listen to this post:
Apple fans would, for years and years, sneer at Microsoft’s penchant for talking about products that may or may not ship, deriding them as vaporware. After Apple’s bungled 2024 launch of Apple Intelligence and new Siri, however, vaporware is fair game, and just in time for this Article.
Last week, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft put forth a vision for a new ecosystem of hardware devices under the banner of Project Solara:
The concept — which isn’t entirely clear from that video, but was more fully explained on stage — is that in the future you will be surrounded by an ecosystem of devices, none of which stand alone, but are more like portals to interact with your agents, which live in the cloud. In other words, as I wrote in February, Thin Is In:
This is even clearer when you consider the next big wave of AI: agents. The point of an agent is not to use the computer for you; it’s to accomplish a specific task. Everything between the request and the result, at least in theory, should be invisible to the user. This is the concept of a thin client taken to the absolute extreme: it’s not just that you don’t need any local compute to get an answer from a chatbot; you don’t need any local compute to accomplish real work. The AI on the server does it all.
I made the case in that Article that server-side inference would dominate AI workloads, thanks in particular to increasingly high memory demands for agents. What I found intriguing about Microsoft’s vaporware, however, is that it showcased a use case wherein this thin client approach was compelling for reasons beyond KV cache.
Specifically, for most of tech history computing has been indistinguishable from interacting; that’s why we place so much value on new input methods, as they often set off new paradigm shifts. By the same token, the problem with wearables as the paradigm beyond the iPhone is that interacting with them generally sucks. Sure, you can imagine a future where voice interaction is completely seamless or where a device can “see” what you see, but anything longer than a few seconds is much less convenient than simply swiping on your phone. Agents, however, compute on your behalf, without any interaction necessary: a few seconds is all you need to get work done for hours — at least in theory.
Apple, a company that can actually make devices, was under heavy scrutiny going into yesterday’s WWDC keynote for a different concern: can the company make AI? And, if your standards are the state of the art in AI circa June 2024, when Apple took their first crack at answering the question, they did quite well. The company’s pre-recorded keynote took great pains to show actual demos — spinning indicators and all — and they worked! Here was the first one of what Apple is calling “Siri AI”:
What’s fascinating about this specific demo is that it also showed just how far behind Apple is. New head of Siri Mike Rockwell successfully used Siri to set a reminder to enter a lottery for concert tickets, demonstrating context awareness and the ability to interact with the Reminders app through Apple’s App Intents framework; what would have been state of the art would have been asking Siri to enter the lottery on his behalf when the time came. In other words, to act outside of the interaction paradigm that has traditionally defined computing, and which Apple has dominated.
At the same time, the fact that Apple is behind the state of the art might not matter that much given Apple’s market and opportunity in that market. To start with the former, Apple is targeting consumers, for whom traditional chatbot functionality is probably sufficient for the vast majority of their AI needs. Siri will be able to give you recipes, tips on do-it-yourself projects, or generate images. Moreover, the fact that Siri will have access to your iPhone gives it all of the same advantages that made me optimistic about Apple Intelligence in the first place. From an Update after that initial June 2024 launch:
The key part here is the “understanding personal context” bit: Apple Intelligence will know more about you than any other AI, because your phone knows more about you than any other device (and knows what you are looking at whenever you invoke Apple Intelligence); this, by extension, explains why the infrastructure and privacy parts are so important.
What this means is that Apple Intelligence is by-and-large focused on specific use cases where that knowledge is useful; that means the problem space that Apple Intelligence is trying to solve is constrained and grounded — both figuratively and literally — in areas where it is much less likely that the AI screws up. In other words, Apple is addressing a space that is very useful, that only they can address, and which also happens to be “safe” in terms of reputation risk. Honestly, it almost seems unfair — or, to put it another way, it speaks to what a massive advantage there is for a trusted platform. Apple gets to solve real problems in meaningful ways with low risk, and that’s exactly what they are doing.
Apple actually made this version of Siri much more capable in terms of accessing world knowledge and image generation, which should make the experience much more seamless, but the real differentiation will clearly be that access to your personal information. You can ask Siri about something you received in messages — or was it email, or a voicemail? — and it will actually find what you’re looking for; it can also “see” what you are looking at on your screen, and act on the information. And, to the extent that third-party apps offer up their data to the Spotlight semantic index, and make actions available via App Intents, Siri can actually operate across different services in a way other AIs can not, at least without making massive sacrifices in security on a local Mac or PC.
These capabilities are genuinely useful, and there’s a good chance they’re enough, at least for now, and that’s because there is another aspect of the consumer market that is worth considering — beyond the fact that billions of consumers already have iPhones. Specifically, consumers don’t want to work, and don’t really care about being productive.
This reality about the consumer market is a lesson that Silicon Valley has to re-learn every decade or so. Consider Dropbox, whose founder, Drew Houston, is in the process of stepping down. Dropbox was a category-defining product that had a viral hook — if someone signed up with your referral code, you got more storage — and grew extremely fast amongst consumers; the company then spent too long trying to actually build a business in the consumer space, before finally realizing that the only way to make money with what was ultimately a productivity product was by selling to enterprise.
The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees’ time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services. The fact that Silicon Valley forgets this is downstream from Silicon Valley being a bubble; normal people aren’t looking for agents to buy them tickets to a concert.
Still, the bubble was strong enough to convince OpenAI to make the exact same mistake Dropbox did: the company somehow convinced itself that it could make enough money selling subscriptions to consumers; Anthropic, meanwhile, realized that it was enterprises who were willing to pay for AI’s massive productivity benefits, even as OpenAI failed to capitalize on their consumer market penetration by refusing to build an advertising product.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that Apple’s agentic shortcomings are a big deal, at least for now. Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don’t want to work or care about being productive. What they do want to do is watch short-form video, and an iPhone is simply much better at that than any other device ever will be; in that context, Siri being good enough is enough, and it appears that Apple crossed that bar.
There are actually a lot of interesting technical details about how Apple rebuilt Siri, including expanding Private Cloud Compute to include Nvidia chips running in Google data centers, as well as a 20 billion parameter on-device mixture-of-experts model that selects the expert on a per-query basis (as opposed to on a per-token basis) so that it can run in an iPhone’s limited memory.
The key strategic takeaway of these implementation details, however, is the centrality of the iPhone. Microsoft’s Project Solara obviously makes sense for Microsoft given the fact that the company missed out on mobile, but it also fits with the infrastructure of AI, which is in the cloud, and increasingly about compute happening without a human in the loop. Apple, in contrast, is heavily incentivized to preserve the iPhone’s importance, and by extension, to focus on use cases organized around human interaction.
However, it’s too simplistic to reduce these approaches to a cynical analysis of incentives; both make sense in their own right. What makes me intrigued about Project Solara is the fact that Microsoft is positioning it as purely an enterprise play, which is important because an enterprise has context about the work being done, making it more viable to build long-running agents — which the enterprise is willing to pay for. That context would be far more difficult to build for consumers, given the need to tie together a huge number of services to get a coherent set of data over which to operate. Indeed, the only entities that can probably pull that off are Google and Apple via Android and iOS, respectively — and Google is always going to be focused more on its cloud services as the point of integration instead of the device.
That leaves Apple as the only company truly — dare I say it? — thinking differently. And yes, the iPhone as the true core of Siri (which will work across your devices, but get its differentiated context first-and-foremost from your iPhone) just so happens to perfectly align with Apple’s business model and desire to not spend billions in capex, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach. You’ll be able to access all of that capex that other companies are building on your phone, you’ll just have to use an app; if you need to find something personal, or work across apps, Siri will be the only one who can pull it off — as long as it’s not vaporware (and it appears the second time is the charm).
AI features on my toothbrush, toaster, refrigerator, doorbell, washing machine, word processing software, TV, whatever, without my actually asking for them first are THINGS I DO NOT WANT, and adding those features to those devices will cause me either to have go to great lengths not to use them, or - much more likely - just not to buy them at all if I can.
I work on a popular consumer product (from well before AI existed) which is incorporating more and more AI features. When we release AI features they receive far more attention and usage than traditional features.
Users who interact with AI features are much "stickier" (more likely to still be users months from now). Free users who interact with AI features are much more likely to convert to paid users. AI features get more press, more online comments, more usage, more conversions. If this wasn't true we wouldn't be spending so much money on it.
They literally implemented the most orthodox scrum you can imagine, with the one exception that they could sit on the sprint planning meetings and override the teams pulling tickets off the backlog into sprints (technical debt of course started to pile up).
The kicker is that after a few months of this, productivity slowed to a crawl. The retrospectives showed that the planning wasn't working because the planned work rarely got done - because we were always fighting fires. Work also slowed due to all the overhead that was added to implement scrum (I also had to participate, despite being in an DevOps role - that at the best of times is inherently interrupt driven and I'm servicing the work of developers). Despite the fact that the powers that be knew things were not working as well as they used to, no amount of feedback could loosen the reigns - probably because it inherently meant losing some control. We had to try everything else to get back to where we were, when empowered developers could make decisions. Things got worse of course as within 6 months we lost half our most experienced talent that wasn't going to put up with it (this was the peak 2022 tech hiring levels).
Eventually there was some mild "improvement" as we were allowed a "15% time" to work on what we thought was best, which still had to be justified and it was still the lowest priority during any given sprint. I still shake my head at the whole situation.
There is a reason why there is a massive backlash against data center buildouts across the US.
I wrote this in another thread recently: AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about products.
This is pretty elementary stuff. SV has a propensity for conflating technology and products, I'll give you that, but Apple's product management has always been relatively good about this kind of thing.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is AI consumer software and is a hit, albeit mostly free tier users.
People don't like to consume AI-made things but they sure like to use it.
Every time I try to take a hands-off approach to the code like this, I come to regret it later. The code ends up bloated and labyrinthine. When I let it grow unabated, it becomes gradually more difficult for the LLM to understand the intended structure as the project becomes too big for the model to keep the whole thing in its context.
There was a meme going around last week where a child saw a phone calculator app and remarked "wow there's an AI just for math".
Generalizing, they're using chat for everything else, like search. Actually reading a source is not on their radar.
This is frightening. A whole generation that will not, and can not, think. At all. "Do it for me."
If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.
But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.
Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.
Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
I think your description doesn't fit the iphone. For some people it was surprising, at least
And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance.
AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.
How would you detect the
presence of bugs in this
scenario?
I would ask AI. "Did the last commit introduce any bugs or unintended consequences?". In fact I already use this prompt after every change I make manually. How would you make sure the LLM
isn't adding yet another
useless, redundant function to
the code base?
By asking AI. In fact, I already run a long "Can you refactor anything in this codebase to reduce redundancy, improve readability, performance or maintainability" pretty regularly.Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.
Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.
Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.
But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
The still unbroken(?) Zune and Windows RT are two rare exceptions.
* - from the HTC HD2 to the latter Lumias like the 1020 and 950/XL
** - buy a Quartus license and you have boatloads of small-ish DIY networkable Arria 10 GX accelerators at your disposal.
(I do hate camera glasses though.)
When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
Please don't tell me that never happens-- I've had one just in the last week and I use both OpenAI and Anthropic foundation models.
Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
What took Anthropic to the top wasn't their models, which are good. It's Claude Code, everything around the model that delivers value for their customers. Gone are the days of slapping a model behind a chatbox and hoping for the best. We need, like, actual software, that does actual things. Siri could be that... maybe. Apple has a lot going for them in regards to how much of their consumer base's software experience they control.
You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.
But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.
Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].
> but nobody believed in communism either
I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy
[2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016...
Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology) (b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.
We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries.
We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations.
We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less.
We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever.
The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefarious purpose (they don’t even agree on what that is) that serves some faceless evil group they prop up (usually “the deep state” or Jewish people). On the other hand, I do not have concrete, observable evidence that God does not exist. That’s the thrust of my point.
This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)
It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.
In fact, I usually let multiple LLMs implement the same feature, and then I compare them. I even run my own arena in which I calculate Elo scores for LLMs from my perspective of which one implemented features better.
Having the ability to control code agents via voice would not take away my ability to do that. But I think in the future, that will become less and less necessary. If we look back at this conversation in five years, it will look very archaic, and we will be used to having superhuman AI do everything for us. In 10 years, it will sound like a strange idea that humans were once fiddling with code to improve the quality.
I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).
This should be obvious if you’ve ever been to a restaurant or airport in the USA, do you really think 1 in 5 adults can’t read a menu?
Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
Something something taking the crafts and the man out of craftsmanship to just get it out the door as quickly as possible.
All jest aside I mostly agree with you but I'd tack on another 20 years for a total of 30.
Though in this technological jump I don't think people are as excited (understandably) as when the teletype came on scene. I too like the potential but dislike the whole discourse around it, the ethics involved and the way it's deployed. Such is life I suppose.
Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because *obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is *obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat.
And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.