Is Apple Out of the Generative AI Game?

Dare Obasanjo, on Mastodon:

2024 is the year Apple faced its limitations. First giving up the dream of competing with Tesla in EVs and now conceding it can’t compete with Google and OpenAI in generative AI.

This means iOS users end up winning as we get actual cutting edge features and not Siri warmed over.

I agree that Apple users win either way — either Apple builds out its own best-of-breed generative AI system, or they license the best one(s) from whoever makes them. But it could well be like maps. Lean on Google or others until the in-house project is ready to go. (Put aside the fact that Apple was forced to switch to their own maps a year or two before it was ready.) Or compare it to Apple building Macs on Intel’s x86 architecture until three years ago.

We are only in the very early days of LLMs and generative AI, and the only moat that seems to exist is large-scale data center processing power, not the models themselves.

★ Monday, 18 March 2024