Apple doesn’t have to sink billions of dollars into its own artificial intelligence solutions when it can outsource by teaming up with partners.
Dave Lee for Bloomberg Opinion:
When all the top tech companies seem to moving in a pack toward artificial intelligence, Apple Inc. has stood startlingly apart…
There are two ways to look at this state of affairs. One is that Apple is in disarray, its AI products don’t work because it has been caught napping on the next great tech revolution and is hemorrhaging talent as a result. Another is that Cook is exercising restraint as others in Silicon Valley lose their heads.
This week’s Apple event in Cupertino, California, will be the usual affair of incremental changes to its core lineup, plus a new, thinner iPhone “Air.” The more interesting developments for the future of the iPhone are taking place behind closed doors as Apple seeks to reinvent Siri for the AI age. The company needs to reverse the virtual assistant’s status as a byword for dumb AI. No other Apple brand comes close to receiving this kind of mockery. When AI captured the world’s attention, Siri’s hopelessness became a serious problem.
Make no mistake, Apple’s first choice would have been to solve the matter in-house and use its own engineering talent to make Siri smarter. That hasn’t happened — or it hasn’t happened yet, at least. Instead, the company is now looking to outsource the task by bringing in a new tutor.
That tutor could be Google and its Gemini AI… A Google-made AI model might adequately suffice much in the way Apple used Intel chips in its Macs until it was happy its own designs were up to the task. As time goes on, and the AI market matures with new use cases, Apple can adapt as necessary.
As Plan B’s go, this outsourcing is an attractive and versatile way forward. In the current climate, you might even call it thrifty.
MacDailyNews Take: From “it’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy” to “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” is Tim Cook’s timid Apple in a nutshell.
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Macdailynews’ take may be the conventional wisdom, but I disagree. When everyone is building the same old same LLM’s, don’t. You think doing the same thing that all your competitors are doing at the same time is the thing that differentiates you from them? Think Different™️. To me, being a pirate means doing something else than what everybody thinks you should do.
I think you missed MDN’s point.
I’d rather have Siri integrate with Grok than with Google’s Gemini. At least give us options.
Apple’s backup plan for AI will be “thrifty” but 3rd class.
Fire Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs said Apple M-U-S-T own the critical technologies for its success.
Buying AI functionality from others is a road to nowhere, commoditization, margins shrinking, and being led by the nose by another company with a different value proposition and agenda than Apple’s.
But Cook is too damn stupid to get it. He is a VP of logistics forever and NEVER a leader or visionary. A bean counter.
Just think of suicide Nokia and their jointly developed software platform failure Symbian. Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia all died (except Samsung who went in time with Android) from a violent case of circle jerk.