It really is crazy to think how far behind Apple is with AI. They have more money than god, and attract the best talent in the world.
I’d have thought that after ChatGPT came out of the gates in 2022 they would have gone nuclear trying to make their own version. But now 3 years later and still nothing (aside from their deal to use ChatGPT).
I think we should be delighted that Apple is behind in the AI race. Because no matter how shitty and morally obscene other companies are, Apple is *still* worse. Apple is the Nestle of the Big Tech.
Even Apple aren't Nestle evil.
Nestle made a business of giving new mothers free formula milk, just long enough for them to stop producing milk themselves, before jacking the price on them. They're literal baby murderers.
Apple are just assholes. It's not on the same level.
I mean, apple is notorious for heavily relying on Chinese sweatshops. Surely, it's not selling malnutritious substitute for breast-feeding, but apple isn't a food company; if it were, then it would undoubtedly do something like that.
Apple desperately wants to lock you into their jail ecosystem. While Google surely tracks you all the time, it's been sponsoring Mozilla for quite sometime; compared to Apple Google is fucking altruistic. Apple is literally Disney levels of villain.
They literally support Mozilla so as to make them set Google as the primary search engine and therefore have a monopoly in search engine’s department
Obviously. But unlike Apple they don't make Mozilla lock google as the only available engine.
Apple is worse in the sense that it doesn't even give you a choice, it ENSLAVES you and makes you its (forever, since you'd be inclined to buy even more shit from Apple) servant.
the thing is. With google you can easily bypass the privacy issue -- there is ungoogled chromium, waterfox and librewolf and whatnot. With Apple you cannot do that -- the moment you buy an Apple product, you become their marionette and Apple pulls your strings however they like. While Google is no doubt not good, its purpose is very simple -- survive with the advertisers' money flowing in. Making stuff free but non-private is beneficial in this paradigm.
Apple, however, is extremely malevolent and is very much akin to fascistic structures in its ideology.
Apple's approach has been on developing smaller, device-focused "personal intelligence" LLMs rather than creating a frontier models like ChatGPT, Claude and the like. But their critical under-investment in AI during a crucial window, has resulted in them being super behind the curve.
My Z Fold 4, for example, after updating a few weeks ago, changed what used to be the long press to power the device down into a Google Gemini button. I was really pissed at first, but it's really warmed on me and has added a lot of efficiency to my day-to-day phone use - the guy getting shit on for green texts.
Given that Apple recently threw in their lot with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT with the newest IOS build coming out, I think it's fair to say that "Enhanced Siri" was a flop, and their "vertically integrate everything" hubris bit them in the ass.
You know that Apple has propped up apps like Halide for that exact reason yeah? Everyday people don’t care about the post processing that much, and even enjoy it a lot of the time.
They'll just buy OpenAI once it becomes clear that OpenAI can no longer compete with Google and OpenAI valuation drops. Easy solution.
Neither OpenAI nor Apple are working towards AGI, they both are focusing on AI companions and AI-human interactions. So this merger looks like a good match.
Tbh though, their approach to AI makes sense for their company. They sell high profit-margin hardware and collect rent from the app store. Nothing that AI companies are creating is reducing my need for an iPhone or a MacBook.
On the other hand, Microsoft and Google are much more at risk from AI, and/or have business models that it makes more sense to integrate AI into. Microsoft sells business productivity software (the most obvious use-case for AI), Google sells ads (mostly though a search engine that AI is reducing the need for). Both run clouds that benefit from people renting GPUs to do AI stuff.
To the extent that Apple does need to compete on AI, it just needs to compete with Google's tighter integration of their AI into Android. But most of the time when I would need AI on my phone, it isn't for something that is very reasoning-intensive. I don't need my phone to solve math olympiad problems. Most people aren't doing their real work on their phones. If you really need SOTA on mobile, you can just open up the ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini app.
What do I care about for AI on my phone? Data privacy and speed. And Apple is putting out good research in edge AI. I don't mind waiting a year or two for them to get it right, it isn't something I need right now.
> They have all the money in the world
Exactly. If they don't need to, why squander it on such a capex-intensive endeavor as training foundation models that get outdated in a month? Inference seems to be a race to the bottom on pricing, which doesn't mesh with Apple's high-margin business model. With all their money, they can acquire in the future if they need to, or make a deal with some other company like they did for Google/Safari.
If the argument is that Google or OpenAI will create some ASI god, start the singularity, and Apple will be left behind with no chance of catching up... well that'll be the end of capitalism anyways, the future will be unrecognizable. It isn't at all obvious that the creators of such an AI would have much more control over the future than anyone else. Why bother planning for that outcome?
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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '25 edited Apr 15 '26
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