Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.

> while keeping control of the UX.

Extremely tangential, but this is my favourite upshot of AI. For decades, companies have been walling off their services and forcing us into their fuckass UIs. Now over the course of the last twelve months, suddenly everything has an MCP and I can use it through my command line chat interface.

Any company that doesn't adapt gets so hammered by people's AI-DIY web scrapers that they have no choice but to cave.

It's been clear for years now that eventually ai will be embedded at the os level. Apple even recognized it way back when they first introduced Apple Intelligence. Yes they're commoditizing llms or whatever. But this has been a user facing feature they've been iterating on for years now

Does “the best machine for AI use” apply here considering these models are still server-side?

Apple’s play was a masterclass - unsure how deliberate it was, or how much of a choice thy actually had, but it’s turning out pretty well IMO.

Now if they can further reinforce their angle on Privacy, they might continue to be what they are (or more)

Now we only need to commoditize the hardware.

I think there is an opportunity for a new hardware company to enter the market. I know this is just hypothetical but I believe that AI is revolutionary enough where a new approach to hardware and UI/UX will enable far more value to be derived from AI. I think the incumbents like Apple will stick to their familiar platforms and could get beaten out by a new competitor that is AI native to the core. Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How is this Apple keeping control of the UX?