alt Hacker NewsApple is actually interesting. They are one of the few companies with a chip / PC play with real power AND basically no play I'm the hyperscalar market.
That means they're actually incentivized at least short term, to benefit PCs becoming strong enough to do local LLMs. Which makes this play make even more sense. Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs.
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Indeed. If Apple makes it feasible to run models like GLM 5.2 at home, I will become their customer.
They do stand in front of a great opportunity that would also benefit consumers, which seems rare in the llm era.
If people can get opus4.6/gpt5.5-like models locally, labs could raise their prices and sell token speed, better reasoning, mobile-focused improvements, you name it.
Not all consumers are power users and many will be happy to pay for flexibility.
I worked at a hyperscaler when the M1 came out. A MacBook Air M1, running a Linux VM was faster and more energy efficient than anything we had in the data center.
Tangential: About 8 years ago ex-Apple chip engineers left to design server-grade chips, this was Nuvia, and they got sued by Apple to the point that they had to get acquired by Qualcomm.
I'm not sure it's a death knell for frontier labs so much as a narrowing of what people need them for
I really wish people stopped saying things "I've been saying that"
why not just say "I think that"
do you see yourself as some kind of visionary about this particular topic? literally EVERYONE is saying that, it's the most obvious fact about AI
> Though, I've been saying for a while that the local AI inflectiom point is the death knell for these frontier labs.
"Death knell" is a touch hyperbolic. Hardware that can only run quantized models that take up GBs in VRAM falls short of even an A100 (by almost an order of magnitude[0]), which in turn falls short of what an 8xH100 cluster can do (also by another order of magnitude[0]).
I'm an avid believer in local LLMs, but I cannot deceive myself - data center accelerators will win on power dissipation numbers alone[1], even when giving generous allowances for higher efficiency on Apple chips - and assuming the Apple-efficiency advantage persists on the same TSMC process node.
0. Based on my unscientific fine-tuning training experiments across local and rented GPUs. YMMV for inference.
1. Unless Apple surprises everyone and brings back the XServe with M7, if not, then laptop and desktop for factors simply can't dump heat fast enough to compete head-to-head, and will be designed for lower input wattage.