alt Hacker NewsSo, Meta will spend millions/billions on building open-weight models and then people will send Apple $20,000 to run them. Seems like a good deal for Apple.
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How big is the local LLM market? I have trouble imagining Apple will move enough units to make $20k/ea worth it for them as a business segment.
How many 5080 16 Gig cards would you have to buy to run the same model, and what would that cost?
They have the best strategy of bigtechco: let others figure out the squishier layers while they focus on selling the best hardware. Privacy has incredible value to a lot of individuals and industries. $20-80k in hardware that *appreciates* the moment you buy it is a reasonable investment for a lot of SMBs, and still less than a single Nvidia rig. Privacy pays.
It won't be free for Apple to use Meta's model in the future.
Both companies are profitable and AI is not their main line of business. This affects pure AI companies.
As open weight models continue to match frontier models, the race to $0 will continue to benefit supporters of running open weight models locally.
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Exactly why does Apple need to do any model training/development? They are out here selling the shovels.