alt Hacker NewsApple has a fascinating history of waiting and seeing how a market develops before entering with a better product and eventually dominating, the iPod and iPhone are two examples. It seems they may be building a strong position to pull that off again in the personal assistant AI category ChatGPT is trying to dominate.
I enjoy watching the slow burn approach Apple is deploying as they quietly gear up to offer some % of local inference on iPhones to provide most of the AI services consumers want. Local inference could enable a very low price point for AI services that Apple would leverage alongside their massive ecosystem advantages and privacy claims to compete very effectively for personal assistant AI subscriptions.
Agreed, but I wonder how that plays out without them entering the frontier model space. I just downloaded the new foundation models cli and ran some inference on my Mac, it wasn't great, but it was neat to see. I asked which model it was using and it said gpt 4o mini.
An on-device, 100% private AI assistant seems like it could be so big that it could be a legitimate threat to the frontier model providers they are partnering with right now, imho.