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.
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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.
Apple or Steve Jobs? It seems like that was Steve Jobs doing as Apple hasn't done it without him.
> the personal assistant AI category
Didn’t Apple sort of already enter this market early-on with their subpar Siri?
I’ve been an iPhone and MacBook Pro user for years, but each time when I set up a new Apple device the first thing I do is say no to anything Siri, and also turning off additional Siri related settings. To the best of my knowledge, Siri is worse than useless, and I haven’t regretted staying away from it.