They will keep pricing the off-the-shelf AI at-cost to keep competitors at bay.

As for competitors, Anthropic is the most similar to OpenAI both in capabilities and business model. I am not sure what Google is up to, since historically their focus has been in using AI to enhance their products rather than making it a product. The "dark horses" here are Stability and Mistral which both are OSS and European and will try to make that their edge as they give the models for _free_ but to institutional clients that are more sensitive to the models being used and where is the data being handled.

Amazon and Apple are probably catching up. Apple likely thinks that all of this just makes their own hardware more attractive. It's not clear to me what Meta's end goal is.

Excuse me, I'm not an english native, you mean like a smart phone? Or do you mean some sort of other new business direction? Where did you get the info thtat they're planning to launch a phone?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/technology/openai-apple-s...

Let me introduce you to the VC business model. Get comical amounts of money. Charge peanuts for an initial product. Build a moat once you trap enough businesses inside it. Jack up prices.

So eventually you could be running decent sized models locally (iOS could even provide an API with fine tuning etc)

In my experience apple's ML on iphones is seamless. Tap and hold on your dog in a picture and it'll cut out the background, your photos are all sorted automatically including by person (and I think by pet).

OCR is seamless - you just select text in images as if it was real text.

I totally understand these aren't comparable to LLMs - rumor has it apple is working on an llm - if their execution is anything like their current ML execution it'll be glorious.

(Siri objectively sucks although I'm not sure it's fair to compare siri to an LLM as AFAIK siri does not do text prediction but is instead a traditional "manually crafted workflow" type of thing that just uses S2T to navigate)

Wasn't that solved about a decade ago. Does anyone suck at that?

Does android even have native OCR? Last I checked everything required an OCR app of varying quality (including windows/linux).

On ios/macos you can literally just click on a picture and select the text in it as if it wasn't a picture. I know for sure on iOS you don't even open an app to do it, just any picture you can select it.

Last I checked the Opensource OCR tools were decent but behind the closed source stuff as well.

Random google result of OCR on android (could be outdated) - https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/10te5et/why_oc...

To use, go to the app switcher and just start selecting text.

It's funny trying to select text in a video while the video is playing...

AFAIK this is a feature only available on Google Pixel devices. so not on 'Android' in general.

For one, my Oppo device running Android 12 doesn't have it.

Yes, Android fragmentation sucks.

That at least works for Pixel phones. Not sure about Samsung and others.

Tesseract? https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

I'm not sure this is true, even in the short term. For some things yes, that's definitely true. But for other things that are real-time or near real-time where network latency would be unacceptable, we're already there. For example, Google's Pixel 8 launch includes real-time audio processing/enhancing which is made possible by their new Tensor chip.

I'm no fan of Apple, but I think they're on the right path with local AI. It may even be possible that the tendency of other device makers to put AI in the cloud might give Apple a much better user experience, unless Google can start thinking local-first which kind of goes against their grain.

Agreed. Something else I wonder is if local AI in mobile devices might be better able to learn from its real-time interactions with the physical world than datacenter-based AI.

It's walking around in the world with a human with all its various sensors recording in real-time (unless disabled) - mic, camera, GPS/location, LiDAR, barometer, gyro, accelerometer, proximity, ambient light, etc. Then the human uses it to interact with the world too in various ways.

All that data can of course be quickly sent to a datacenter too, and integrated into the core system there, so maybe not. But I'm curious about this difference and wonder what advantages local AI might eventually confer.

GPS, phone orientation, last 5 apps you were in, etc. --> embedding

you might even have like "what time is it?" compressed as it's own embedding.

What phone are you referring to? A quick google didn’t seem to pull up anything related to OpenAI launching a hardware product?

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/openai-jony-ive-talks-ra...

Would completely change how I use the device.

Siri: "Sorry. Dictation service is unavailable at the moment."

It's past time for excuses. High-level people at Apple need to be fired over this. Hello? Tim? Do your job. Hello? Anybody home...?

My hope is that the upcoming eu rulings allow competition here. Ie force Apple to get out of the way of making their hardware better with better software.

You know what would get Apple to fix this? Forced competition. You know what Apple spends their trillions preventing?

It's not a time for complacency, if only because driver assistance is becoming more important every day. There are good reasons to put competent people on the Siri team.

It’ll probably take a while though.