* The CEO of a three trillion dollar company that employs 100,000+ of the best talent you could find around the world, with the best lawyers in the world one phone call away. Also, one of the best performing CEOs in modern times.

AND

* The CEO of the AI company (ok ... non-profit) that pretty much brought up the current wave of AI to existence and who has also spent the best part of its life building and growing 1,000s of startups in SF.

Lol.

I could buy that argument about Jobs. Cook is just a guy with a title. He follows rules and doesn't get fired, but otherwise does everything he can with all the resources at his disposal to make as much money as possible. Given those same constraints and resources, most people with an IQ above 120 would do as well. Apple is an institution unto itself, and you'd have to repeatedly, rapidly, and diabolically corrupt many, many layers of corporate protections to hurt the company intentionally. Instead, what we see is simple complacency and bureaucracy chipping away at any innovative edge that Apple might once have had.

Maintenance and steady piloting is a far different skillset than innovation and creation.

Make no mistake, Cook won the lottery. He knew the right people, worked the right jobs, never screwed up anything big, and was at the right place at the right time to land where he is. Good for him, but let's not pretend he got where he is through preternatural skill or competence.

I know it's a silicon valley trope and all, but the c-class mythos is so patently absurd. Most of the best leaders just do their best to not screw up. Ones that actually bring an unusual amount of value or intellect to the table are rare. Cook is a dime a dozen.

In any case, "dime a dozen" doesn't do him justice -- he was very accomplished, in ways you can't fake, before becoming CEO.

There's a tendency to exaggerate the qualities of men in positions like this. There's nothing inherent to their positions requiring greatness or incredible merit. The extraordinary events already happened; their job is to simply not screw it up, and our system is such that you'd have to try really, really hard to have any noticeable impact, let alone actually hurt a company before the institution itself cuts you out. Those lawyers are a significant part of the organism of a modern mega corporation; they're the substrate upon which the algorithm that is a corporation is running. One of the defenses modern corporations employ is to limit the impact any individual in the organization can have, positive or otherwise, and to employ intense scrutiny and certainty of action commensurate with the power of a position.

Throw Cook into an start-up arena against Musk, Gates, Altman, Jobs, Buffet, etc, and he'd get eaten alive. Cook isn't the scrappy, agile, innovative, ruthless start-up CEO. He's the complacent, steady, predictable institutional CEO coasting on the laurels of his betters, shielded from the trials they faced through the sheer inertia of the organization he currently helms.

They're different types of leaders for different phases of the megacorp organism, and it's OK that Cook isn't Jobs 2.0 - that level of wildness and unpredictability that makes those types of leaders their fortunes can also result in the downfall of their companies. Musk acts with more freedom; the variance in behavior results in a variance of fortunes. Apple is more stable because of Cook, but it's not because he's particularly special. Simply steady and sane.

This is absolutely true. But that doesn’t imply that Tim Cook is so unexceptional that anyone with a 120 IQ could do the same job he does. The fact that Steve Jobs himself trusted Cook as his right hand man and successor when Apple probably has literally thousands of employees with at least a 120 IQ should be a sign of that.

Partly because little of this is really a question of intelligence. If you want to talk about it in psychometric terms, based on what I’ve read about the man he also seems to have extraordinarily high trait conscientiousness and extraordinarily low trait neuroticism. The latter of the two actually seems extremely common among corporate executive types—one gets the sense from their weirdly flat and level affect that they are preternaturally unflappable. (Mitt Romney also comes across this way.) I don’t recall where I read this, but I remember reading Jobs being quoted once that Cook was a better negotiator that he was because unlike Jobs, Cook never lost his cool. This isn’t the sign of an unexceptional person, just a person who is exceptional in a much different way than someone like Steve Jobs. And, contrary to what you claim at the top of your comment, someone like Tim Cook is pretty distinguishable from someone like Steve Ballmer in the sense that Ballmer didn’t actually do a good job running Microsoft. I don’t know if that was related to his more exuberant personality—being a weirdly unflappable corporate terminator isn’t the only path to success—but it is a point against these guys being fungible.

I'm on the side of culture. That's what I see with most of the business leaders.

This is quite ridiculous. "Developers x3" Ballmer would have face-planted at Apple. He only coasted so far at Microsoft because Gates had already won the platform war.

For example, when they say "requests are not stored by OpenAI," I have to wonder how they define "requests," and whether a request not having been stored by OpenAI means that the request data is not accessible or even outright owned by OpenAI. If Apple writes request data to an S3 bucket owned by OpenAI, it's still defensible to say that OpenAI didn't store the request. I'm not saying that's the case; my point is that I don't trust these parties and I don't see a reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

The freakiest thing about it is that I probably have no way to prevent this AI integration from being installed on my devices. How could that be the case if there was no profit being extracted from my data? Why would they spend untold amounts on this deal and forcibly install expensive software on my personal devices at no cost to me? The obvious answer is that there is a cost to me, it's just not an immediate debit from my bank account.

Is how I interpret that. It's similar to that OneDrive language which was basically allowing user directed privacy invasion.

Inevitably,openai will consume and regurgitate all data it touches.

It is not clean and anyone thinking openai won't brutalize your data for it's race to general AI is delusional in one of several ways.

The question is, is it encrypted E2E everywhere, how controlled is it on device, how often is it purged.

The ubiquity of cloud means theres a huge privacy attack.surface and unclear how much ofvthat is auditable.

Lastly, theres no reason to think Apple will avoid enshittification as the value of their ecosystem and users grow.

Just takes one bad quarter and a greedy MBA to tear down the walls.

Past privacy protection is no Guarantee of future protection.

What's the worst possible interpretation of Apple and CloudFlare's iCloud Private Relay?

LLMs are not accurate, they aren't subject matter experts that'll be maybe within 5% error margin.

People will gradually learn and discover anf the cost of keeping a model updated and running won't drastically reduce so we'll most likely see dust settling down.

It's like a graphics designer being limited to chose between local MS Paint, and Adobe Creative Cloud. Okay, so Llama 3 8B, if it's really as good as you say, graduates to local Paint.NET. Not useless per se, but still not even in the same class.

Alternatively synthetic data might drive the next generation of models, but that's largely untested at this point.

Llama 8B is ChatGPT 3.5 (18 months before L3), running on all new iPhones released since October 2022, (19 months before L3). That includes multimodal variants (built outside Facebook).

On the same token, those of us who are sufficiently motivated can maintain and utilize a local copy of Wikipedia…frequently for training LLMs at this point, so I guess the snake has come around, and we’ve settled into a full-on ouroboros of digital media hype. ;-)

Then, when I’m downstairs in my office and want to listen to music on my iPhone. I want my headphones to connect to my iPhone and not my TV upstairs!

I don’t need Skynet, I just need my devices to be a little less stupid.

I would consider that akin to magic at this point. Let’s start there and work our way up to handing over control of our nuclear arsenal.

You're asserting that the AI features will be removed in 3 to 5 years because they're not accurate enough today, but you actually need them to remain inaccurate in 3 years time for your prediction to be correct.

That seems unlikely. I agree that people will start to realize the cost, but the accuracy will improve, so people might be willing to pay.

An LLM that gives you a detailed plan for removing a stubborn stain in your toilet that involves mixing the wrong combination of drain cleaners and accidentally releasing chlorine, is going to happen if it hasn't already, but a lot of people will read about this and go "oh, I didn't know you could gas yourself like that" and then continue to ask the same model for recipes or Norwegian wedding poetry because "what could possibly go wrong?"

And if you wonder how anyone can possibly read about such a story and react that way, remember that Yann LeCun says this kind of thing despite (a) working for Facebook and (b) Facebook's algorithm gets flack not only for the current teen depression epidemic, but also from the UN for not doing enough to stop the (ongoing) genocide in Myanmar.

It's a cognitive blind spot of some kind. Plenty smart, still can't recognise the connection.

Someone’s going to accidentally kill themselves based on an AI hallucination soon if no one has already.

In the US it's different, because the US' FSD has nothing to do with the capabilities of the FSD in Europe (which is some sort of glorified driver assist), and it can clear navigate in many streets.

Mercedes in the US is very limited.

Forget about a model that knows EVERYTHING. Let's just train a model that only is expert in not all the law of United states just one state and not even that, just understands FULLY the tax law of just one state to the extent that whatever documents you throw at it, it beats a tax consultancy firm every single time.

If even that were possible, OpenAI et.el would be playing this game differently.

Is this standard applied to any other app?

My app is powered by GTPChatChat, the model beating all artificially curated benchmarks.

Still wanna buy?

An employee can be held accountable, and fired easily. An AI? You'll have to talk to the Account Manager, and sit through their attempts to 'retain' you.

Two years ago they output a solution for my query [1] right away, now they try to engage user to implement that thing. This is across the board, as far as I can see.

These LLMs are not about helping anyone, their goals are engagement and mining data for that engagement.

[1] The query is "implement blocked clause decomposition in haskell." There are papers (circa 2010-2012), there are implementations, but not in Haskell. BCD, itself, is easy, and can be expressed in a dozen-two lines of Haskell code.

Wow, this is a really interesting idea! A sneaky play for LLM providers is to be helpful enough to still be used, but also sufficiently unhelpful that your users give you additional training data.

Now instead of having some answer right away, the user has to engage in discussion, which increases the cost that is sunk into the work with LLMs.

this is particularly evident with image generation, but I think it's true across the board. for example, you may think something I created on midjourney "looks amazing", whereas I may dislike it because it's so far from what I had in mind and was actually trying to accomplish when I was sending in my prompt

One can find anything YOU produce to have different qualities from you.

In other words, there are two different objectives in a "drawing": (1) portraying that which I meant to portray and (2) making it aesthetically appealing

People who only see the finished product may be impressed by #2 and never consider how bad I was at #1

The Gell Mann amnesia effect suggests people will have a very hard time noticing the difference. Even if the models never improve, they're more accurate than a lot of newspaper reporting.

> People will gradually learn and discover anf the cost of keeping a model updated and running won't drastically reduce so we'll most likely see dust settling down.

So, you're betting on no significant cost reduction of compute hardware? Seems implausible to me.

This is not about compute, but about data.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125

"...our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training paradigms remains to be found."

Is that when they’re cribbing straight out of the newspaper pages, or is this just a cynical snipe at the poor state of media that, not for nothing, tech companies have had a fair hand in kneecapping?

"""I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."""

- Thomas Jefferson (not Mark Twain), 1807, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-read-newspaper-...

As mentioned elsewhere, 3 to 5 years is some 3x to 5x as long as GPT-4 exists; some 2-3x as long as ChatGPT exists and LLMs suddenly graduated from being obscure research projects to general-purpose tools. Do you really believe the capability limit has already been hit?

Not to mention, there's lots of money and reputation invested in searching for alternatives to current transformer architecture. Are you certain that within the next year or two, one or more of the alternatives won't pan out, bringing e.g. linear scaling in place of quadratic, without loss of capabilities?

As for money and reputation, that's a lot behind gold making too in medieval times and look where that lead too.

Scientific optimism is a thinking distortion and a fallacy too.

I’m not trying to downplay its potential, but I don’t know of anyone who trusts it enough for what I’d consider “tooling”.

Had Google become a utility and frozen it's search engine half a decade or more in the past, we would actually have something you could add AI on top of and come out with an improved product.

As it stands, capitalism isn't going to fix GIGO with AI

I think Apple's ultimate goal is to move as much of the AI functionality as possible on-device.

I think 4o is free because GPT3.5 was so relatively bad it means people are constantly claiming LLMs can't do things that 4 does just fine.

> Apple demoed other generative features beyond the OpenAI integration and said it plans to announce support for other AI models in the future.

But goddamn they absolutely leapfrogged Google and Apple and it’s completely amazing to see these trillion dollar companies play catch-up with a start-up.

I want to see more of this. Big Tech has been holding back innovation for too long.

Apple's focus has long been on a lifestyle product experience across their portfolio of hardware, and Apple Intelligence appears to be focused exactly on that in a way that has little overlap with OpenAI's offerings. The partnership agreement announced today is just outsourcing an accessory tool to a popular and suitably scaled vendor, the same as they did for web search and social network integration in the past. Nobody's leapfrogging anybody between these two because they're on totally different paths.

Having Siri answer your trivia question about whale songs, or suggest a Pad Thai recipe modification when you ran out of soy sauce, is just not where they see the value. Poor web search has been an easy critique to weigh against Siri for the last many years, and the ChatGPT integration (and Apple's own local prompt prep) should fare far better than that, but it doesn't have any relevance to "leapfrogging" because the two companies just aren't trying to do the same thing.

And it's not just web search! Siri's context is abysmal. My dad routinely has to correct the spelling of his own name. It's a common name, there are multiple spellings, but it's his phone!

Call it whatever you want.

Google had technical founders, now it’s run by MBAs and they are having a Kodak Moment.

I'm quite skeptical of Apple.