bigyabai
Well-defined governance policies stop businesses and orgs from wasting their valuable time on zero-sum politics like this. If he doesn't agree, he doesn't have to participate.
It makes me wonder what these people think workplace decorum looks like in professional orgs.
Man, China's been taking notes.
The "baked-in" weight technology you are describing uses enormous amounts of memory. There is not enough SRAM or flash ROM in the world to put a "modern frontier model" on every iPhone, even if you quantized it to 1 bit. It is scarce and expensive, and we are in a global shortage of memory and flash storage.
If we lived in a world where Cerebras, Taalas and Groq could dethrone Nvidia, they would have done it years ago. Turns out, cutting architectural corners has consequences, and they're extremely offputting for the majority of inference providers.
It'll be popular forever now, not because of momentum or network effects, but because fake engagement and bot content will be blended in with genuine user generated content. People too easily forget that TikTok was a national security concern, and that there was almost certainly secret/sealed imperatives to build a comparable US platform with equivalent international outreach. Well, here you have it.
Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream
If it isn't, it's certainly an advantage over the trashy EVs we have in America.
If rampant despotism is the end-goal, Oracle has already aligned themselves with the despots.
Whenever I see "hosted in Switzerland" my mind immediately goes to the Crypto AG scandal.
Intel could have piles of GDDR sitting around, and Arc GPUs would still be have limited supply. It's just the way the product was made.
You are about 4 decades too late for that to matter.
Flock's shareholders and board of directors don't pay their executives to be humanitarian moralists. Same for OpenAI, Disney, Apple, et. al.
We should all know by now that it depends on who you are. For conversational use, toolcalling and structured response, it was a few years ago. For coding it will probably be a few months from now. And for advanced 3D/computer use/biology/engineering applications, we're probably looking at a longer time horizon.
We have GPUs and NPUs capable of accelerating models this size on-device, most of the time. Replacing that flexible logic block with a static ASIC is a downgrade, especially since users don't ever have 1000+ tok/s or batched request requirements. The on-device acceleration is perfectly fine for >8B model inference.
I get that people are starry-eyed, and that HN is supposed to be the place for curious inquiry. But creating a coprocessor that uses a redundant, static memory system that gives users no noticeable advantages is much more expensive and stupid than investing in a CUDA-style GPGPU architecture.
> Like Claude Mythos Preview, GLM-5.3 has strong capabilities for autonomously building end-to-end cyber exploits. But GLM-5.3 is unlike other frontier models in that it has been released without meaningful safeguards to limit misuse. https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...
Just sayin'...
It would probably be easier for Micron to double their memory production, than it would be for Intel to beat Micron's annual shipments.
Project Silica is a pretty cool example of how you could potentially circumvent this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
Crypto miners already charged down this route for mining, and now there are thousands of ASIC mining rigs that are worth nothing, when GPU rigs are resold at a profit. ASICs are a dead-end, and I think that's why Nvidia couldn't give a rats ass what Taalas builds.
To push beyond the envelope of what a mobile GPU can do, you'd have to build gigantic coprocessors for 30-100B models, which would probably cost more than the phone/laptop itself to integrate on-die. Nevermind the fact that SRAM is several times more expensive than DRAM gig-for-gig.
Those on-device weights are horribly outdated, underperform for their size, and cannot be updated to use a different model. I don't think Nvidia is afraid of Taalas.
I don't know if anyone told you, but GDDR is included in the current RAM shortage.
Minecraft is really the perfect example, because humans get all sorts of unfair advantages. Even a young player has enough spatial reasoning to recognize and remember landmarks, visualize large projects or explore without getting lost. These are simple instincts that LLMs will struggle to match even with huge context sizes and native multimodal input.
It's just missing the context that Tesla hemorrhaged European market share for 8 consecutive quarters.
From their current position, it would be genuinely difficult to find ways to piss off more of their customers.
At risk of sounding like a glazer, Nvidia has a super clean path to home robotics no matter who wins the consumer segment. They have experience selling their hardware to system integrators like Nintendo and Tesla, and have shipped low-power GPGPU platforms on an SOC since the mid-2010s. The value add of CUDA is enormous, versus the struggle Apple will have bringing developers into the CoreML ecosystem. Nvidia has the momentum with Tegra and Jetson, the hardware and software lead will take years to catch up with.
I guess in a fair essay, this is the point where I should commend Apple for their output. They make the fastest AArch64 CPUs on the market, have an excellent "ecosystem" sell to the billions of iPhone owners in the world, and can ship any service from advertisement to F1 and sports streaming. Individually these are very impressive accomplishments that Tim Cook deserves commendation for. Taken as a whole, I don't see any coherent strategy that ties it all together. The "iPhone ecosystem" concept can't save expensive masterpiece products like the Vision Pro, even if it's a great headset. Users despise Apple's advertisement and service upsells, and single-core CPU performance isn't constraining home robotics. All of Apple's strongest tactics are pretty benign in the light of who they'll have to oppose.
This was a good discussion, and it's fun to game-theory future products with other people. Admittedly, asking Apple to compete with Nvidia's tech stack is like asking the coughing baby to defuse a hydrogen bomb. I recognize that the full scope of my demands for competition are unrealistic, but I think there's some meat on the bone that Apple is leaving for no good reason. The Mac Pro is one of those lowest-hanging fruit that didn't have to die, or at the very least could have been redesigned to champion the advantages of Apple Silicon. The Mac Studio is not a very confident future-facing product, and I feel a bit of worry for Apple's future designs seeing it as their flagship Mac. Apple has all the resources to push out the compute frontier for consumers and datacenters alike - here's hoping they join the fray, for all of our sakes.
This is exactly what I said in the last comment. "People in the know" is a statement that narrows down your audience to a select few groups that Apple narrowcasts to. You arbitrarily ignored the rest of the market as being unqualified to shop for themselves. We have the usage statistics that prove macOS is not a popular alternative to Windows or even Chromebooks. The vast majority of PC shoppers do not buy Macs.
You might call it "disingenuous" to ignore your cherry-picked audience, but I did acknowledge the niches that Apple caters to. You are the one that is unable to reconcile Apple's halo of quality with their mediocre sales performance and rejection by the market at-large. Macs make Apple less revenue than novelty devices like the iPad, and the iPhone blows it out of the water in terms of install base. Apple Silicon isn't even the highest-demand high-performance ARM chipset right now, Nvidia's Grace SOC is. And Grace sucks, but it's modular and scalable enough to replace Apple's discontinued Mac Pro niche.
Cut it however you want; M-series Apple Silicon is chopped liver even in the middle of a compute shortage. The HN echo chamber said that unified memory and AArch64 would irreversibly change the direction of PC design forever, but both of those features have been ignored by other OEMs for the past 7 years. Instead, Apple Silicon is starting to copy design characteristics of competing hardware like Nvidia's CUDA GPUs. So, maybe you shouldn't trust "people in the know" to give you an honest accounting of how Apple Silicon competes with the computers that most people are buying. Their subjective statements cannot be extrapolated into an objective metric.
"Apple will bring memory in-house" (no further explanation, apparently)
"Vertical computers need a comeback" (ignoring why they originally died?)
"$GROUP needs to buy an ARM ISA license" (Arm has to make it worthwhile)
It's beyond my understanding how people can read the news and come up with this stuff. Perhaps it is beyond the commentor's understanding, as well.