Apple backs out of backing OpenAI, report claims
arstechnica.com
Apple dropped out of the $6.5 billion investment round at the 11th hour.
  • Toto@lemmy.world
    110·
    2 months ago

    This will definitely cause pause amongst the non-cost sunk companies. They will be wondering what Apple knows.

    IMO this signals the lack of clear ROI versus maintenance costs. Silicone Valley is used to funding huge projects like Amazon which took years to choke out the competition and make money. But AI is a new market which is more interesting to investors than people who didn’t want it in their mouse.

    • drdiddlybadger@pawb.social
      151·
      2 months ago

      Not only is AI a new market but it’s the only market where someone with way less investment can leapfrog the shit out of you and that group can just release shit for free just to stab you in the dick after billions of investment. Open AI only has a hope if it can get massive state level contracts to fund it, likely by offering some type of surveillance service which they aren’t even specced for but models like these are great at. Just all round bad investment decision to buy into them unless you know what they’re planning.

    • 100@fedia.io
      5·
      2 months ago

      the current tech is really unsustainable with its cost to usefulness ratio

      needs a lot of optimisation to make it work and less “brute forcing” the models

  • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    I don’t care for a lot of what Apple does, but there’s no denying they understand how to make money–and how to avoid losing it.

    • BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 months ago

      I’d guess the 3 key staff members leaving all at once without notice had something to do with it.

      • celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        Not to mention TSMC told Sammy a couple days ago that his business isn’t worth $7T spent on scaling up their operations. Major companies do not see the value in AI. It’s a flash in the pan technology and solves few if any problems.

    • erenkoylu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      probably just price. OpenAI does not have the edge over competition it once had.

  • just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    That’s good marketing. OpenAI recently went for profit on steroids. They are increasing chatgpt plus price, they backed out of providing free credits to startups, they also made it so Sam Altman would have full control over the company (basically non-profit board is no longer involved).

    Not to mention sama first made outrageous claims about how he needs a crazy amount of energy for AI training and now that MS and other governments are starting to fulfill those requirements, he is changing the goal post to even more outrageous claims. Like literally he said if the world does not do this, there will be wars fought over AI in the future and only rich people will have access to AI.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    152·
    2 months ago

    Too late to the grift…

    Why even collab with that clown, when apply has money to hire talent and buy NVIDIA cards to do the job…

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        310·
        2 months ago

        learn something new everyday… well apple better tuck that dick and buy these GPUs then it seems, i doubt their own design can compete tbh… .if it did, nvidia would not be running a train on the global GPU market.

        • thejml@lemm.eeEnglish
          162·
          2 months ago

          Considering how long Apple has been putting neural cores in all their chips, and the speed at which their in house chips have outpaced competitors (like the M series for example), I feel like not only will Apple beat nvidia at this, Apple will do so by a decent amount.

          That said, nvidia will continue to sell world wide in this market as Apple will keep their chips in only their own hardware, so if you’re not running a Mac/IOS device, you’ll be using nvidia chips.

          Either way, even if Apple just keeps up, competition is still best for everyone, so I welcome this development.

          • Akrenion@slrpnk.net
            4·
            2 months ago

            The m chips are only good for inference and not for training. That is still unparalleled with CUDA. Pun intended.

            • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              31·
              2 months ago

              That is still unparalleled with CUDA.

              I still don’t understand how an open source alternative with better hardware support hasn’t happened yet.

              • herrvogel@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 months ago

                The problem has two sides: software and hardware. You can open source the software side all you want, it’s not gonna go very far when it has to fight against the hardware instead of working with it.

                ROCm is open source, but it’s AMD. Their hardware has historically not been as powerful and therefore attractive to the target audience, so it’s been going slow.

    • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
      9·
      2 months ago

      They can and they are making their own chip designs to do the job.

      The cloud part of Apple Intelligence runs on their own designed hardware.

  • Random123@fedia.io
    4·
    2 months ago

    So what does this mean for the so called apple intelligence that was coning out later next year?

    • interurbain1er@sh.itjust.works
      171·
      2 months ago

      Apple intelligence is their own project, with their own models. They bought a company specialized in AI at the edge (or on device). All the “AI” that will interact with user’s data is Apple’s.

      Still waiting to see what the chat-gpt integration is exactly, but the more I read about it the more it seems it just the usual writing assistant that we will soon find in every text and image editor. And the hint that they will offer Gemini or other model as well really mean they haven’t tied any real features to it.

      • mbtrhcs@feddit.org
        4·
        2 months ago

        According to the keynote at least, the integration is literally just Siri offering to defer to ChatGPT for some requests. Basically a more advanced version of “here’s what I found on the web” if it doesn’t know what to do otherwise.

        Funnily enough, Apple isn’t even paying OpenAI for that, they’re literally saying it’s for exposure.

    • Michal@programming.dev
      3·
      2 months ago

      It’s their inhouse project, so if they’ll probably focus their efforts on it if they’re no longer investing in 3rd party.

      • Random123@fedia.io
        1·
        2 months ago

        As a degenerate who bought the new iphone for a much needed upgrade, this sounds promising

  • erenkoylu@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    This is not suprising. Anthropic models are clearly better than OpenAI ones. OpenAI no longer has a secret sauce that everyone wants to pay billions for.

  • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Okay, I have no idea what the hell is going on here. I don’t follow this stuff, and last I heard, Sam Altman was the good guy who was kicked out of OpenAI because he was focused on ethics while they were focused on profit.