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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

It’s not a long term risk at all. Long term, models are going to be running on local hardware.

The AI data center is analogous to the mainframe.

If I can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my DDR4 closet server with a $500 16GB GPU at 50 tok/s (which I can) then I just about guarantee you that in 2-3 years a pretty acceptable AI model is going to be running off of iPhones and M7/M8 Macs.

The other option that reduces Apple’s long-term risk is that they could just buy an AI company.

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Yeah I can kinda see why Altman is out there trying to shame the public for having compute. The longer they carry those massive debt obligations, the more the models are going to economize.

It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.

Models running locally doesn’t benefit Apple unless they have a competitive model of their own. Otherwise they’ll end up being dependent on Google, Meta etc the same way they are today for apps and services. And getting out of that hole won’t be as simple as building a maps app.

I think it does if their chips are the only ones that run the models well on phones and competitors need to charge customers more money or give away less functionality for free.

Or open models become competitive as a base? Apple have an entire OS based on OpenStep and FreeBSD after all.

There is exactly zero chance Apple lets open, unconstrained models run on iPhones when they get powerful enough. We are talking about a company that doesn’t allow apps that contain bad words. People holding out hope for this are delusional.

How much would it cost to license one? Probably less than renting servers.

The on-device models that Apple distilled from Google's server based models are already available to developers to use in their apps at no cost.

We're in a time where devices are becoming more capable and developers are figuring out how to do on-device inference using less resources.

The companies that spent a fortune on AI data centers might as well have built a huge pyre of money for all the "moat" they built with it.

That’s not what I’m saying. They could take an open model, create their own variation of it, then embed that on devices. Just like they have with their OS.

In return for Google getting a discount on how much they pay Apple to be the default search engine in Safari, Apple currently has the right to distill Google's Gemini server models to create their own models that fit on-device.

> Apple is cutting down Google Gemini's massive models into smaller and more secure parts through distillation, to create elements that are more suited to on-device Apple Intelligence processing.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/03/25/apple-is-distilli...

Not to mention the fact that Apple, unlike most of the industry at times, has never seen itself as a software company. Someone needs to build all the devices used to interact with all this AI, and there's no evidence any major "AI company" other than Google, and to a much smaller extent Meta, has any interest in doing so.

If I were Apple and wanted to make a big bet, I'd be dumping money into a top-secret robotics lab.

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