How Apple Won Generative AI 17 Years Ago

Beware of the quiet among the noisy

Apple is a question mark to me.

The largest tech companies in the world are immersed in a desperate fight. To win, they’re resorting to various strategies: They maintain an endless stream of research not even Ahsen Khaliq, the king of paper reviews, can keep up with; they release new models whose many-number or cute-animal names we can’t recall anymore; and they’re marketing new features, turned products, turned features again.

This race (to the bottom (of inference cost)) is their attempt at leading generative AI, the industry of the future.

The race has the biggest players in the world against the ropes. Google’s executive is under attack by its own employees who lament a lack of vision and point to CEO Sundar Pichai as the culprit. Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted Meta out of the metaverse and into AGI and open-source and is willing to spend up to $20 billion in buying the equivalent of 600,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Satya Nadella, apparently cleverer than those two, took a riskier bet that promises to be one of the most visionary moves in recent tech history, by betting $13 billion on OpenAI (although he might have overplayed his hand).

A lot of noise out of its front door but Apple, undisturbed, remains silent.

It sits still, above them, calmly looking down, waiting for them to stop what, from its vantage point, looks like an inconsequential and petty squabble to announce, in a solemn voice—one that settles the destiny of things as if reading from a divine script—that they need to fight no more.

That the winner has been decided and they all have lost.