It’s a bit more complex than that. Octopus do a deal where you can lease a car and get the energy for it for free provided you agree to have it plugged in > x hrs a month. My read on that is that the cost of balancing the grid is greater than the cost of generating power. So grid is expensive, but power is cheap.
Could be higher - multiple Scottish windfarms are fully curtailed (developers paid for generation but the grid can’t distribute so they don’t use the power). Once the grid is upgraded with Easter Green Link 1-5 & Western Link 2, and the Scotwind Windfarms built this would be even higher!
Why should Apple have done this? It doesn’t fit their business in anyway shape or form. Where does data centre hardware sit relative to electronics / humanities cross roads that is foundational for Apple?
Apple is presumably leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to sell Apple Silicon for AI inference and training. They're the only ones who can attach reasonably large GPUs (M3 Ultra) to very large amounts of cheaper memory (512GB SO-DIMM per GPU). Apple could e.g. sell server SKUs of Mac Studios, heck they can sell M3 Ultra chips on PCIe cards. And they could further develop Apple Silicon in that direction. Presumably they would be seen as a very legit competitor to Nvidia that way, perhaps moreso than Intel and AMD. I'd assume that in the current climate this would be extremely lucrative.
Now, actually doing this would disrupt Apple's own supply chain as well as force it to spend significant internal resources and cultural change for this kind of product line. There's a good argument to be made it would disproportionally negatively affect its Mac business, so this would be a very risky move.
But given that AI hardware is likely much higher margin than the Mac business an argument could probably (sadly) be made that it'd be lucrative for them to try it. I personally don't think Apple is inclined to take this kind of risk to jeopardize the Mac, but I'm sure some people at Apple have considered this.
Yeah nothing about Apple is server side and imho that's what training is. To be serious about it as a company you have all sorts of other tools (crawlers, etc...) helping with training so it basically has to be in the datacenter at any reasonable scale anyway. And that's just not where Apple lives. We saw with Swift that they couldn't focus on server side enough to make it a serious language there and they've consistently declined to enter that area over the years because it's outside their wheelhouse.
If my Grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. Apple would need to transition from being a consumer electronics company to being a B2B retailer for data centre hardware to take advantage of this.
Obviously Siri from WWDC 2yrs ago was a disaster for Apple. Other than that they seem to have done pretty well navigating the new LLM world. I do think they would benefit from having their own SOA LLM, but I don’t think its is necessary for them. My mental model for LLMs and Apple is that they are similar Garage Band - “Now everyone can play an instrument” becomes “now anyone can make an app”. Apple owns the interface to the user (i don’t see anyone making nicer to use consumer hardware) and can use what ever stack in the background to deliver the technical features they decide to.
They should be allowed to make money from their work. Their work is MIT licensed, if it goes south it is rescuable by the community.
Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.
That's all fine. I don't think anyone is upset they got purchased. It's clear it was heading that direction anyway. What everyone is upset about is that they were purchased by OpenAI, who isn't exactly a trustworthy company.
When I use Claude code to work on a hobby project it feels like doom scrolling…
I can’t get my head around if the hobby is the making or the having, but fair to say I’ve felt quite dissatisfied at the end of my hobby sessions lately so leaning towards the former.
macOS is still better than windows, but my feeling is it’s more of a glass of cheap warm whiskey in hell than a cool glass of ice water.
reply