from Hacker News

Apple and the AI Divide

by GavinAnderegg on 1/7/25, 8:45 PM with 46 comments

• by malshe on 1/8/25, 1:23 AM

  > Apple seems to be pressured to play catch-up on AI technology, and I feel like this is being driven by activist shareholders instead of people who are focused on products.

  I get the same sense. When Apple announced their AI features last year, the stock started moving up.

• by raincole on 1/8/25, 3:56 AM

  When even Mozilla is introducing AI summarization services, I find it's really hard to blame Apple.

• by 486sx33 on 1/8/25, 12:34 PM

  I’d say this is a very general article that isn’t well sourced or referenced.

• by 42lux on 1/8/25, 8:54 AM

  Apple is pretty conservative in their AI approach or am I out of touch? I mean for comparison just look at google, samsung or microsoft.

• by imtringued on 1/8/25, 1:23 PM

  I wonder why AI is used for these random things that nobody needs, instead of immediately useful things like calibrating microphone volume. I'm so tired of constantly redoing the echo tests, because the software is forgetting what microphone I used last time. Then there are also people who don't bother with the echo tests (I used to be that guy) and you can't understand what they are saying because of volume clipping.

• by sandspar on 1/8/25, 1:17 AM

  >There’s a group of the population that is disgusted by anything related to LLMs or generative AI.

  I feel genuine concern for this group of people, a group which includes some of my own family members. I worry that they're going to be left behind.

• by aleph_minus_one on 1/8/25, 2:48 AM

  > Blockchains are slow, expensive databases masquerading as a social revolution while functionally being a get-rich-quick scheme.

  If you consider a blockchain to be (mostly) a "competitor" to a database, you use it wrong. Blockchains and in particular consensus algorithms for blockchains are a solution to a hard problem: reaching a consensus when not all participants can be trusted.

  For any application that needs this problem solved, blockchain algorithms are to my best knowledge basically the only game in town. These applications are rare, but they do exist - for these blockchain and blockchain consensus algorithms are a godsend.

  If you have another problem to solve, a blockchain will insanely likely not be the proper solution.