He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.
I don't think we are seeing productivity gains due to LLMs in the general economy yet.
Even in software development, are we seeing an increase in the number of products or features shipped?
I certainly wouldn't credit Ed Zitron with timing his predictions very well, but that doesn't make them wrong, and it certainly doesn't support the AI maximalism we're all forced to endure.
I’m curious, removing coding as a criterion what is more impressive about the current models than say gpt 4o? Give a prompt example. Keep in mind most consumers of AI are likely not using it for coding so this is relevant.
I doubt anyone could give a not coding example where it’s meaningfully better with current frontier than 4o.
Take humaneval. 4o gets 90, gpt 5.6 gets 94%. So what?
https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
If an iPhone had a 4o quality model that could run locally frontier models would be finished.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
I guess the Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor also exists, but good luck getting your hands on that... and regardless that's also 128GB.
Put it this way, with 192 GB VRAM you can run deepseekv4... with 128gb only with lots of quantization
Edit: WTH! I was curious and i went to apple's website to price out a high end unit just to price comparison, and it looks like the high ram units are gone now, and they max out at 96GB?? Guess i missed that...
What! Ends with a cliff-hanger!? I NEED TO KNOW WHAT POINTS HE MISSED!!!
(but not badly enough to buy a $100/mo subscription).
Anyway, I think they are really well positioned for local inference, if local inference will be a thing they will be fine.
Their hardware is just that good and the fact that is great for LLMs is just icing
A lot has been made of Google's recent earnings being cash flow negative (I think for the first time ever?). Building data centers is something Google is very good at. They've also partially or wholly insulated themselves from a collpase by using Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") where the collateral for loans is simply the GPUs. Even the physical building and the land its own is leased from another subsidiary. Google is still a cash cow. I also think they may break the NVidia mohnopoly with their own TPU hardware given enough time.
Microsoft too is a cash cow and seemingly hasn't bet the farm on Copilot.
And Apple is a real dark horse here. They, like Microsoft, don't seem to have bet the farm on AI but also, they're in a unique position to drive a move to local LLMs with their own silicon. Their ARM CPUs use a shared memory architecture. Nvidia strictly segments the market by limitng VRAM on consumer GPUs. Apple can get around that. They just don't have the raw FLOPS to compete yet. There have been rumors they're targeting the M7 series in 2028 for a big jump in AI performance.
This market is going to boil down to performance-per-Watt (IMHO) and that's going to be interesting to watch as NVidia moves up to an annual product cycle. what will the new generation do to existing deployements when hardware 1-3 years is at a severe PPW disadvantage? we'll see.
Personally I just want to be able to buy 64GB of RAM for $200 and an SSD for under $100 again. You know, like 2025.
I think a good follow-up question is: which Copilot?
Anyway, Microsoft seems to be leaning hard into the whole "you can't get fired for buying Microsoft" thing that used to be IBM and AWS. Normies all around the world still insist on using Microsoft Windows and Office.
Anecdotally, they supposedly lost a lot of money on GitHub Copilot's inference costs, at least until June. So they'd be far more equipped to survive an AI crash now.
What other device manufacturer does that? The Google Pixel 4 released the same year dropped major OS updates after 3 years. Same for the Galaxy S10.
This is a criticism I've never understood. I think I know what you're referring to, but it really says more about Apple customers than Apple the corporation.
In my opinion, for all its faults, Apple makes quality hardware that can last many years when treated well. Unlike Microsoft, they don't completely shift paradigms with every OS release or new doo-dad. My 7 year old Macbook is still perfectly usable, receives updates, and can run modern software. Although I don't own an iPhone, I haven't seen anything to suggest that they are built to be immediately obsolete. Just because many Apple users are addicted to having the latest thing doesn't mean that a several years old iPhone isn't still perfectly viable in 2026.
Ursa Ag is funny. Maybe we can have a device that runs programs the user selects.
Especially since they're seeing huge leaps in capabilities every few months.
I only use free web version for all btw.
This was true until late April, when OpenAI's GPT Image 2 overtook Nano Banana 2.
That I did not say.
There was a class action because they deliberately slowed down iPhones claiming it was for battery health (anecdotally, when I had iPhones I noticed they were always a a pain to use for a month before and after the new releases, but it could be in my head).
They solder in RAM so it's difficult or impossible to upgrade.
I have an M1 MBP and the battery life is half of what it used to be. However I also have Applecare so of course the battery health is stuck at 84% (fairly sure, but not totally sure, that it was at 82% a few months ago) because they won't replace the battery unless it's under 80%. A lot of people report the battery health getting stuck just above 80% if they have Applecare.
Their hardware is great, I agree with you, but let's not pretend they don't play that game.
Not to turn this into a Web fight or anything, but come on... Even my t420S from 2011 could be upgraded with ssd and more ram and is still used :). My daily driver is t480, 8 years old, my wive's x1 carbon 7 years old, with no intention of retiring either anytime soon.
The notion of Apple, of all companies, "setting standard for long span devices", is laughable to me as I look at my ipads no longer running old software I paid for and getting slower with every forced update.
Apple makes sexy devices that match many people's requirements. Good on them! But this continued notion they invented everything is grating.
</old grouchy man's rant finished> :-)
The iPhone 8 finally died. I think it was almost 10 years old.