Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs(247wallst.com)

36 points by prabal97 11 hours ago | 22 comments

exabrial 51 minutes ago |

The one good thing out of this, we may finally get the mac pro back. Hopefully a rackmount version that doesn't cost trillions.

pingou 10 hours ago |

I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $? Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?

unrented7977 10 hours ago | |

The tinfoil hat answer is they want to ensure fewer people can run local LLMs instead of paying OpenAI for their models.

mindslight 7 hours ago | | |

But the monthly subscription isn't that expensive?

(demon rises up. "muahahaha, you don't pay here with money")

notfromhere 10 hours ago | |

Aren't they used doing this so they can generate training data for using Macs via the UI with computer use?

prabal97 9 hours ago | |

I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.

MisterTea 9 hours ago | | |

What realistic environment requires 10,000 Macs?

cyanydeez 2 hours ago | |

Theyre distilling tge open models. Fr

kevinrineer 4 hours ago |

> According to The Information, OpenAI has reportedly purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios in recent months for reinforcement learning and training computer-use agents.

I do hope they verified this claim and didn't just read the headline. I'm not interested in subscribing to that source to find out unfortunately.

ChrisLTD 7 hours ago |

Something else they want to price us out of?

exceptione 6 hours ago | |

Yep. Waiting for someone writing a paper titled "All you need is coffee" or something.

evanjrowley 10 hours ago |

I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.

nozzlegear 6 hours ago | |

A vibe coded distro is a real monkey's paw type of wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499854

vablings 10 hours ago | |

I highly doubt that a purchase this large did not come with contracts to get software working how OpenAI wants on the apple software hardware stack.

Apple wants this knowledge for their software stack too so it's not going out back into Asahi

jbverschoor 7 hours ago |

Just to make sure we’re gonna do opening and run locally?

ChrisArchitect 11 hours ago |

Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508982

burnt-resistor 8 hours ago |

Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.

DangitBobby 8 hours ago | |

Sounds like a job for a state of the art model...

cyanydeez 1 hour ago | | |

Chicken, meet egg.

vbwml 10 hours ago |

  AI-junkie: Claude, please write an AI infra article about OpenAI buying Macs!
             Please use a non-beige background for once!

  AI-royalty: I'm sorry, non-beige requires the full token price!

AI-junkie: Claude, please write an AI infra article about OpenAI buying Macs! Please use a non-beige background for once! AI-royalty: I'm sorry, non-beige requires the full token price!