🏠 Here Comes The King

Apple is making AI moves

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Gm. Welcome to the last Homescreen of the year. I hope you’ve enjoyed it this year as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Otherwise, I’ll see you again on the other side, aka Jan 3rd.

🏠 AI

Apple Awakens

It’s well known that Apple is AI’s sleeping giant. Despite basically lapping the field in tech, they are basically non-existent when it comes to AI.

That may finally be changing.

Apple has awakened with two new papers introducing techniques for 3D avatars and efficient language model inference.

The first paper brings us Human Gaussian Splats, or HUGS for short. HUGS is an AI method that is able to generate animated 3D avatars from short single camera videos. Basically, all you need to 3D-ify yourself is to shoot a small video on your phone.

The second deals with LLMs on devices with limited memory. It proposes minimizing data transfer from flash storage into scarce DRAM during inference. In English: it makes it so your phone and tablet can run LLMs.

And that’s the key point of this all, isn’t it?

Apple’s big advantage is in hardware. Chances are you have a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or all 3. It doesn’t really matter if they take a bit longer to get the software up to speed because all they need to do is throw their models into their devices and it’s GGs. Why use GPT when I can just use Apple?

This is why Samsung is developing an AI smartphone, Google is putting Gemini natively into Pixel, and Sam Altman flirted with iPhone designer Jony Ive.

Distribution matters just as much as product, and nobody has better distribution than Apple. It’s up to everyone else to catch up while Apple is still product-less.

In 2024, Keep An Eye On…The AI hardware wars.

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