How Apple Could Help With AI and LLMs
A modest proposal for how Apple can come to dominate the AI race without ever actually matching with the current leaders[…]
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So what is Apple the platform vendor to do? Stop thinking like an app ecosystem participant or even an app store referee, and start thinking like a platform vendor again. Apple’s value-add here will never be by producing its own “frontier” model that does everything best.
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Right now all these AI providers are returning documents in response to user intent, and everyone is treating those documents like the finished product. Here’s your poem. Here’s your picture. Anything else?.
The brilliance of OpenDoc was that each of those were raw material.
Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.
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And similar to the Spotlight indexing API, developers should be able to provide data to the SI along with rich metadata.
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But give developers the opportunity, and then customers will have something to choose from. Make the Mac and iOS the best platform to build personalized LLMs.
Let the apps die and live based on their own merit and reputation. Apple can build the platform, and maybe expand on it over time and use it themselves.
Apple Intelligence has so far been the opposite of the platform strategy that had previously served it so well. Modern Apple is more about providing closed solutions and services.
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