Competition is the core tenant that makes capitalism beneficial to broader society.
Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors.
So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation.
In many of the cases they've brought there exists alternative, yet stronger arguments that could have been made.
I'd support congress legislating towards more competition (e.g. forcing open standards for things like APIs/chat clients/smart watches etc), or a more active FTC.
But the current approach is far too disorganized and weak.
I mean, I'm not a lawyer so I won't really judge what's a good or bad argument. My impression is that forcing open standards is a much harder argument than an antitrust one. Open standards can come at a later step.
And if you haven't kept up this year, Chevron being overturned is showing that the SCOTUS is more than happy to reduce FTC interference.
While I do think there's going to be a huge market for cloud-based LLM serving, the fact that consumer hardware can run close to SOTA models fairly easily (e.g. high-RAM MBP config), seems to me that the provider market won't be as big as investors are betting on.
Most of the rewards will be reaped by consumers rather than providers.
We're also in an age where the current levels of RAM in consumer devices were almost entirely optimized for prior to the existence of LLMs. I find it highly likely vendors will optimize for higher RAM capacity over other priorities in future hardware.
How long until a 256GB RAM laptop (shared with GPU) is reasonably cheap/available? I give it a few years at most.
It's possible that models grow orders of magnitude larger, but I find it more likely that the size of models will grow along the curve of cost of training decreasing/hardware cost improvements. There will be a sweet spot where it's economical to train larger models, and private companies won't push much beyond that.
Enterprises use LLMs too, and quite often there wouldn't be any client you could reasonably run the model on. (You wouldn't want to e.g. have an LLM summarize and categorize a user request on their device, since that would require you shipping your model and/or internal knowledge base to the client).
Yes, but if you can run a sufficient LLM on a $2,000 laptop, then the cost to serve it from the cloud will be similarly cheap. (e.g. reserve an appropriately sized EC2 instance for pennies on the dollar)
It's a highly competitive market. Companies aren't going to pay 100k/year to run a model on something that can run on a 2k consumer grade device.
128GB of gpu accessible/fast RAM can be had for $5000 on a macbook pro today. What will it be 3-4 years from now on linux/windows machines?
And we still haven't seen any SoC providers try to optimize for RAM capacity over compute yet.
Oh yes, I could definitely see the privacy-preserving consumer use case creating sufficient demand for efficiency that also bleeds over into the enterprise market.
That's what's happened with power efficiency and ARM CPUs, after all!
That's what I mean: ARM was initially attractive in the low-power/low-performance market, then it scaled up to higher and higher power cores (while still staying power efficient), which in turn attracted datacenter customers.
This is where I want highly sensitive healthcare consumers of LLMs to be at. Note summation, suggested diagnosis (provider always in control), and other augmented abilities for the clinical staff without the risk of health care data sent outside the device, or the very local network.
Even if bandwidth weren't an issue and all users had compatible hardware: You'd still be offloading a (semi-)trusted computation to user hardware, which is usually completely untrusted.
The semantics of the word "DONATION" are frankly irrelevant to the discussion.
Conceptually, why should a "donation" be any different than a "payment" in regards to the Apple tax? Regardless of their current legal agreement attempts to disambiguate these, they are conceptually quite the same. In one case you receive a good, in another you receive good-will.
Should Apple be entitled to 30% of these voluntary payments? Some of you will say "yes", but I'd bet pretty strongly the vast majority of the public would say "no".
And legislation will follow eventually, in my opinion, despite the US government/courts moving very slowly here.
Continued acts like these will only move up the timeline and increase the number of lawsuits which will eventually tip against Apple.
>Should Apple be entitled to 30% of these voluntary payments?
Apple believes so, because Apple is so arrogant as to think that the payment wouldn't have occurred had it not been for their hard work on the platform.
It's false, of course. It'd be like Bell Telephone asking for a cut of your profits because you negotiated a business deal over the phone. Or the cell phone carriers forcing you to pay them $7 for a 20-second ringtone.
Why would Apple have to do consider what another company makes? What's that got to do with anything.
Not trolling - and I think Apple is greedy here. Still I need pointing out how your arguments is not logical.
This is like saying you can only sell your product for a % of someone else profit.
Apple should be allowed to charge whatever they want - as long as they don't have monopoly on the process. That is the crux of the problem here. Monopoly is the problem not the percentages.
While Apple’s monopolistic practices should not be legal, it’s simultaneously true that Apple should not be able to inject itself into arrangements like this.
It should absolutely illegal for a company to tax your revenues like this.
Let's assume, for the sake of discussion, all parties involved voluntarily want to give Apple 30%. Why should that be illegal?
It seems it only becomes a problem when there is external pressure that where accepting the giving of giving 30% to Apple is seen as the best of a bad situation. But that's what anti-monopolistic efforts are supposed to avoid.
This argument is a poor foundation for legal reasoning. Suppose a guy wants to be a slave? Shouldn’t he have the right to be enslaved? Suppose a guy wants to sell his organs? Shouldn’t he have the right to sell his organs?
Well, no, society is much better off with these things blocked off. There are immensely perverse incentives created.
The main one here is just straight up collusion because there’s not many distributors by nature. It’s dumb as hell that steam takes as much as it does. It’s not helped by clauses about not charging less elsewhere even if the fees are lower which should also be illegal
Some of the things you list are probably illegal because it is challenging to obtain informed consent. Especially where the repercussions are irreversible so it is more about avoiding exploitation rather than imposing a standard of what is acceptable behavior.
It is challenging to obtain informed consent when a company acting as the middleman between you and your customers changes their terms even if it is theoretically possible try and convince your customers to change middlemen.
> Suppose a guy wants to be a slave? Shouldn’t he have the right to be enslaved?
Sure. Why not? Typically society would only be concerned with the servitude becoming involuntary. Thus the right to be enslaved would be expected to also come the right to end enslavement at will. That said, in most jurisdictions marriage dissolution is happy to uphold involuntary servitude so we're not entirely consistent here.
> Suppose a guy wants to sell his organs?
Likewise, society might take issue with it because of its once and done nature. Decide that selling your organs was a bad idea and don't want to do it anymore? Too bad. You are already dead. However, relatedly, things like the sale of blood often is legally accepted as you can stop providing blood at any time if you find the association is no longer working for you.
Aside from the monopolistic considerations, the 30% offer to Apple would normally be acceptable to society because, like blood, one can stop offering it in the future should they no longer find it to be desirable. If it were a contract that states that you will pay 30% and on all future transactions for the rest of your life, even if you stop liking the idea, then society would undoubtedly take issue with it. But that in no way has any relationship to what is being talked about here.
Now, the monopolistic considerations are not typically accepted by society, but, indeed, we have gotten pretty lazy in doing anything about it.
Like, the labour law? Volunteering to be a slave isn't labour. In fact, income is not even a concern of society. Look at income data sometime. A not insignificant portion of the population realize negative income. All perfectly legal.
It's not illegal. You can donate money to Apple whenever you want. The issue is not that you're giving money to Apple, it's that Apple can force itself as a middleman.
> it's that Apple can force itself as a middleman.
Sure, which it can do because of the monopolistic position it has entrenched itself with. If that were cleaned up, it would no longer be in a position to do that. But the other commenter doesn't agree with you. He says that is an entirely different problem.
It's not a monopoly, though. Strictly speaking, there are markets where Apple is far from a monopoly, and yet this is still true there. The issue is that Apple is weaponizing laws and limiting consumer freedom. Apple is being anti-competitive and abusive, even when it doesn't have a monopoly.
Well, then, don’t pay it. Pay yourself for the service instead. Nothing stopping you from being the service provider if there is no monopoly.
Is suspect you will soon find a monopoly, though, and that you’re merely confusing some external interpretations with what is defined within the context of this particular.
I technically could. Nothing stops me from self-signing apps or using websites only. It's just massively inconvenient, due to anti-competitive behaviours. In the strictest sense of the term, even by a narrow construction it's not a monopoly. The problem is really anti-competitive and anti user practices that makes competitors unfairly disadvantaged
> Nothing stops me from self-signing apps or using websites only.
That is clearly not the same thing. Why don't you do the exact same thing? I mean, other than the monopolistic efforts holding you back.
(I recognize that you are trying to bring your own monopolistic definition to the table, and while I'm sure it has merit as a better definition, I fail to understand what value you think there is in trying to change the subject? Why not just stick to the topic in progress like everyone else, even if you don't love everything about it? The rest of us probably don't love it either, but that's not a good reason to toss the ball to the side in an effort to disrupt play because it isn't the brand of ball you have a preference for.)
I'm not trying to use my own monopolistic definition. I'm using the generally accepted one, which cares about markets and where you can't narrowly define them, but you instead have to look at what services/goods are provided for what purpose. It's like saying that Sony has a monopoly on PS5 games distribution, it wouldn't really fly, though it might if there was a market where PS5 games were 80% of games.
The point I'm making isn't that Apple is doing good here - I absolutely hate it, actually. The point I'm making is that the issue isn't that there's a monopoly, strictly speaking, but that Apple engages in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices which are harmful even without a monopoly.
> The point I'm making is that the issue isn't that there's a monopoly
I made the same mistake at one point, so I feel for you[1], but what was actually said was "monopolistic". That is not the same as a monopoly. One can act in a monopolistic manner without actually having a monopoly.
[1] But I don't feel for, and frankly find it incredibly strange, that you are now doubling down on your mistake after it was brought to your attention that you were speaking outside of the context of discussion.
The top-level comment was talking about a monopoly, and you talked about Apple having a monopolistic position. In markets where Apple is in not in monopolistic positions, nor is it a monopoly, the problem is the anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices that enable it to put itself between market participants, not the position. Even if Apple doesn't seek a monopoly, the app distribution practices are the problem and would lead to the same undue value extraction.
I'm taking monopolistic position to mean a grossly dominant market position short of a monopoly. If you meant it as engaging in "monopolistic competition", that's another concept entirely that's irrelevant here. I also took monopolistic behaviour to mean behaviour seeking to monopolize.
OP has already cited sufficient stats to prove his point, and you're looping on reply for different sources.
Why don't you supply your own sources? You're making a claim just the same as the OP, without providing any evidence in your favor. A good faith responder would do the legwork to provide a researched counterpoint.
To anybody that has actually been paying attention to CPU evolution over the years, the process node has clearly been the main differentiator between CPU performance. Intel had the process advantage and thus the CPU advantage, and now they don't.
Architecture matters too, but does not result anywhere near an order of magnitude difference, conventionally.
And this AMD processor is not the one specified in the OP (Ryzen HX 370) and is not on the same process node as the m1, thus not valid to prove your counterpoint.
You are comparing a 7nm processor to a 5nm one, and yet the gap isn't even very large. Which was entirely the OPs point.
Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
>You are comparing a 7nm processor to a 5nm one, and yet the gap isn't even very large. Which was entirely the OPs point.
The gap is huge. AMD's 7nm chip typically uses ~5x more power than the M1 and is still slower.
>Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
No it does not. Apple's chips are significantly more efficient.
>You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
I've found Claude 3.5 Sonnet actually much worse on average for coding than Claude 3 Opus.
At least for my use case and when interfaced with through Kagi. Much higher hallucination rate.
GPT-4o hallucinates far less than Claude 3 Opus but also seems to have less niche knowledge (I was using it to assist with Groovy+Spock+Spring upgrade)
So I question a lot of the benchmarks published on the newest models. They don't seem to track linearly/accurately with my use cases
It's pretty clear the base model is a race to the bottom on pricing.
There is no defensible moat unless a player truly develops some secret sauce on training. As of now seems that the most meaningful techniques are already widely known and understood.
The money will be made on compute and on applications of the base model (that are sufficiently novel/differentiated).
Investors will lose big on OpenAI and competitors (outside of greater fool approach)
> There is no defensible moat unless a player truly develops some secret sauce on training.
This is why Altman has gone all out pushing for regulation and playing up safety concerns while simultaneously pushing out the people in his company that actually deeply worry about safety. Altman doesn't care about safety, he just wants governments to build him a moat that doesn't naturally exist.
Many Chinese goods are great. But if it's an end run around regulation, it is not in the US's best interest. Ralph Nader already fought this fight and won back in the 1960's with the Chevrolet Corvair. The Ford Pinto had the gas tank between the rear axle and the rear bumper, creating a death trap on rear collisions.
These are a few issues of goods from China being an issue in the past:
Consolidation over the past few decades has limited the capacity for firms to compete in many sectors.
So I appreciate the sentiment of what the FTC is trying to do, but they really come across as amateurs bringing far too many lawsuits and often with weak legal reasoning/argumentation.
In many of the cases they've brought there exists alternative, yet stronger arguments that could have been made.
I'd support congress legislating towards more competition (e.g. forcing open standards for things like APIs/chat clients/smart watches etc), or a more active FTC.
But the current approach is far too disorganized and weak.