Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Humane, etc.<p>As much as everybody hates on OpenAI for chaotic management, they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them. Even though it probably only buys them a 20% chance of success, they haven't doomed the project by underestimating what it takes budget-wise.<p>And they blew it. Maybe they blew it by not realizing that even long time Apple employees could get arrogant about security. Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general. Whatever is it the root or the problem, they set billions of dollars on fire maybe tens of billions, by being unnecessarily cute about Apple proprietary information when they could've been above reproach. They had the resources to hire all the right people with the right knowledge and probably already had them on board.
“ Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general”<p>Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics.<p>There has to be a reason why almost every single important partnership OpenAI had, abruptly ended, except for maybe Nvidia.<p>Just recently Satya Nadella publicly implied that OpenAI should not be trusted.<p>They are slowly becoming the STD of the AI industry, it’s like they think they are too big and awesome to need friends.<p>Maybe pissing Apple off will teach them a lesson?
As far as I can tell Ive's expertise isn't "build a platform".<p>All they seem to have gotten out of it is some creepy blogpost:<p><a href="https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/</a>
I think the other thing folks underestimate is how important Jobs was as an editor for Ive's designs. Ive always leaned more to form over function IMO, and Jobs (or the Apple environment in general as it existed under Jobs) helped temper that. I don't think the butterfly keyboard would have seen the light of day under Jobs, and the released Ferrari interior doesn't seem like a stroke of genius to me. Easy to say from the peanut gallery I know, but I still think Jobs was best able to harness Ive's greatness.
At this point in his career, Jony Ive is best suited for doing deep dive studies on the corner-radius of new products. And even then, you might as well just default it to that of an ipad, because that seems to be his preference for all things, including $650k Ferraris.
> they could've been above reproach.<p>This is hilarious. The company run by sama? The company that started as the largest copyright violation ever? How can you be above reproach when you start with such disregard like that?
AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race.<p>I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.<p>Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.<p>Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.<p>There's virtually no platform play available to them.
> there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point<p>Yeah it almost certainly won't be captured by them. That value is going to be captured by the folks/companies that shrink wrap the capabilities into a nice SaaS or other tool, that a business can buy off the shelf and give to their employees.<p>The model makers are on a fast track to just becoming dumb pipes, not unlike ISPs.
> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.<p>That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.
Copilot isn’t a model per se, no? It’s a harness that can use any model that supports tool calls from what I understand. It’s the way Microsoft commoditize ai models
I tend to agree with this sentiment. I'm not in the tech sector. As an outsider, it seems to me that OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing government and the defense industry as their main clients. Google and Microsoft are chasing business clients and educational institutions. Amazon and Apple are chasing consumers.
At least from some smaller marketing companies I know that isn't necessarily true. They often have Gemini or Copilot and Claude nowadays and before Claude it was ChatGPT.<p>The moat is way smaller than with Office or Gsuite because they feed data into the chat interface and it gives them an answer. The moat for Gsuite and Office is higher because you have to move all your data and reorganize it. Oh and everyone has to learn how to use the new software clients.
There is a time window when it will flip. When Internet came along, we had a number of businesses that did not survive over the next years.<p>This time, it is different with AI. The rate of change is significant.
Just out of curiosity, what is the change and how are you measuring its rate?<p>From no internet to internet the change is pretty profound. But my job is already very automated for the most part. It's true AI might automate it a bit more, but it's not like I'm going from zero automation to full on automation. That's not nothing, and it is worth something, but it's also not internet from no internet level of change either.
I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.
The trick is antitrust style bundling. The massive pile of documents and processes tied to GSuite is a moat which makes it hard to switch to something like o365. Since a company might effectively be locked into GSuite (the primary product), if Google forces companies to buy Gemini (the secondary product) by bundling it with GSuite, they've given themselves a moat in the LLM space using their document/email moat from GSuite.<p>This is essentially what Google has done, and it's a shame the US is so weak on enforcing antitrust laws.
> as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race<p>China is obviously in the GPU/RAM race. Heard of Huawei, Moore Threads, Lisuan Tech, CXMT?
Not to mention with each iteration of every model you get lower cost per token. It’s really a race to the bottom for hyperscalers and neoclouds at this point, with technically only two paying customers.
I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)
> The real value is and going to be in hardware<p>Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.
Forgive me, but what does Jony Ive know about building platforms?
I maintain that if Humane wasn’t arrogant as hell and had just put a screen on their device, theyd have been PERFECTLY placed to become the open-platform AI Phone<p>Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol
Small nit.<p>> they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them<p>If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally).<p>Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them.<p>I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.
> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.<p>That's why Apple used open-source software to build a kernel.<p>And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.
I don't think Jony Ive has this skillset either. They might make a very nice device (I'd expect it to be polarising).
the rot starts from the top.<p>sama plays loose with the truth. so likely the employees are gonna follow their boss in cutting corners.<p>you see it everywhere in gvt/large organizations - if you come from a poor country - if the president is corrupt - the whole gvt gets corrupted.
> <i>And they blew it</i><p>This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him.<p>The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.
> Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform.<p>Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion.<p>Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one.<p>Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."
> Meta didn't buy pants<p>They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring.<p>VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves.<p>Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.
Ehh, Tomi Ahonen always came across as someone who was letting his emotions cloud his judgment (maybe the N9 was his pet project?) which was not great for a "consultant." Sure enough when I looked around there was substantial criticism to be found, e.g. <a href="https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten-reasons-why-i-say-tomi-ahonen-should-not-be-trusted/" rel="nofollow">https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten...</a><p>Also wasted spending is not quite the same as "not wanting to spend" -- it's more, to GP's point, "spending a lot unsuccessfully." I got the sense a lot of the friction Nokia and Windows Phone faced were due to Google (and to some extent Apple) using the market dominance of their properties (Android, YouTube, Search, Maps) to suppress competition.<p>I suppose it's fair play for what MSFT did in the OS and browser wars, but they got dinged pretty hard by Antitrust and played nice for a decade+ after that. Google is starting to see the antitrust blowback for it's actions only now, long after the competition has been crushed.
> Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense.<p>It makes a lot of sense to get into a massive legal battle with one of the most deep-pocketed companies on the planet?
I don't know. Some of it did seem like short attention spans and not enough perseverence. But what do I know being far from an insider.
Unnecessarily cute? It's a documented campaign of industrial-scale theft...
What does that have to do with employees stealing documents?
A decade ago Uber seemed poised to be the big tech powerhouse. Maybe not a platform per se (certainly not an ecosystem as other companies had it) but a major provider of software for all kinds of verticals beyond their core business. What happened to that?
Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.
Uber managed to make the business by lobbying so hard. In some countries they broke the regulation of tax drivers and made the environment like wild jungle. Now, people don't feel "safe" anymore for random Taxis and prefer Uber in many places.
Many of them left and turned into startups around that tech, like Temporal.
Yes, but how do we know specific manufacturing processes weren’t in employee contracts like, “If you leave Apple you can’t utilize the invisible weld process invented here for the iMac.”<p>I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying.<p>There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.
> <i>There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy</i><p>Except there are. It’s why clean-room design [1] is a thing.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design</a>
Your comment assumes they have stolen some propietary info or trade secrets but it hasn't been determined yet that they have, no?
> <i>it hasn't been determined yet that they have</i><p>Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-engineer-s-lol-moment-set-stage-for-legal-fight-with-apple" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-en...</a>
Why are we taking Apple’s side here? They made accusations, nothing had been proven yet.<p>Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.