Young man me likely would have thought, “wow, cool tradition!”
Old man me thinks “$390 million? How are they funding this?! That seems like a massive sum of money to throw down the drain every 20 years.”
Then I did the back of envelope math. Assuming 20% comes from donations, then all you’d need is a $380m fund earning a real 3% to fund the building of the next temple. That’s very doable.
Something is “weird” when it is absurd, which is to say something that is aimless or has an aim that is not in the service of an objective good. There’s a deviance from the nature of the thing, like intentionally growing a tumor on your forehead or having a tumor growing out of your forward and then happily refusing to have it removed.
Otherwise, what is said of things that are merely unconventional.
So in this case, is there not a purpose? Is the purpose not spiritual and instructive in some sense? Are you not imposing an inappropriate tacit goal onto this practice?
Or perhaps you find it weird because it is nowhere to be found within your conventions?
Regarding the Ise Shrine (伊勢神宮), the practice is called Sengū (遷宮) related to preserving mystical spirits, supporting trades, tradition, and respecting the cyclical impermanence of all things.
By contrast, Hōryū Gakumonji (法隆学問寺) is a 1350+ years old wooden structure more closely related to the themes of imported Buddhism long before the shinbutsu bunri (神仏分離) but in Japanese style. There are/were very large buddha figures carved into rock throughout Iran, Afghanistan, China during the Mongol period and also semi-contemporaneously c. ~7th century Japan's Usuki Stone Buddhas (臼杵磨崖仏).
A big part of the benefit seems to be in ensuring the next generation is capable of the craftsmanship necessary to ensure the shrine continues to stand. If you don't continue to rebuild, then the skills atrophy until they're lost forever.
Over in Europe, when the Notre Dame cathedral burned down, ancient 13th century skills had to be revived to rebuild it. Even the lead needed to be made traditionally, noone else in the world except a small company in the UK who could. Ten tons of UK lead now adorns the roof.
Makes Stonehenge looks like most sensible approach. Build it one time and then it will be there. Not that Egyptians with stone in dessert is bad either.
My main takeaway from this is that Luca Maestri was a blight on Apple. He steered this company into the most malicious of compliance schemes that only has increased their regulatory attack surface. On top of that, he's the one who discouraged apple from making huge investments in compute for LLMs that threatens to derail Apple and the iPhone's primacy as the gateway to information.
Yes, don't forget Tim Cook, who from what I've seen, is the biggest proponent of milking every dollar out of absolutely everything, regardless of if it's good for the consumer or not*. So Maestri and Cook were a perfect combination, Maestri got to be tough, and Cook got someone to blame.
*Take USB-C, Apple made tonnes of money from MFA, which was the main reason they didn't ever want to pivot to a different connector. Even if it was the better choice.
You’re only looking at one side of it. Consider how much value that excel adds, and how many use cases it enables. It’s incalculable. It’s always easy to poke at excel’s issues, but errors are almost always a skill issue.
From a financial perspective, there are many ways you could enforce checks to ensure the model is balanced - it just takes time. Data entry can be an issue, but you can automate that too. The deloitte report is saying the health department should benefit from adopting a gigantic erp system but you could get 90% of the benefit by employing a couple people that really know what they’re doing.
You could say that excel should allow those things to happen but the flexibility is precisely what makes it so valuable.
The people writing the reports are consultants. Consultants recommend things that benefit consultants. In their case, a multi year process and tens of millions of dollars trying to install ERP software is more a windfall for the vendors and not the companies.
Yep. I was going to say the same thing. Installing some $10M+ software costs the company more than just the install and ongoing licensing costs. You have to have an entire new IT team to manage it and staff to understand and so on. There are probably just as many chances of having a big issue.
That assumes that Better Excel would somehow not look like Excel and would lose its benefits of being easy. My assumption is that Better Excel will still look like Excel, in the same way that Better iOS will also look like iOS.
Sure but to compare it to tech, this is why we build tooling like linters and typed languages so that we don’t lose millions of dollars because we needed the average developer to implement a feature. I imagine in heath care it’s even more skewed because a SW eng can see the compiler output and make changes but the person entering the data isn’t (for example) the nurse that’s using the needles to be accounted for
There are indeed tools like this available for Excel. And there are also whole practices within the big accountancy firms, and independent firms which focus on providing "audit" of Excel files like this, which are used commonly where there are financial firms involved in a project with big money at stake (lenders, financial investors, etc). But in my experience these tools and services aren't often used for the spreadsheets which are used for day to day corporate-type management (I would count government as part of that).
Say nothing of many crisis were avoided because somebody was able to pull up a local excel file despite a central service being down or go through their historical files and sniff out a discrepancy. Workflows like that are often impossible or require coordinating with a vendor in another time zone or a bunch of slow cross team communication and ticket submissions with the sort of minimum effort "we'll run a DB in the cloud and slap a JS front end built with a bunch of questionable but flashy libraries and ignore all the edge cases because I'll be working somewhere else in 2yr" solutions that the median software developer hive mind will implement if left to its own devices.
If Apple wasn't selling privacy, I'd assume the other way around. Or if anything, OpenAI would give the service out for free. There's a reason why ChatGPT became free to the public, GPT-4o moreover. It's obvious that OpenAI needs whatever data it can get its hands on to train GPT-5.
ChatGPT was free to the public because it was a toy for a conference. They didn't expect it to be popular because it was basically already available in Playground for months.
I think 4o is free because GPT3.5 was so relatively bad it means people are constantly claiming LLMs can't do things that 4 does just fine.
You seem to be positioning this as a Ford vs Chevy duel, when (to me at least) the comparison should be to Ford vs Exxon.
Nvidia is an infrastructure company. And a darned good one. Apple is a user facing company and has outsourced infrastructure for decades (AWS & Azure being two of the well known ones).
Apple outsourced chips to IBM (PowerPC) for a long time and floundered all the while. They went into the game themselves w/ the PA Semi acquisition and now they have Apple Silicon to show for it.
But Apple is vertically integrating. Thats like Ford buying Bridgestone.
The only way it hurts Nvidia is if Apple becomes the runaway leader of the pc market. Even then, Apple hasn’t shown any intent of selling GPUs or AI processors to the likes of AWS, or Azure or Oracle, etc.
Nvidia has a much bigger threat from with Intel/AMD or the cloud providers backward integrating and then not buying Nvidia chips. Again, no signs that Apple wants to do this.
I think Apple is going to make rapid and substantial advancements in on-device AI-specific hardware. I also think nVIDIA is going to continue to dominate the cloud infrastructure space for training foundational models for the foreseeable future, and serving user-facing LLM workloads for a long time as well.
Nvidia obviously has an enormous, enormous moat but I do think this is one of the areas in which Apple may actually GAF. The rollout of Apple Intelligence is going to make them the biggest provider of "edge" inference on day one. They're not going to be able to ride on optimism in services growth forever.
It took almost a decade but the PA Semi acquisition showed that Apple was able to get out of the shadow of its PowerPC era.
Nvidia will remain a leader in this space for a long time. But things are going to play out wonky and Apple, when determined, are actually pretty good at executing on longer-term roadmaps.
Apple could have moved on Nvidia but instead they seem to have thrown in the towel and handed cash back to investors. The OpenAI deal seems like further admission by Apple that they missed the AI boat.
Exactly. Apple really needs new growth drivers and Nvidia has a 3bn market cap Apple wants to take a bite out of. One of the few huge tech growth areas that Apple can expand into.
I am of course wrong frequently, but I cannot see how that would happen.
If they create cpu/gpus that are faster/better than what Nvidia sells,
but they only sell them as part of a Mac desktop or laptop systems
it wont really compete.
For that they would have to develop servers that has a mass amount of
whatever it is or sell the chips in the same manner Nvidia does today.
I dont see that future for Apple.
Microsoft / Google / or other major cloud companies would do extremely well
if they could develop it and just keep it as a major win for their cloud
products.
Azure is running OpenAI as far as I have heard.
Imagine if M$ made a crazy fast GPU/whatever.
It would be a huge competitive advantage.
Well, good luck to Apple then. Hopefully this attempt at killing Nvidia goes better than the first time they tried, or when they tried and gave-up on making OpenCL.
I just don't understand how they can compete on their own merits without purpose-built silicon; the M2 Ultra doesn't shine a candle to a single GB200. Once you consider how Nvidia's offerings are networked with Mellanox and CUDA universal memory, it feels like the only advantage Apple has in the space is setting their own prices. If they want to be competitive, I don't think they're going to be training Apple models on Apple Silicon.
It's ripe for attack. But Nvidia is still in its growing phase, not some incumbent behemoth. The way Nvidia ruthlessly handled AMD tell us that they are ready for competition.
Let's check in with OpenCL and see how far it got disrupting CUDA.
You see, I want to live in a world where GPU manufacturers aren't perpetually hostile against each other. Even Nvidia would, judging by their decorum with Khronos. Unfortunately, some manufacturers would rather watch the world burn than work together for the common good. Even if a perfect CUDA replacement existed like it did with DXVK and DirectX, Apple will ignore and deny it while marketing something else to their customers. We've watched this happen for years, and it's why MacOS perennially cannot run many games or reliably support Open Source software. It is because Apple is an unreasonably fickle OEM, and their users constantly pay the price for Apple's arbitrary and unnecessary isolationism.
Apple thinks they can disrupt AI? It's going to be like watching Stalin try to disrupt Wal-Mart.
> Let's check in with OpenCL and see how far it got disrupting CUDA.
That's entirely the fault of AMD and Intel fumbling the ball in front of the other team's goal.
For ages the only accelerated backend supported by PyTorch and TF was CUDA. Whose fault was that? Then there was buggy support for a subset of operations for a while. Then everyone stopped caring.
Why I think it will go different this time: nVidia's competitors seem to have finally woken up and realized they need to support high level ML frameworks. "Apple Silicon" is essentially fully supported by PyTorch these days (via the "mps" backend). I've heard OpenCL works well now too, but have no hardware to test it on.
Apple Intelligence stuff is going to be very big. iOS is clearly the right platform to marry great UX AI with. Latching LLMs onto Siri have allowed the Siri team to quickly atone for its sins.
I think the private compute stuff to be really big. Beyond the obvious use the cloud servers for heavy computing type tasks, I suspect it means we're going to get our own private code interpreter (proper scripting on iOS) and this is probably Apple's path to eventually allowing development on iPad OS.
Not only that, Apple is using its own chips for their servers. I don't think the follow on question is whether it's enough or not. The right question to ask is what are they going to do bring things up to snuff with NVDIA on both the developer end and hardware end?
There's such a huge play here and I don't think people get it yet, all because they think that Apple should be in the frontier model game. I think I now understand the headlines of Nadella being worried about Apple's partnership with OpenAI.
There is also this thing with Siri and Google Assistant that a lot of the answers are manually entered (the jokes, etc), so the switch to an LLM could be a massive improvement.
Regarding Germany and large corporations, and somewhat of a tangent, I remember a decade ago a bunch of hedge funds had tried to sue Porsche, the parent company of VW, for cornering the market for VW’s open interest and cause the mother of all short squeezes.
They tried the case in New York but it got thrown out for lack of jurisdiction. They did try the case in Germany, but Porsche had fittingly cornered the market for the best and biggest law firms. All of the best law firms refused to take the case because it would mean that they’d be essentially blacklisted by the largest companies in Germany for bringing a case against a German company.
There weren’t 200 holdouts. It was like 5 AM over there. I don’t know why you are surprised that people who work at OpenAI would want to work at OpenAI, esp over Microsoft?
Assuming these two things are related, if I may editorialize just a tiny bit, I am a little annoyed at how much their rollouts often disrupt service for paying customers. Paid users being impacted by free user rushes really sucks, but is understandable. API developers being impacted by free-user rollouts is unacceptable, and especially sucks for those who have to answer to users of their own.
I suppose this is a wakeup call to migrate to Microsoft's Azure endpoints which, presumably, aren't affected by the current outages. But I'm fully tapped out in terms of yet another service's application and vetting process.
So to connecting it back to the current drama, while I support OpenAI, their employees, and Sam's return, I can understand why folks like Helen would be miffed by management's approach to building. I'm not saying they should slow product development, but would staged rollouts hurt?
Really apologize for the disruption, unrelated to the events of this week and also not related to the voice rollout. The team is working fast on a fix! Hang tight.
> I am a little annoyed at how much their rollouts often disrupt service for paying customers.
Same for me. The days following Dev Day were horrible, and now I'm randomly in a state as if they were rebooting their machines but without killing the session, so that I can continue normally after a minute or so.
I prefer the Pi app's voice chat ... it has a lot more personality and will play along with questions like whose your spirit animal: Mother Teresa or Obama. It will provide an answer there yet when you ask it the same question using Trump and Hitler it refuses to answer lol
Overall Chat GPT's voice chat needs some zing to it when compared to Pi. Yet either both are awesome pieces of technology, just prefer one over the other. Pi is free too ... Im paying $20 a month for Chat GPT.
I love Pi, but I'm not on the market for asking it to act like Hitler or talk about relating to Mother Teresa or not.
The ability to say "Hey what's happened in the OpenAI saga in the last 8 hours" or "How did <my sports team> do last night" and get a voice response while I'm walking my dog is the sort of thing I care about.
Old man me thinks “$390 million? How are they funding this?! That seems like a massive sum of money to throw down the drain every 20 years.”
Then I did the back of envelope math. Assuming 20% comes from donations, then all you’d need is a $380m fund earning a real 3% to fund the building of the next temple. That’s very doable.