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Benedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
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There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.
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In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind.

I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)

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I use both Claude and Codex and don’t see any meaningful difference between the two. My use case is modeling semi complex physical processes (energy and manufacturing) in code for simulations. I also have to do a good fair of automation via scripting in Python or PowerShell for manipulating data as well as legacy code analysis (C, Fortran, COBOL). Given I provide the models with the information and documentation they need, both perform very similarly. I recently did a full codebase review (for design patterns and vulnerabilities) and both Codex and Fable agreed 100% about the most critical findings. I do very little front end development, although some of my automation scripts have TUIs and again no problem with either Claude or Codex generating them for me. At this point I go with the less expensive, which seems to be Codex. With the $100 plan I rarely hit the limits. With Claude I max out my plan in about 4-6 hours of work.
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>I think Evans is completely wrong.

I wish there was a case where I find Evans is wrong. As far as my memory served me, I failed to record a single one.

I disagree that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are "well" behind. If anything the frontier model advantage seems to be at best 6 - 9 months. And that the Chinese model are all doing well.

One of Steve Jobs's line, "It is a feature, not a product." Even if Apple were a generation behind or 1 year behind frontier model. The advantage of default is enough to hold a lot of its user.

To put it simply, even if OpenAI or Anthropic were better, there is zero chances they would topple Apple in hardware sales, user or ecosystem. On the other hand, even if Apple's AI were 6 - 9 months or a generation behind, most user would settle for it and damage OpenAI / Anthropic.

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Maybe I’m alone in thinking this but I think the long term victor will be the one that works out pricing best.

Fable might well be a better model but it’s too expensive for everyday AI use. Definitely if we’re talking about the kind of stuff you’re going to want to do on your phone. Even for coding, I’m not going to reach for Fable (well, when I can…) for 95% of the work I do.

I don’t believe a mature AI industry is going to have a one size fits all, single winner.

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> I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)

Truly fascinating ecosystem and community in general, as experiences differ so wildly. Anthropic's models seems far behind OpenAI to me, especially when you get into "Pro" territory, and there doesn't seem to be any worthy competition to Pro Mode available at all.

And this is said with someone who use both platforms, and spend a lot of my day interacting with agents and LLMs in various ways. The interesting part is that probably so do you too, and probably your experience and what you share lines up with what you experience! Yet we come away with basically opposite takeaways :) I don't think either of us are wrong either, somehow.

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I agree with what you're saying. I have a Claude plan for work and I prefer using Claude more than any other LLM I've tried. Having recently tried the Codex 100€ plan with GPT-5.5 in high/xhigh, I don't think it's worse that the Opus models, just different.

I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is often a bit too literal.

Just my two cents.

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> I've noticed that depending on how you talk to it, you get wildly different outputs. This seems to happen less with Opus: it mostly understand what I want. GPT is often a bit too literal.

Yeah, exact prompting matters a lot, seemingly more than people think. There is definitely tradeoffs between how literal the models takes the prompts, on one hand it's useful for the model to ignore their own instinct when you know better, so they don't go chasing geese randomly, but on the other hand it's useful sometimes when they self-direct, when you misworded something and it's obvious you meant something different because of the context, and similar things. They're basically good at different things.

Really agree every model isn't equal and they aren't as interchangeable without adjusting how you prompt them as people seem to think.

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When you say "Pro" territory, do you include Fable?
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You mean the model that was available for a whole of three days? No, I had played around with it a tiny bit, but not much than that. I guess time will tell if it gets close.
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Does “the best machine for AI use” apply here considering these models are still server-side?
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The play here seems pretty evidence, if I may assume. Apple creates an interface that is generalized enough so you can easily swap models, and while Claude is preferred by Apple today, it may be any provider or even local models in the future, and the APIs the developers use remain the same, so "migration" becomes easier.
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I would think so, as “use” doesn’t specify implementation. If you use a word processor it may be running locally or remotely.

From a user’s perspective, it doesn’t matter.

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How is this Apple keeping control of the UX?
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The betas of the next OS's include a Siri AI chatbot, and the AI features are built into various parts of the OS. A user has no idea what model is powering any of it - Apple controls the UX.
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I'm aware. How is this relevant to the posted article?
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The article is about (from the eyes of a user) white-labeled usage of Claude models on Apple devices, this subthread is about white-labeled usage of LLMs on Apple devices, how is it not relevant?
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Because that's not what the article is about; this is about a unified API for the _app developers_ to access different kind of models.

That API has no user-facing components, and has no influence over UX of what the end-users are interacting with.

The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.

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> The users won't know if you used Foundation Models API or integrated with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini SDK directly.

That's the point! That's the whole "white-labeling" part, and what the commentator earlier is talking about. You're very close in understanding the context here!

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I’m sorry, so your position now is that “being completely invisible to the users” is “controlling the UX”?
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I think you're taking the written words a bit too literally here. Read it with a more lax filter and less literal word-meaning, and I think the original comment will become a bit clearer.
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You know what, I've been a bit too snipe-y in my previous comments, and it led to to discussion devolving in unproductive ways.

I'd genuinely like to understand where you're coming from more.

I think we're all in agreement that this framework is very much about letting developers swap the models easily, and treat them as commodities. That seems pretty obvious.

I do however still don't see how this has anything to do with controlling the UX (or the new Siri for that matter! The new Siri doesn't use Anthropic models, and there are no extensions point for it to do so — that's pretty much the whole reason why it won't be available in the EU).

Help me see your point of view!

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It's Apple, so it's some revolutionary big brained play, and not just yet another llm sdk.
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