Yes, the whole Deep Learning thing was luck, but as with most lucky things, they ensured they were positioned to capitalize on it.
AlexNet kicked off a new wave of research around neural networks by demonstrating they could be scaled well and trained on GPUs.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYuH2Kl_b98 [2]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
e.g.: previous crypto hype-cycle
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-graphics-card-availabilit...
This story turned out to be false but I think smart, reasonable people a couple years ago could have believed it with conviction. It doesn’t really seem like “completely asleep” to me.
They have been taking NPU's seriously on their phones, tablets and laptops since the M1.
Then they enabled fully-connected RDMA for 4 x 512GB MacStudio's = 2TB RAM. Perfect for a large Mixture-of-Experts model.
It would be very strange if they didn't notice their product line had landed in a new sweet spot.
While the company I am in is embracing AI the disconnect and delay between what is available and possible versus what is approved and permitted is a three month window. The State employees I speak to are just now getting around to writing their usage policies for internal AI usage.
All the while the top of the company is of course praising AI and saying we should do everything with it right away.
It's a joke really. We had to go through all this rigmarole just for an agent that does some preliminaries on a service support ticket (making sure all data was filled in correctly and contacting the requester of not) before sending it to a human for final review. It couldn't action anything, not a single thing. Just assist with the prerequisites.
And yet they call our company 'innovative'. We're certainly innovative at inventing bureaucracy.
But "oops, we missed that people are interested in AI work on our machines" seems like a really fucking big myopia. But then again, Tim's off to retire on a bed made of cash this week, so...
My vibes were that Apple wound down the “actual work” side of their operations (including machines like Xserve), because Ives couldn’t handle the unsexiness and unpredictability of business requirements in hardware.
He was self-indulgent and only wanted to work on things that “vibed” with him, rather than what the customers needed. It’s easy to be creative when you get to do what you want to do, it’s hard when you have hard constraints.
Enterprise sales sucks. There's infinite amounts of politicking and glad handing and buyers will get all sorts of sweet brib..."sales dinners" then go with the cheapest option. Margins on hardware sucks and the only money is in support contracts. Apple instead invests in consumer sales/support primarily and all the other channels are side businesses.
Stuff like the Xserve existed mostly for Apple internal purposes and ended up being sold externally to goose the scale enough to make them not a huge loss. At one point a large percentage of the offices on Bubb road were packed with Xserves running portions of the iTunes Music Store and the Apple online store. More offices were packed with Xserves doing media ingest and encoding for iTMS. Just about every building had racks of them as build and file servers.
However, I don't think they expected the level of Enterprise interest they saw.
“Not as fully staffed as some people might hope” or “Developer Relations isn’t as responsive as I’d like” are both at least not obviously false.
This is clearly a mis-statement, they have a whole annual conference for developers. Maybe they mean specifically AI devs.