It surprises me is that there is much real tension between basic research and application development two exists in Meta. For any normal company, sure. But this is a company that spent over $70 billion dollars on VR that nobody ever wanted. And they can't fund both AI research and, separately, application development?

Agreed that AI (in general) is not a dead end, but any particular implementation of AI might be. OpenAI et al are betting billions that their approach will turn out to be the best one, but it really is a bet; there's not guarantee that tomorrow the next DeepSeek won't come out with a better algorithm that obsoletes all their investments.

Apple can always buy out whichever company they decide has what they want. It'll be pricey, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand.

Why will it be "winner takes most"? AI isn't like the Internet where there are network-effects that make first-mover status a huge advantage -- e.g. if I could write a better Facebook than Facebook today, it still wouldn't get used by anyone, since Facebook's advantage comes from its huge user base and my new platform wouldn't have one.

With AI, OTOH, anything the first-movers do, Apple can (eventually) copy and improve upon, a strategy they have used successfully many times in the past. Stepping back and letting others figure out what the works and doesn't work, on their own dime, seems like a good approach. Why burn money on what might be a dead-end, when others are happy to burn their own money for you?

Apple isn't doing nothing -- it's continuing to do the things that it has always done, like selling iPhones and computers and streaming services. Those things have always been profit centers for Apple, and they continue to be.

The other thing that it's doing correctly at this point is not losing its head and betting the farm on AI. Other companies would be wise to follow Apple's example.

Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

thanks

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

So, what is your prediction? It sounds like you think Amazon is going to fire thousands of people in hopes that AI will eventually replace their roles, and then say, "whoops, it doesn't work, we're screwed," and the packages will stop flowing. Is that your prediction?

Anybody have a way to read the blomberg article?

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.

Let me tell you about this little detail called CO2...