Apple Inc.

Jason support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Apple: the AI dark horse via local models E281 · 2026-07-18 ▶ 54:11

M7 Ultra is going to support as much as 1.5 terabytes. ... this is like an opus level model running on your Mac Studio. ... 99% of the workloads on the local Mac Studio. I think Apple is a screaming buy right now. And that's not financial advice, but my Lord, that company could just run the table on AI if they get this right.

Jason support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Apple: the AI dark horse via local models E275 · 2026-05-29 ▶ 38:32

This is why I think Apple is just the dark horse in this entire race. There is an open source product that can run on this hardware, the M5s, the 48 gigs, 128 gigs, the new Mac Studio coming out with supposedly a terabyte. That changes the whole game.

Friedberg oppose ×2 ▼ on 📈 Apple has completed the transition from growth company to cash cow and loses the AI cycle E238 · 2025-08-09 ▶ 1:36:25

I would not count Apple out. There's a system there that's built unlike any other in corporate history.

it's been many years since they brought out anything that excites me as a consumer

Gavin Baker support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Apple has completed the transition from growth company to cash cow and loses the AI cycle E238 · 2025-08-09 ▶ 1:33:38

But I'm just shocked at their inaction. And aptitude and AI, how bad the products are from a user perspective. I mean, they're terrible.

Chamath oppose ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Models commoditize — proprietary data is the only AI moat E237 · 2025-08-01 ▶ 50:35

Grok 5 and for sure Grok 6 will not use Common Crawl. It will not use the Internet. It'll just be an enormous amount of synthetic data.

Gavin Baker support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 AI value migrates from apps to the vertically integrated hardware/OS layer E236 · 2025-07-19 ▶ 37:57

Yeah, the browser is part of distribution-winning championships. Apple has Safari, Google has Chrome, and if you're not going to strike a partnership with one of those distribution channels, you will eventually need to do your own browser, and you can extend that logic all the way. That's why at Google they did a browser, they did a phone.

Gavin Baker support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Apple licenses an outside frontier model (Gavin's pick: xAI/Grok) rather than building or bolting one on E236 · 2025-07-19 ▶ 34:48

XAI and Apple are natural partners. There's been a lot of news about Apple thinking about buying Perplexity or McStrawl, but that's just a bandaid. Those companies don't get Apple what they need, and Apple's had an incredible partnership for many years now with Google, that's generating tens of billions of dollars for both companies. I think there is solid industrial logic for partnership.

OpenAI, at career point, they do have a good product team and they need to stay ahead on the product level because they can't compete on the factory level. The way to stay ahead of the product level is shipping a device. You got to ship the device. It's got to be good. It's got to be right. It's got to be the right form factor. It's got to do things for humans that are unexpected. But then if they do that, they're like Apple plus AI.

And if you continue this failed strategy of Apple, Apple has missed every possible window on AI and continues to miss it. And it has cultural. I think the CEO has challenges. I think culturally, they have challenges. I think they have infrastructure challenges. So it's not an easy fix.

This is actually what Google should be doing, truthfully. Like I think Google's also, Google Search, Quos Search is toast. And since they have Chrome and they theoretically have a quality team in Gemini, they should be putting these two things together and hoping to compete with chat, GBT. They are going to lose the search game. The assets that are best at Google right now have nothing to do with search. Every other product is the only thing that's going to save that company if they can figure out how to use them.

The most important thing I think as a VC that you said, as we've been debating for years, should we invest in companies like Scale, or WorkCore, or any of these surge? The truth is, I think there's a very short half-life on human-label data. And so, everybody who's investing in these companies, just looking at revenue traction, really didn't understand that there may be a year, two years, three years max, when anybody uses human-label data for maybe anything.

Chamath reversal ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Models commoditize — proprietary data is the only AI moat E235 · 2025-07-11 ▶ 20:39

That has huge implications because if you think about all these other companies, what has Lama been doing? They just spent 15 billion to buy 49% of scale AI. That's exactly a bet on human knowledge. What is Gemini doing? What is OpenAI doing? What is Anthropic doing? So all these things come into question.

Chamath support ×3 ▼ on 📈 Apple has completed the transition from growth company to cash cow and loses the AI cycle E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 51:26

I don't think they have any chance of anything. I would take the exact opposite of what Friedberg says. ... A company that focuses on this kind of revenue growth is not capable of creating something that's exceptionally unexpected.

Friedberg oppose ×3 ▼ on 📈 Apple has completed the transition from growth company to cash cow and loses the AI cycle E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 48:06

I do think there is. I do think they're doing it. And I do think they have a shot at winning, which is this kind of ambient AI assistant. ... I don't think they need to own the full stack to be successful here.

So I think the good news for them is, look, they still have a monopoly on users, they have three trillion of market cap to kind of play with. So I think it's way too early to count them out.

Jason support ×2 ▼ on 📈 Apple has completed the transition from growth company to cash cow and loses the AI cycle E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 44:54

it's absolutely confounding that they're optimizing for share buybacks and earnings per share instead of having some amount of that money, go towards innovation and acquiring companies. Biggest acquisition is beats? Give me a break.

Jason oppose ×3 ▼ on 🤖 ChatGPT takes Google search share and the market starts pricing the decay E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 33:36

Do they lose search share? Does it matter? What I think matters is are their ads more effective? Is their ad network more effective? ... all that data is going to lead to an ad network that performs so much better that even if they lose search share, their ad network is going to continue to grow.

Chamath reversal ×2 ▼ on 🤖 ChatGPT takes Google search share and the market starts pricing the decay E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 32:05

if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right? Not the value North Star metric. The economic North Star metric would be price per click. And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token.

if we look at the winners, in models of the past 12 months, anthropic the same, right? They've been very deliberate and have explained how TPUs, right? They've been a big user of them, how it's helped define their training models. ... If we look at the models that have really performed, it's ones that have that quote secret, as you mentioned.

Chamath support ×3 ▲ on 🤖 AI value migrates from apps to the vertically integrated hardware/OS layer E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 18:19

So I think the first thing that Mark has to do, if I were him, is start to chip away at all of the sets of secrets. ... I think the thing that's missing is the infrastructure and compute set of secrets. I think it's insufficient to buy stuff off the shelf from NVIDIA and expect these models to fundamentally compete.

Jason support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 Models commoditize — proprietary data is the only AI moat E232 · 2025-06-21 ▶ 14:48

This is great service. A lot of people rely on it. He buys it, shuts it down for everybody else, gets the tool for himself, gets the data for himself.

Onavo was a small data service provider, but what it did is it had a panel of phones, and we as investors could see which apps people were using, and the data was incredibly valuable because it was the only service that gave you true engagement data. ... Eventually, it sold to Facebook, and Facebook used it internally and didn't allow anybody else to use it.

Jason brush_off ×2 ▲ on 🤖 AI value migrates from apps to the vertically integrated hardware/OS layer E229 · 2025-05-24 ▶ 48:23

I don't know why we're even talking about this. But they're going and getting espresso. I watched the nine minute video. I wanted my nine minutes back. Nothing happened.

Sacks support ×2 ▲ on 🤖 AI value migrates from apps to the vertically integrated hardware/OS layer E229 · 2025-05-24 ▶ 53:53

It could be a new kind of phone that is AI first as opposed to the wall of applications, or maybe it's like some sort of like pendant thing that like tracks what's going on around you and feeds it into AI so it can give you more context, you know, maybe like in the movie Her. Who knows? But it seems like they'll do something with devices in the physical world. So that would be the play, I guess.