Why is it only a matter of time? The AI-as-a-service companies are going to continue to improve their products by improving both the part that could be reproduced in a self-hosted setup, but also the “secret sauce” they put on top of that to make it a better product. There is no incentive for this “secret sauce” to be something that can be reproduced for self-hosting, is there?
What secret sauce? We already have open source tooling for tool use, web browsing, and code execution/computer use. Open weight models will win in the end.
AIaaS might keep an edge with multi-modal agentic workflows, but for 80% of general use cases, no "secret sauce" needed, the open weight models are already there, and tooling is constantly getting better.
The bottleneck is the cost of local hardware right now.
The "secret sauce" is vendor lock-in. A textbook case is the vmware broadcom situation. Vmware was cheap so corporations found little reason to use open source. Broadcom made vmware expensive but now those corporations are finding out that it is a lot of work (aka expensive) to switch infrastructure.
I think a major incentive could be to sell hardware. If Apple is able to get their hands on a local LLM capable of covering a significant % of what people use ChatGPT for, the pitch they can offer is:
"Free, private, offline ChatGPT so long as your laptop has X GB of RAM"
Beyond that, I wouldn't underestimate the incentive of "because I can". The "secret sauce" you refer to is effectively just a DB & a while loop that feeds text to a bunch of tensors. If an indie dev decides they want to release something that dismantles the OpenAI & Anthropic moats, there really isn't all that big of a technical barrier stopping them.
LLM inference decode is heavily dependent on memory speed, not just having lots of memory. You can't say "X amount of ram" because the memory bandwidth on an M1 is 68.3 GB/s versus the 614 GB/s of an M5 Max, or a 4090's 1.01 TB/s over GDDR6X.
This basically creates a bottleneck at the oldest/cheapest Apple Silicon machines, which are already crippled for context prefill.
Thanks for clarifying -- I was oversimplifying.
But honestly, obsoleting a huge number of otherwise great Apple Silicon machines is something Apple would moment consider a major "pro" of building a compelling local AI stack.
With how much speculation around the difficult time Apple has had getting people to upgrade from M1, I'm sure they'd jump at such an opportunity.
this might be a way for Apple to milk product revenue for many years.
- Please buy our new Macbook pro M5 that gives you 20 tokens/s on local 80B LLM
next year - Please buy our new Macbook pro M6 that gives you 25 tokens/s on local 80B LLM
milking product revenue in perpetuity by offering meaningful marginal improvements, while keeping same architecture will be the golden goose for Apple
+plus if it allows to segment market by wallet size into poor/middle/rich classes, thats even better