Guess who’s ganging up on Apple? Everybody!
In our quickly expanding world of technology, things can be roughly divided up into two camps: Apple and everybody else. Its always been that way.
That’s why Steve Jobs returned to Apple — so he could show the world that building products — from a singular software and hardware perspective — could be superior in every way. The iPod was WinAmp + MP3 player. The iPhone was touch screen PDA + Phone + Media (iPod, Cam, Mic) + App platform. The iPad was a shrunken down MacBook, with touch screen running the latest coolio Apple OS. The iWatch 4 is what Dick Tracey had.
Apple’s recent iPhone Xs announcements pushed that envelope further by including the A12 Bionic SoC — which gives every iPhone owner an entire deep learning neural networking platform — in their hand.
Combine that with Tim Cook’s recent revelation in an interview that Apple keeps all its user’s data on the iPhone itself and they never get access to it. This is the path Apple has chosen: buy our device — we’ll give you everything you need. We don’t need to monetize our user’s data — ‘cause we’re printing money on the margins we make off of these extremely expensive devices.
Oooops — except one thing. Siri sucks. And you can’t keep fighting against the entire world — all the time. At some point you’re gonna need friends.
This is the issue of our day. Even crazy ass entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and fascist libertarians like Peter Thiel know that they have to work with others.
Jeff Bezoa has perfected the art of “working with others” — and shown the way. Satya Nadella has transformed Microsoft away from the “evil empire” into a lumbering giant that works with others. NetFlix has doubled down and changed Hollywood — by extremely working with others.
Facebook is all about exploiting others, pretending like they care about others; but its certainly been ABOUT others — since day one.
Apple’s deal with Salesforce to get Siri into the Enterprise shouldn’t be interpreted as anything more than Salesforce expanding it’s sales catalog — to keep their dumb-ass enterprise customers happy. “We want Siri, not Einstein” they said! So Benioff gave them Siri.
Siri in the enterprise makes no fucking sense — at all. It barely works as a consumer platform, it’s closed and — I just don’t give a shit about it.
Meanwhile…….
Facebook has announced a ton of support for their PyTorch deep learning framework from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Qualcomm and ARM.
Google’s TPU chip service-in-the-cloud has been growing, providing a way for researchers and developers to tap into hardware driven computing for deep learning. This is diametrically opposed to having a GPU chip in the smartphone itself. It’ll keep Android phones cheap — but provide an opportunity for high-end differentiation — if user’s want BETTER AI and neural networking.
Ford is calling for a standard language to express self-driving “intents” — for all to use. This is especially awesome and confirms the path forward for all auto manufacturers.
A new movement called “InnerSource” launched this summer. It takes the lessons of Open Source and applies it to the enterprise, to work “within the Corporate Firewall.” I can’t tell you how important this is. Since all companies are now software companies, digitial transformation is needed “across the board” and to do that — business better learn how to share — if for no other reason, than to save money and be more efficient!
Numerous efforts, standards and organizations have been launched attempting to establish ethics standards for AI. Yup — that’s right. Ethics is actually getting a seat at the table!
All of this news and efforts points to a cooperative world where we all have to work together.
In true irony — I believe this notion is best described by nobody less than Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford Univ.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them — looking backwards.”
When we look back on today we can have regrets for letting BigCo tech companies - take over. We can regret allowing them to mine our data, monetize our asses and build empires which seem impenetrable and forever.
We can rid ourselves of sexism and racism and we can portend a future of ridding ourselves of white supremacy and male domination.
But these folks ain’t foolish!
They KNOW they have to start cooperating. They simply can’t do everything!
Microsoft has accepted their place (#4, #5 or #6 — depending on how you look at it.) But they’re going to be a KICKASS #6!
Looks like Facebook is NOT going to enter into the “battle of the NLPs” and launch their OWN Voice activated platform (at least I sure hope they don’t.) Instead Facebook is investing billions into getting AI to work for their own purposes. They’re open sourcing code, they’re rolling their AI into everything — and they’re sharing — when they can.
Google has several platforms which gets their technology into the hands of others. Is that sharing or Google just acting like Google? I don’t care. I’ve given up on hoping that some “ad company” can do “the right thing” (which would be the opposite of evil.)
Instead I’m just happy Google bought YouTube, provides us free Google Maps, Docs and Apps and continues to connect the world’s knowledge to AI. In lots of different ways.
My startup uses Google Recognition, DialogFlow and their new Flutter framework. But we’ll also be using AWS Lambda and connecting into Alexa.
For sure.
Our future is a future of connecting the dots, and I know that, ‘cause I been there and done this — for almost 40 years now.
Like Jobs said “we learn about the future by studying the past.”
And Apple is fucked if they don’t open up their Siri platform and let us developers build on top of it.
‘nuf said.
