Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

26 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by prabal97
(247wallst.com)

17 Comments

pingou

4 hours ago

I don't understand the economics of that, is it just because compute is very constrained and they are buying everything they can, even suboptimal machines with a lower performance per $? Or is it just an experiment and anyway 10k macs are just a blip?

prabal97

4 hours ago

I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.

MisterTea

3 hours ago

What realistic environment requires 10,000 Macs?

prabal97

39 minutes ago

I mean an agent probably only uses one mac at a time. But they're obviously training tons of agents concurrently.

notfromhere

4 hours ago

Aren't they used doing this so they can generate training data for using Macs via the UI with computer use?

unrented7977

4 hours ago

The tinfoil hat answer is they want to ensure fewer people can run local LLMs instead of paying OpenAI for their models.

mindslight

an hour ago

But the monthly subscription isn't that expensive?

(demon rises up. "muahahaha, you don't pay here with money")

ChrisLTD

an hour ago

Something else they want to price us out of?

exceptione

27 minutes ago

Yep. Waiting for someone writing a paper titled "All you need is coffee" or something.

jbverschoor

an hour ago

Just to make sure we’re gonna do opening and run locally?

evanjrowley

5 hours ago

I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.

vablings

4 hours ago

I highly doubt that a purchase this large did not come with contracts to get software working how OpenAI wants on the apple software hardware stack.

Apple wants this knowledge for their software stack too so it's not going out back into Asahi

vbwml

5 hours ago

  AI-junkie: Claude, please write an AI infra article about OpenAI buying Macs!
             Please use a non-beige background for once!

  AI-royalty: I'm sorry, non-beige requires the full token price!

burnt-resistor

2 hours ago

Good luck with that. Managing zillions of Macs has always been difficult, clients and servers. Stanford tried to build an Xserve cluster and failed miserably at it because the OS wasn't conducive to it, nor the hardware at the time either. :( It's not impossible but requires a lot of messy custom, fragile tooling.. and that's expensive to support.

DangitBobby

2 hours ago

Sounds like a job for a state of the art model...