They have the largest free cash flow (over $100 billion a year). Meta and Amazon have less than half that a year, and Microsoft/Nvidia are between $60b-70b per year. The statement reflects a poor understanding of their financials.
No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.
What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a reasonable schedule.
I have no idea what AI involves, but "training" sounds like a one-and-done - but how is the result "stored"? If you have trained up a Gemini, can you "clone" it and if so, what is needed?
I was under the impression that all these GPUs and such were needed to run the AI, not only ingest the data.
Theoretically it would be much less expensive to just continue to run the existing models, but ofc none of the current leaders are going to stop training new ones any time soon.
The cash pile is gone, they have been active in share repurchase.
They still generate about ~$100 billion in free cash per year, that is plowed into the buybacks.
They could spend more cash than every other industry competitor. It's ludicrous to say that they would have to burn 10 years of cash flow on trivial (relative) investment in model development and training. That statement reflects a poor understanding of Apple's cash flow.
What part of buying index funds of public shares in a company (aside from direct investment, IPO or private placement which are not hallmarks of index funds) funds the company?
Thieves steal because they know a fence will take the goods of their hands. The fence will take the goods of their hands, because they know they can sell them on.
People buy into IPOs partially because they know a lively secondary market exists, where they can offload the shares later. Index funds are part of that secondary market.
Just to be clear, I don't think investors in IPOs are thieves. I'm just saying that you can legitimately say that the secondary market financies companies just as much as the primary market does. Perhaps a better example might be farmers selling to food factories selling to retailers selling to me. I never hand money directly to the farmers, but you can still say with a straight face that my purchase of bacon funds the pig farm.
No money reaches a company when you purchase shares on the secondary market. Unlike a purchase of bacon, where some amount of that money is passed along to the farmers.
> there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public setting, nor should there be. anyone arguing there should be is giving up basic rights because they're scared
I personally value my fundamental right to privacy.
Yes. Believe it or not, most people are not all star human beings in all facets of their lives. We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.
> Yes. Believe it or not, most people are not all star human beings in all facets of their lives.
The above is not just normal faults of the magnitude we all have, instead they're pretty strong indications that jobs was a terrible person. He was probably a narcissist.
> We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.
There are different kinds of "learning from people," I'd recommend not "learning from" Jobs like he's a guru to be admired, but that's what a lot of people do.
We should admire and learn from good people, and the lesson to learn from Jobs is terrible people can be successful, and not to confuse success for goodness.
Job's design taste, and intuition into customer demands are certainly things to learn from. His resolute rejection of orthodoxy is another (which killed him in the end).
> We can certainly still learn from them, instead of casually dismissing them when we find an instance that they don't live up to our pedestal.
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