Rodney Avilla on NYT: The ranks of genAI skeptics is growing - '“hallucinations are a feature.” Love it! Like the car salesman who said “that dent actually helps with aerodynamics”'
on Premarket: Apple is green - 'Approaching 11am in the east and Apple is up $0.19 at $272.05. Broadcom is in the green $7.75 or 2.24% at $353.85. Goldman Sachs is ahead $15.33 at $894.33. Vertiv Holdings, a data center supplier, is higher by $13.60 or 8.40% at $175.61. Apple supplier Corning has advanced $1.83 or 2.09% and is currently trading at $89.39. At present 53% of S&P 500 components are trading above Wednesday’s closing prices.'
on NYT: The ranks of genAI skeptics is growing - 'An LLM trained with specific qualified content is substantially different from an LLM trained by sucking down the entire internet. I still think “learn to train” will be the critical skill that replaces “learn to code”. It’ll be figuring out how to use various kinds of AI to accomplish reasonably well-defined tasks, along with figuring out how to verify the results. A lot of “learn to train” should focus on ‘how to tell when the AI gets it wrong’, that’s both establishing global “shall not” conditions, and local “this kind of result is invalid.”'
on AppleInsider calls BS on the FT's Apple Vision Pro sales numbers - 'Rodney, the FT quoted AVP sales was 45,000 unit for the holiday quarter, not for just December month. I don’t know if there is any significant seasonality to AVP sales but let’s assume there is more sales in the December holiday quarter and the rest of the year averages out to 30,000/quarter or roughly 10,000/month Jan-September. That’s 90,000 + 45,000 =135,000 for 2025. Now I do not assume the ASP is $3500 since many will also buy more memory (512GB version is $3699), additional straps, batteries, wireless Magic keyboards, Zeiss optical inserts, etc. I put the ASP at $3750. So for those 45,000 buyers in q4 quarter, it’s $168,750,000 quarterly revenue and for the 135,000 for the year, $506M roughly.'
on NYT: The ranks of genAI skeptics is growing - 'Part 2 Why I Like genAi I used Elephas Ai to create a mini-brain. For Elephas, this is basically an SLM (Small Language Model) very specific to only getting poured data that I feed it – it’s offline so it doesn’t reference the web, but does tap to an LLM of my choosing. Long story short, I poured examples of project plans & content I’ve done in the past 5 years and specific slides, reports, spreadsheets, webpages→PDFs, about a large project program I’m in, into this min-brain. I then asked Elephas to generate me a project plan giving it all the things a veteran PM should know, e.g. task durations, schedules, team names & their roles & responsibilities & % availability to the project, et al. And voila, it ultimately generated (with me vetting & iterating/finetuning the prompts) a 1,200-task project plan broken out in four large phases. I would say a week of prep & prompting & refining, a week of copying & pasting each task (and its detailed info) into a Wrike project task plan. This would have taken me months to do pre-genAi. My opinion is that the efficiency gain from genAi works best if you’re a seasoned subject matter expert in that particular field, educated enough in those relevant areas, long-experienced in both successful & unsuccessful aspects of what you’ve done, and expertly skilled in whatever it is that’s needed. If you’re clueless and aski Ai to help you, hopefully it’s not for a job you’re in, they’ll definitely find someone else better than you at that point. Cheers!'
on AppleInsider calls BS on the FT's Apple Vision Pro sales numbers - 'Rodney, 900,000 screen units is consistent with Sony’s stated total annual production capacity. Each Vision Pro requires 2 Vision Pro screens, reducing the total number of Vision Pro’s produced annually to 450,000 units, AND SELLING THEM ALL AT $3,500 EACH. Until production exceeds 900,000 individual units annually there is no need to lower Vision Pro pricing. Sony’s inability to increase production capacity has led to Apple contracting with Chinese firms BOE and Seeya for Vision Pro screens.'
on AppleInsider calls BS on the FT's Apple Vision Pro sales numbers - 'For those on Apple 3.0 who don’t have experience with a Vision Pro, it may be helpful to take a brief look at a page on Reddit where users post their responses to some of the immersive videos and other apps that are available for the Vision Pro. It’s difficult to read some of the comments and not get a good sense of the great enthusiasm so many people have about Apple’s “flop” product. https(colon)//www.reddit(dot)com/r/VisionPro/'
on AppleInsider calls BS on the FT's Apple Vision Pro sales numbers - 'I realize here that I torqued up my math (mostly a dyslexic transliteration) from $157 million (correct) to $175 million (fat fingers or something). Still, as suggested in this article, not a dismal failure.'
on FT: Apple has sharply cut Vision Pro production and promotion - '@Rodney According to the AppleInsider article Apple moved production to Vietnam, they didn’t cease production. Lazy reporting.'
on The trillions spent on new computing infrastructure suddenly makes sense to me - 'I thought protein folding was doubling over the ham slices in my sandwich.'
on FT: Apple has sharply cut Vision Pro production and promotion - 'Tommo says I told ya so… lol! Nothing to see here folks!'
