7 September

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones - the Mac Minis - in particular. People are using them for ‘local AI’. They’re running AI systems locally, on these tiny computers, without the need to be constantly connected to the cloud/data centres. The social media zombie culture might immediately think ‘ah, it’s about data centres!’ (one of the fake bullshit rivalries). It’s much, much bigger than that. Apple invented ‘system on a chip’ computing, see the coloured square diagram. Where the processing and memory and other functions all happen as much as possible on a single chip. ‘Apple silicon’ they call it. The reason they did that years ago already was to create immensely powerful but also incredibly energy efficient mobile devices, that needed little cooling. Laptops, mobile phones, iPads. It was an extraordinary engineering innovation. Traditional PC folk scoffed, especially gamers. They love their multi-thousand dollar graphic cards, coupled to mega-sized CPUs, to run graphics-heavy things like games and simulations. With big noisy cooling systems to stop them from melting. But then along came neural networks i.e. AI. AI is a fundamentally different model of computing itself. I’ll post more about that, separately, that’s the REAL revolution here. But it turns out Apple Silicon is THE ideal way to run neural networks. Even their cheapest machines like the Mini absolutely smash a traditional PC, for running AI locally. And they use tiny, tiny amounts of energy, doing it. Silently, with minimal cooling. While the rest of the world fights over limited supplies of powerful GPUs (graphics chips), to run AI data centres with, Apple’s architecture makes them much less relevant. It’s the integrated architecture that’s important, not the size of the GPU. Many had said Apple was losing in the AI war, it hasn’t developed any notable LLM-style AI. But it’s winning in the *hardware* that will increasingly run AI, that runs the famous AI agents.