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- Hacker News
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!by vbwml- 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.
- Sounds like a job for a state of the art model...by DangitBobby
- The one good thing out of this, we may finally get the mac pro back. Hopefully a rackmount version that doesn't cost trillions.by exabrial
- Perhaps only billions per 2u with the current trajectory of ram pricing. /sby anakaine
- Just to make sure we’re gonna do opening and run locally?by jbverschoor
- That went wrong.. I meant -> Just to make sure we won't be able to buy and run LLMs locallyby jbverschoor
- > According to The Information, OpenAI has reportedly purchased tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios in recent months for reinforcement learning and training computer-use agents.
I do hope they verified this claim and didn't just read the headline. I'm not interested in subscribing to that source to find out unfortunately.
by kevinrineer - I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.by evanjrowley
- 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
by vablings - A vibe coded distro is a real monkey's paw type of wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499854by nozzlegear
- Something else they want to price us out of?by ChrisLTD
- Yep. Waiting for someone writing a paper titled "All you need is coffee" or something.by exceptione
- Related:
Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
- 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?by pingou
- Theyre distilling tge open models. Frby cyanydeez
- I think they just want Apple devices to train their computer-use models in a realistic environment.by prabal97
- Aren't they used doing this so they can generate training data for using Macs via the UI with computer use?by notfromhere
- The tinfoil hat answer is they want to ensure fewer people can run local LLMs instead of paying OpenAI for their models.by unrented7977