There has been a lot of (necessary) election and trade war talk on The BetaKit Podcast recently. But this week we just want to nerd out on some tech news.
So consider this week’s episode a tech palate cleanse, focused on AI (the pickled ginger of tech conversations).
“Apple won’t use user data to develop and train AI. And Apple lives in a world where AI is going to be table stakes in any software or hardware moving forward.”
Any conversation about AI should start with Apple Intelligence and its ongoing delays. Last year, we said that Apple’s riskiest decision in years might be catching up to AI too soon. For a company that often ignores the existence of new tech until it is ready to roll it out at scale, news that a Siri able to compete with ChatGPT (or anything else) might not come until 2026 has ruffled some feathers, particularly if you recently purchased an Apple Intelligence-ready device. But given reports that Apple might be starting from scratch, was it still the right call?
On the opposite end of the vaporware spectrum is Cohere’s Command A large-language model (LLM), which both exists and currently sits in pole position ahead of the company’s global competitors for speed and efficiency. It’s a nice feather in the cap of Canada’s ‘Great AI Hope’ no matter how long it lasts, but as Decelerator’s Rob Kenedi notes on the podcast, with LLMs becoming increasingly commoditized, is it the data centre owners who will ultimately win the AI wars? Cohere has an iron in that fire as well, as does Telus, with claims of Canadian AI sovereignty—both data centres will be powered by Nvidia chips.
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That last morsel had a bit of a sour taste to it, and this is supposed to be the palate cleanse episode, so I’m switching up the vibes to talk about vibe coding. Y Combinator’s Garry Tan recently claimed that a quarter of his accelerator’s batch of startups are building products almost entirely written by LLMs. This seems like the beginning of a marked shift in the way tech is built, right? Well, as @leojr94_ and others have revealed, with great vibes come great responsibility. Please consider this your vibe coding PSA.
Let’s dig in.
Related links:
- Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino
- Apple’s AI division reportedly starting from scratch
- Apple’s Craig Federighi Discusses the Future of iPhone AI
- Apple’s Catch-22
- Cohere’s Command A goes brrrrrrrrr
- Cohere had to extend the axis a bit
- Telus, data centres and ‘Sovereign AI’ (powered by Nvidia)
- 25% of Y Combinator’s latest startup batch is vibe coding
- Vibe coding startups are already raising millions
- @leojr94_ vibe coded his way into a cyber attack (lol)
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Feature image courtesy Cohere. Episode edited by Darian MacDonald.