Apple Is Suddenly an AI Infra Stock as OpenAI Buys 10k+ Macs

ChrisArchitect

Related: Apple Caught Off Guard by AI Demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508982

vbwml

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!

evanjrowley

I hope this means OpenAI might become a contributor to Asahi Linux, lest their hardware investment become depreciated due to planned obsolecense by Apple.

pingou

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?

burnt-resistor

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.

jbverschoor

Just to make sure we’re gonna do opening and run locally?

ChrisLTD

Something else they want to price us out of?

kevinrineer

> 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.

exabrial

The one good thing out of this, we may finally get the mac pro back. Hopefully a rackmount version that doesn't cost trillions.