It's not the M5 Ultra itself, but the M7s or M9s that will do the damage.
99% of people will use whatever AI is free. The sophisticated, heavy users that are willing and able to pay a lot of money the ones that will be interested in controlling their inference bills.
Today, the sweet spot where an M5 Ultra makes sense is tiny. But we might expect that to grow a lot.
Even if you could get a frontier model, you would not be able to run it on any Mac. So speculating on what M7 or M9 will achieve in 5 years (if we even still exist) seems pointless.
True, but do you need a 10,000 dollar machine to do so?
I would love to find an excuse to buy a 10,000 dollar machine! But I cant find one yet. My current cloud bill is in excess of 400 USD per month. Just can't achieve frontier model capabilities locally.
Not for some of those well-connected high school, college kids, whose parents are rolling in it, the next generation of talented Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg’s and others are coming up… Guess what they’re gonna get for Christmas?
You will. Some of us are going to be already ground into dust that the microwave parts are made out of. Others will be locked into our communism cubes with our daily allotment of entertainment and sustinece. let out into the sunlight for only 30 minutes per day.
And nightmare fuel is just what they'll be selling at the UN this week, for this very reason.
Sam's address will probably be more riveting, imaginative, and terrifying than the last couple of Terminator screenplays. Legislators will lobby him to write the laws for them, and the ghost of Harlan Ellison will threaten to sue him.
I don't see how that math works? This is a $15k rig under benchmark and per the results it competes very acceptably against... one consumer GPU.
I really don't see who buys this, except people who want the Studio for some other reason. But nothing in the story says you want to fill racks with these instead of Blackwell or TPU parts; it's not even close.
Your math is correct, but it’s math based on today’s economics.
Think of a company like Apple moving onto your turf. They’re not going to cede AI to the cloud. They want their part of the pie.
So in 7 years, how much AI will be handled locally on your iPhone. And will you have repaid all the debt on your balance sheet before Apple eats your lunch
I think most important thing is that Nvidia doesnt want to give 100% of market to frontier AI labs either.
It's way too easy for 1T+ frontier labs to ditch Nvidia. So Nvidia will also put effort to make sure there are open weights models and local hardware available.
There is zero chance that an LLM approximating a modern frontier model is going to be running on a phone in the next decade. Even if you grant that you could stack enough DRAM dies on top of each other in the package, that would be a three order of magnitude improvement in power efficiency just for the compute.
Because for many people, and especially for the cohort that is HN readers, the current MAGA republican, doesn’t differ just on policy decisions like a Bush or Regan, but is undermining the institutions that keep our checks and balances in place
P.S: I hope this wasn’t too political of a comment. I know we want to keep HN political free. But it does need to be said there’s a difference between policy differences and desecration. Example from today: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/18/trump-white-house-ban-msnow-...
Based on current reward models, the frontier AI labs will burn down mathematics as an impressive display of capabilities and in doing so, will make it impossible for people that get paid to do mathematics to stay employed.
If your job is literally to publish papers, and OpenAI and Anthropic decide that making an infinite-paper-printing machine is the best thing to show how effective their tech is, then as a demo, they destroy that industry.
I wouldn't expect them to destroy that industry, imagine global squadrons of academics and mathematicians focusing their attention on LLM's, training algorithms, scaling laws, ... they're gonna try and beat the incumbent frontier AI labs, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth
My paranoid brain thinks the new "Every baby gets a $1000 investment account" is a lame effort on their part to keep it going. For an extremely low price tag they can give every child & parent skin in the game. For someone struggling seeing their kids account go up a $100 might compel them to support the bloated financial/banking industry now that they get a few drops from it.
The Gilded Age didn’t just “pass”. It was ended by strong unions and antitrust legislation (and enforcement). Passivity will kill us if we let the oligarchs have their way. Hope is not a plan. Appeasement will have no more success than it did in WWII.
Maybe not yours but it was taught at my mediocre public school. We definitely covered Fort Frick, the Pinkertons, the Haymarket bombing, formation of the IWW and AFL-CIO, etc. For some reason people just tend to not pay attention or remember anything from their high school history classes.
The first one passed with a lot of regular people losing their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. I wish just for once we could have the wealthy elites get their comeuppance without it also screwing over everyone else.
there were substantial crashes and booms during the gilded age as well, it wasn't uncommon to go bust and lose a house before the great depression. The panic of `73 is pretty comparable with the great depression, for example
I worked on a 20-ish team of good-but-not-brilliant engineers. Our secret weapon was liking each other and having very low turnover over the course of 10 years.
As a principal engineer at Meta and LinkedIn, it’s still the most productive team I’ve ever been on
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
Imo a good example are soccer teams. To be in the top 5 the team has to work as one hivemind which only works if the people making up the team (coaches and players) actually work together on both the sport side as well as on the social side of things.
Different to corporate jobs those teams spend tremendous amounts on scouting, analysis etc.. They don't just look for the best player but also one who fits as a person.
I think the core issue is that management hasn't picked this up yet and understanding team chemistry etc is totally undervalued. I'd argue this is partly due to this being hard to measure and very hard to do.
The real test of this is whether a manager can fire their single most productive employee because he/she is ruining the social harmony of the team.
I've seen managers in my career bend over backward to protect people who were outright abusive to their coworkers but were individually very productive. Those managers didn't go very far. Your team is not a car collection.
AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.
A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.
When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.
Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.
On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.
Executives can fire individuals and keep the train running for a while. They can't fire "teams" unless they know that product doesn't need to be maintained anymore.
This might just be hanlon's razor and I'm overthinking it, but part of me wonders if it's less "executives don't get it" and more "executives do not want to get it".
It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same.
I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem.
The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.
The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team
There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.
Yep, same experience. We were a company of largely bootcamp grads with past experience in the product area. Most people had tenures of 5+ years and everyone had great rapport. Made it to unicorn status and then some. Then, for whatever reason, the C-suite decided to let go of most of the senior engineering team (rumor was cost-cutting measures at the behest of investor(s)).
Went from IPO hopeful to struggling to position to sell the company now that it was obviously down-trending. Everyone else worth their salt left within a year. Biggest takeaway was how effective everyone was despite not having a traditionally strong engineering background, just because everything traveled so fast because everyone knew everything about the product and everyone was happy and eager to talk to one another, and how quickly that disappeared.
I was very unproductive at Meta because there was so much tribal knowledge context gatekept by others who were too busy to continuously offer any meaningful support despite giving lip service. In other words the flow of information sucked ass compared to when I worked at a startup, even though I didn’t feel much politics at my level (senior).
Given that you work for Meta/LinkedIn, I don't think 'productive' is the correct adjective. It would be like saying that Ted Bundy was more 'productive' than Jeffrey Dahmer.
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