79 pointsby acossta2 hours ago17 comments
  • sdoeringan hour ago
    Pardon me not understanding what this is about?

    Basically SETI for AI workloads? At least, this is the impression the landingpage left me with.

    I am a bit lost, tbh.

    • railka41 minutes ago
      Minions is an internal enterprise system already in use at Apple. It pools idle Mac GPUs into a shared compute cluster for ML inference.

      There is no distributed execution of a single LLM across multiple GPUs using tensor parallelism here. Instead, it relies on task-level parallelism-breaking down a large workload into independent subtasks that run across separate machines. For example, generating embeddings for a million documents.

      • alt22723 minutes ago
        So basically works the same way as Folding@Home?
        • rafaelmn6 minutes ago
          Embedding@Work
        • rramon21 minutes ago
          Only on the same local network I guess.
  • tom1337an hour ago
    I guess for companies this can be nice? Run some inference in the off-hours on the machines that you already have. Could be useful for analytical tasks that don't require to be instant. On the technical side this doesn't seem that groundbreaking for me though.
  • eikenberry3 minutes ago
    Sounds similar to Salad (salad.com), except for the differing hardware.
  • pm90an hour ago
    My warm take is that Apple is leaving a lot of money on the table by not investing in creating an independent supply chain for their chips and building their own cloud. They arguably had the first mover advantage when it came to general purpose arm compute; all they had to do was flood the market and make it easy for anyone to rent it. Not only would they corner a part of the market but perhaps ease demand pressure on other chip manufacturers too.
    • sigmoid1042 minutes ago
      Apart from straight up buying TSMC's or Samsung's fabs I don't see a way of building a vertically integrated high-end chip supply chain for Apple. At least not on timeframes measured below a decade. And on those time frames the current supply issues will probably be resolved by companies who put all their effort into it instead of just tweaking their bottom line.
      • alt22722 minutes ago
        TBH Im surprised they havent already bought one of these companies.
        • bel89 minutes ago
          I don't think they would be able to buy any of these. It would have been blocked by multiple regulators.
        • macintux20 minutes ago
          They've had a great deal of success playing them off against each other.
          • 15 minutes ago
            undefined
        • r_lee20 minutes ago
          because their entire thing is to focus on a few product lines... I'm not surprised at all
    • yohannparis18 minutes ago
      My guess is that it's already hard for them to get as many chips fabricated for their devices, which is still their main source of income so far.

      Maybe their chip team is already on the work, or already made, a server chip for AI purposes used internally, and doesn't have to talk about it yet.

    • pjmlp26 minutes ago
      They don't get enterprise, A/UX, mkLinux, OS X Server, Mac Pro tower, all gone now.

      Swift's main reason to go open source and have good Linux support was naturally for app developers to be able to use it on server side, which naturally wasn't going to be macOS.

      I macOS wasn't required for developing iDevices apps, they would surely sell even less desktops.

  • lynndotpy10 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • brandonpelfrey30 minutes ago
    I don't get it. In the paper it sounds like it's "just" a CRUD DB, then you have some fleet of Macs, and they store inputs and outputs in S3. What's the innovation here? Not trying to poo on this, but it looked like the most basic and obvious approach.
  • mindwork4 minutes ago
    Is this opt-in or opt-out?
    • cousinbryce2 minutes ago
      I’ll opt-in to working at Apple
  • djoldman17 minutes ago
    Paper:

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.12970

    Shortest promoted paper I've seen from a FAANG.

  • pjmlp28 minutes ago
    Apple rediscovering HPC clusters, but without OS X Server to serve alongside it.
  • simbasan hour ago
    That's why the button is on the underside.
  • Bric3dan hour ago
    They'll throw this together but still not sell you something you can stick in a rack ?
    • Telemakhosan hour ago
      That seems to be the point: you leverage existing workstations on your corporate network and run compute batches at night while they're idle. You don't have to buy any extra servers for your low-priority AI workloads.
      • jprd41 minutes ago
        We were doing this decades ago with engineer's HP C3600s under their desks. It wasn't AI, just low-priority HPC / fluid stuff batched out to hundreds of workstations.
        • macintux18 minutes ago
          That was the original pitch for Ian Murdock's Progeny startup in the late 90s: a Linux-based distributed filesystem for corporate desktops to boot into overnight for distributed computing.
  • gempir34 minutes ago
    Interesting, so this is basically Apple's version of exo ? https://github.com/exo-explore/exo
    • 22 minutes ago
      undefined
    • skhameneh15 minutes ago
      Reading the “paper”, this is just a job runner built on Ollama. Exo, and the teams at Apple that built the foundations Exo uses, actually use modern distributed compute.
  • skhameneh27 minutes ago
    I’m a bit disappointed in the lack of depth (and use of Ollama): https://arxiv.org/html/2610.12970v1

    Apple has released some small models previously that seemed genuinely great, along with some quality research/efforts. I’m just not seeing the same level of depth here, am I missing something?

    • serhack_18 minutes ago
      true, shame on apple for the paper quality
  • veexx103an hour ago
    This project sounds good.

    What is it actually like?

  • tw198418 minutes ago
    internal system, so the IT/HR department is the solution to leechers.

    nothing new here.

  • railkaan hour ago
    [dead]
  • sehw13 minutes ago
    >Apple steals your electicity while you take a dump