Is AI a feature? Steve Jobs would say so
Steve Jobs once tried to buy Dropbox for reportedly a 9 figure sum, but was turned down by the two founders. Jobs met with Drew Houston and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at Cupertino, and Houston said that no, that they were not interested in selling.
Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. “ He said we were a feature, not a product,” says Houston.
That same year, Steve Jobs unvelied iCloud at that year’s keynote, as the way to solve the problem of file syncing across all your Apple devices. And with that swift blow, killed any chance of Dropbox ever becoming an Apple product.
LLMS ARE A FEATURE, NOT A PRODUCT
The way I see it, LLMs will never be a product, they will just integrate into our daily lives, and we are already there, we are already using them as a feature. In VScode and other developer tools, for example, you call an LLM to help with your code. Same thing with ChatGPT, you use them as part of your iPhone, as part of Siri.
LOCAL LLMS ARE THE FUTURE
What’s stopping Apple and Google from making their own local LLMs and letting people freely use them? They have the resources, people and know-how to do it. This of course will crater the current LLM market and send OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of the pack into the ground.
At the moment I’m writing this, I’m using the free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT on my phone. How much do you think it costs me to use it? Zero, nada, zilch.
I signed up for a free account on OpenRouter, which provides access to a bunch of LLMs, including the latest OpenAI models released a couple days ago; it’s free, and has some daily limits on how much do you use the models, but if you want to use it more often, you can add US$10 in credits to your account to increase daily limits on free models. I started using those, seamlessly switching between them, testing Google, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Mistral and others, with no problem at all, and also switching between paid and free models.
LOCAL FIRST On iOS, apps like Enclave and OpenCat, among others, let you download and use local LLMs on your phone. So you can use a LLM for the unbeatable price of free. [^1]
STEAL UNDERPANTS → ??????? → PROFIT
I don’t know about you, but the current LLM market looks like that famous South Park underpants scene, where a US$300 billion company like OpenAI doesn’t have point #2 defined.
When I switched between models I realized that I was using them as a feature, not as a product.