Tech philosophy and AI opportunity was published on Tuesday, July 8th, 2025. One of the most paradoxical aspects of AI is that while it is hailed as the route to abundance, the most important financial outcomes have been about scarcity. The first and most obvious example has been Nvidia, whose valuation has skyrocketed while demand for its chips continues to outpace supply. Another scarce resource that has come to the forefront over the last few months is AI talent. The people who are actually building and scaling the models are suddenly being paid more than professional athletes. And it makes sense. The potential financial upside from winning in AI are enormous. Outputs are somewhat measurable, and the work to be done is the same across the various companies bidding for talent. It's that last point that is fairly unique in tech history. While great programmers have always been in high demand and there have been periods of intense competition in specific product spaces, over the past few decades, tech companies have been franchises where in their market niches have been fairly differentiated. Google and search, Amazon and e-commerce, Meta and social media, Microsoft and business applications, Apple and devices, etc. This reality meant that the company mattered more than any one person, putting a cap on individual contributor salaries. AI, at least at this point, is different. In the long run, it seems likely that there will be dominant product companies in various niches. But as long as the game is foundational models, then everyone is in fact playing the same game, which elevates the bargaining power of the best players. It follows then that the team they play for is the team that pays the most through some combination of money and mission. By extension, the teams that are destined to lose are the ones who can't or won't offer enough of either.
Apple's reluctance. It's that last point I'm interested in. I'm not in a position to judge the value of any of the players changing teams, but the teams are worth examining. Consider Meta and Apple in the latest free agent signing from Bloomberg. Apple Inc.'s top executive in charge of artificial intelligence models is leaving for Meta Platforms Inc., another setback in the iPhone maker struggling AI efforts. Roming Pang, a distinguished engineer and manager in charge of the company's Apple Foundation models team, is departing, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Pang, who joined Apple from Alphabet Inc. in 2021, is the latest big hire for Meta's new super intelligence group, said The People, who declined to be named, discussing unannounced personnel moves. To secure paying, Meta offered a package worth tens of millions of dollars per year, The People said. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring spree, bringing on major AI leaders including scale AI's Alexander Wong, startup founder Daniel Gross, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman with high compensation. Meta also hired Wanji Lee, a researcher from OpenAI, and Anton Bakton, who worked on Claude at Enthropic PBC, according to other people with knowledge of the matter. Last month, it hired a slew of other OpenAI researchers. Meta later on Monday confirmed it is hiring Pang. Apple, Pang, OpenAI, and Anthropic didn't respond to requests for comment. That Apple is losing AI researchers is a surprise only that they had researchers worth hiring. After all, this is the company who already implicitly signaled its AI reluctance in terms of that other scarce resource, Nvidia chips. Again from Bloomberg, former chief financial officer Luca Maestri's conservative stance on buying GPUs, the specialized circuits essential to AI hasn't aged well either. Under Cook, Apple has used its market dominance and cash to shape global supply chains for everything from semiconductors to the glass for smartphone screens. But demand for GPUs ended up overwhelming supply and the company's decision to buy them slowly, which was in line with its usual practice for emerging technologies it isn't fully sold on ended up backfiring. Apple watched as rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft Corp bought up much of the world supply. Fewer GPUs meant Apple's AI models were trained all the more slowly. Quote, "You can't magically summon up more GPUs when the competitors have already snapped them all up." End quote. says someone on the AI team.
It may seem puzzling that the company that in its 2024 fiscal year generated $118 billion in free cash flow would be so cheap. But Apple's reluctance makes sense from two perspectives. First, the potential impact of AI and Apple's business prospects, at least in the short term, are fairly small. We still need devices on which to access AI, and Apple continues to own the high end of devices. There is, of course, long-term concern about AI obviating the need for a smartphone or meaningfully differentiating an alternative platform like Android. That significantly reduces the financial motivation for Apple to outspend other companies in terms of both GPUs and researchers. Second, AI, at least some of the more fantastical visions painted by companies like Anthropic, is arguably counter to Apple's entire ethos as a company. Text two philosophies. It was AI, at least the pre-LM version of it, that inspired me in 2018 to write about text two philosophies. One was represented by Google and Facebook, now Meta. Quote, in Google's view, computers help you get things done and save you time by doing things for you. Duplex was the most impressive example, a computer talking on the phone for you. But the general concept applied to many of Google's other demonstrations, particularly those predicated on AI. Google Photos will not only sort and tag your photos, but now propose specific edits. Google News will find your news for you, and Maps will find you new restaurants or shops in your neighborhood. And appropriately enough, the keynote closed with a presentation from Whimo, which will drive you. Zuckerberg, as so often seems to be the case with Facebook, came across as a somewhat more fervent and definitely more creepy version of Google. Not only does Facebook want to do things for you, it wants to do things its chief executive explicitly says would not be done otherwise. The messianic fervor that seems to have overtaken Zuckerberg in the last year though simply means that Facebook has adopted a more extreme version of the same philosophy that guides Google computers doing things for people. End quote. The other philosophy is represented by Apple and Microsoft. Quote earlier this week while delivering Microsoft's build conference keynote Sai and Adella struck a very different tone. This is technology's second philosophy and is orthogonal to the other. The expectation is not that the computer does your work for you, but rather that the computer enables you to do your work better and more efficiently. And with this philosophy comes a different take on responsibility. Pchai in the opening of Google's keynote acknowledged that quote, "We feel a deep sense of responsibility to get this right." End quote. But inherent in that statement is the centrality of Google generally and the direct culpability of its managers. Nadella, on the other hand, insists that responsibility lies with the tech industry collectively and all of us who seek to leverage it individually. This second philosophy that computers are an aid to humans not their replacement is the older of the two. Its greatest proponent profit if you will was Microsoft's greatest rival and his analogy of choice was coincidentally enough about transportation as well. Not a car but a bicycle.
