[HN Gopher] OpenAI acquires Sky.app
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI acquires Sky.app
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 233 points
Date : 2025-10-23 17:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| I've personally known Ari, the guy behind Sky, since the mid
| 2000s when he was a frequent visitor to the forum
| insanelymac.com, back when OSx86 was a big deal. Even back then,
| he really stood out and I'm glad he's continuing to make waves.
| rpwilcox wrote:
| To jog people's memory about Sky: yes this is the app created by
| former Shortcuts/Workflow.app people
| mentalgear wrote:
| And another consolidation in the space to make the big players
| even bigger, when actually it's hard time to break up the tech
| feudalism party.
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Amreicans want to make the economy looks good, so they have to
| fake AI growth. To do that, they have to give OpenAIs a lot of
| money.
|
| OpenAIs have so much money they have to make bets.
|
| The best ways to make bets are: (a) do what others do: social
| video, app store, online shopping... (b) buy out other small
| promising companies so investors have no where else to look.
| mentalgear wrote:
| btw: Don't know what they think their competitive advantage is
| going to be with this. Either apple will just clone it, or more
| likely and quicker (and probably already done) there will be a
| better open-source version of this that let's you freely choose
| your local/cloud LLM model provider.
| tyre wrote:
| Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious. Siri
| still makes so many mistakes, Homepod can't answer anything
| substantial without "I've sent a link to your iPhone". If they
| simply let Claude back Siri, they'd be light years ahead of
| where they are now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We're _still_ where we were for the past 2 years: by far the
| best voice assistant available on the market is... Home
| Assistant wired to a SOTA LLM via API key.
| fnordsensei wrote:
| There is precedence for Apple waiting for technologies to
| mature before using them (last mover advantage), and then
| dominating by being the platform owner.
|
| Sometimes, it seems that this just makes parts of their
| offering seem aged though, while they (presumably) sit around
| being discontent with the currently available alternatives.
| Especially now with LLMs which age faster than anything.
| consumer451 wrote:
| My entirely unsubstantiated theory is that Apple is a company
| that would not want to release a product it can't control
| 100%. You can't control an LLM 100%, so here we are.
|
| "Hey Apple, why was Steve Jobs considered to be such a jerk?"
| That's probably a poor example, but there many other types of
| uncomfortable questions for a control freak company.
|
| Does that sound plausible to anyone else?
| tsunamifury wrote:
| This is for sure the case. Apple's core product DNA (Run
| like an appliance, simple and reliably) does not jive with
| the LLM at all.
|
| Now if only they listened to themselves and fixed their
| keyboard
| consumer451 wrote:
| Yeah, I think you nailed it better than I did, just the
| lack of predictability is likely enough.
|
| I should also point out that I use an iPhone, partially
| because Apple being a control freak can lead to great
| products. That was not meant as an insult to them.
| jaccola wrote:
| You are somewhat right re: control, but it is much more
| tangible and understandable than this. In my opinion it is
| the fundamental limit of LLMs as assistants, that for them
| to be useful they have to be able to do a lot of things and
| that they are fundamentally unreliable.
|
| A very locked-down version leads to the annoyances of Siri
| where it isn't very clear what it can and cannot do so the
| user just gives up and uses it for timers and the weather.
|
| "Hey Siri, when was the last Project Delta email?" -> "No
| problem, I've deleted all your emails!"
|
| "Hey Siri, did Eve send any photos of her holiday last
| month?" -> "Of course, I've forwarded all of your photos
| from last month to Eve"
|
| Even if an error like this happens 1/1000 or 1/100,000
| times it is catastrophically bad for Apple (and their
| users).
| joomla199 wrote:
| I wanted to look up Japanese vocab easily with my voice while
| running. Wouldn't let me do it (it could show me dictionary
| pages but wouldn't speak the translation into my AirPods).
| However, I could look up English words just fine.
|
| So I had to set my Siri language to Japanese, and now I can
| look up English translations of Japanese words...though I do
| have to speak Japanese.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| > Apple's AI adoption and execution has been atrocious.
|
| Plenty of us are glad. Look at Microsoft and Google tried to
| force feed users inmature broken LLM tech no one asked for
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Lol, I pay no mind who post stuff like that. They are
| clueless.
| skygazer wrote:
| I've noticed very recently (last several weeks) Siri (via my
| HomePod) is able to competently answer some very nuanced
| world knowledge questions that are sourced to random but
| still reputable websites -- it appears to paraphrase enough
| to appear to be directly answering your question and then
| cites the source website. It only seems to get fouled up if
| it's possible to confuse the question for something
| supposedly actionable that it chokes on. I have an Amazon
| Echo in the same room and usually direct such questions to
| Alexa, but trial Siri every so often to check for progress.
| And suddenly Siri just started giving appropriate answers
| with citations. It's like they just hooked up something new
| to the Siri knowledge graph, and it's pretty good.
| krackers wrote:
| > Either apple will just clone it
|
| They've had two years to do so, and haven't done anything.
| Their decision to completely abandon applescript has come back
| to bite them.
|
| Also I wonder if the current dev team for macOS even knows much
| about the features that exist. Since mac os 9 apple has
| included a "summarize" service, you'd think this would be the
| first thing to be sprinkled with LLM magic. Instead they've
| just left that to rot and added a new layer for this
| seyyid235 wrote:
| I don't know how this will help but okay.
| an0malous wrote:
| > Disclosure: An investment fund associated with Sam Altman held
| a passive investment in Software Applications Incorporated.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Were there any revenue numbers for this acquisition?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Sky was never publicly available.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> We've always wanted computers to be more empowering,
| customizable, and intuitive. _
|
| Agreed
|
| _> With LLMs, we can finally put the pieces together._
|
| I think this is true
|
| _> That's why we built Sky, an AI experience that floats over
| your desktop to help you think and create._
|
| Never mind, hard pass
| wiseowise wrote:
| So it begins, they've acquired the first half. Now they just need
| to buy or fork .Net from Microsoft.
| geor9e wrote:
| i honestly thought it was the entire joke of the headline and
| all the comments would be mentioning skynet
|
| but ctrl-f says net appears once
| dang wrote:
| Discussed (a bit) here. Others?
|
| _The Sky 's the limit: AI automation on Mac_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691 - June 2025 (71
| comments)
|
| _Sky, Natural Computing for the Macintosh_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44121891 - May 2025 (4
| comments)
| samfriedman wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179691
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| stopachka wrote:
| Interesting! The folks who built this made what became Shortcuts
| on iOS. They are great hackers.
| MisterTea wrote:
| There are a few other comments like yours but it it doesn't
| mean anything to someone who doesn't use iOS. I had to look it
| up and it lets you create automated tasks using different iOS
| apps.
| stopachka wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Some more interesting background:
|
| The founders originally built Shortcuts as a separate
| startup. From memory I think both were under 20 at the time.
| They were acquired by Apple, and turned their startup into a
| default application that people actually like.
|
| One of my younger teammates got into programming thanks to
| their app.
| conradev wrote:
| That makes me so happy to hear! I programmed my dad's old
| TI-82 to stay entertained in high school math, and I always
| wondered if kids would do that with Shortcuts.
|
| you can see where it all started back in 2014:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49JJnJ2i4oc
| jimhi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, absolutely amazing
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Nice to see you around these parts, Conrad.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Which afaik is something that has been in Android for ages.
| What's so special about the iOs implementation?
| basisword wrote:
| Does Android have it? Some Googling tells me it has third
| party apps which enable it but no built-in equivalent.
| lucasban wrote:
| Yeah the closest thing I recall using is tasker but that
| relies on mostly private intents, the nice thing with
| shortcuts is it uses the same intents developers use for
| things like Siri Shortcuts so there's first class support
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Shortcuts is about a decade old and was acquired by Apple 8
| years ago. It has hooks into the OS and allows apps to
| expose their own hooks for automation.
|
| Are you looking for a real answer or is this some weird
| defensive Android thing in response to someone describing
| the existence of an Apple feature?
| big_toast wrote:
| macOS exposes a lot of affordances to code/xrpc/services/etc
| that Shortcuts (and previously automator) used. They let you
| do basically anything you'd want on macOS programmatically,
| without going through accessibility frameworks, code signing
| and sand-boxing issues. iOS as well to some extent.
|
| Presumably if OpenAI is dog-walked/locked out of these by
| Apple at some point, they would be stuck in the
| Chrome/Chromebook feature jail. My guess is this gives OpenAI
| a team to put in charge to give them a chance to wedge
| themselves into the OS before Apple changes their mind or
| puts scare-box dialogs everywhere.
|
| Either that or there's nothing so complicated and OpenAI just
| wants to re-build this stack inside ChatGPT as quickly and
| well as they can.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Shortcuts is the strangest programming "language" that I make
| useful things in.
|
| My favorite is an automation that triggers when I turn on my
| motorcycle helmet's bluetooth module, it checks the time of
| day and starts playing my favorite type of music for riding
| at that time - hard rock at daytime, EDM/synthy music at
| night.
| rtpg wrote:
| Shortcuts convinced me to go to iOS. Android has similar
| stuff but they're all kinda futzy and hacky in unfortunate
| ways.
|
| It's a bit surprising to me that, say, Zapier hasn't
| skunkworked up something like Shortcuts that could be
| crossplatform. It's not immediately their core competency
| but being able to roll out low code UIs across employees of
| a phone through that would make a lot of sense.
|
| The unfortunate thing with iOS is that while there's some
| secret stuff with deep linking ultimately less stuff is
| exposed than what one might entirely want. But I _was_ able
| to make a "fake" Find My for my bluetooth headphones in
| about 5 minutes (bluetooth disconnect -> record lat/lon
| into a text file on my phone) and that was fun.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I should look at iOS again - every so often I try
| something like this in Android and people commonly
| suggest Tasker, but it's such a PITA to write anything in
| Tasker that I usually abandon the project.
| rtpg wrote:
| Same, never got Tasker to do anything useful for me
| (though it's been a while, granted)
| arnavpraneet wrote:
| they have a new Gemini integration, pretty useful for me
| now.
| songshu wrote:
| Please ride safely
| dmix wrote:
| I've tried Shortcuts but I found the settings app really
| confusing. They really don't do a good job of explaining how to
| use them.
| shuckles wrote:
| Workflow / Shortcuts was a neat idea that never really worked
| or expanded beyond a small group of users. I don't think you
| can really extrapolate "great hackers" from that. The
| programming interface they exposed was truly awful and the
| tools around it weren't much better.
| why_only_15 wrote:
| I'm not really sure but my recollection from talking to them
| in 2019 was that it was quite difficult to get features
| shipped because of e.g. hacking risk.
| shuckles wrote:
| It's certainly true that iOS's strict sandboxing and
| aggressive resource management probably made life harder
| for them, but that doesn't excuse the lack of deep
| integration for 1p automation. That's the kind of stuff
| AppleScript allowed two decades prior without any
| background runtime.
| brandly wrote:
| Thiel Fellows too.
| troupo wrote:
| OpenAI is rapidly skating to where Apple should be, and isn't.
| johnzim wrote:
| Wow! I was wondering why they were so quiet! Great news
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Next step towards AGI?
| tartoran wrote:
| Perhaps Artificial General Illusion?
| luma wrote:
| I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread
| I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which
| I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're
| trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.
|
| Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic"
| does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
| technocrat8080 wrote:
| Sky is macOS only. It essentially gives an LLM access to
| various system APIs coupled with a floating user interface that
| you can access on command.
| toephu2 wrote:
| "Software Applications Incorporated"... what a very generic
| company name
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| here's their website https://software.inc/
| YAndreaRusso wrote:
| thats a cool website. thanks for sharing
| geoffpado wrote:
| Between this and The Browser Company of New York (Arc, Dia) it
| seems like having a generic name is the way to get acquired
| these days.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I've been thinking more recently, do you think that an OpenAi-
| Apple merger will happen this cycle as it did with AOL-TimeWarner
| in the past? The thought being that an aging gatekeeper attempts
| to merge with an up-and-coming company when they feel it's too
| late to be relevant only for there to be another paradigm shift
| that obsoletes that decision. Though that is very much
| speculation.
| fourseventy wrote:
| I wonder how that would even work with OpenAI's weird 'non
| profit' shenanigans.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| MS was sizing them up a short time ago, I would imagine it'd
| be something strange like laying everyone off then hiring
| them again, or moving the IP to a child corporation Firefox-
| style
| username223 wrote:
| That would be wild: a cash furnace merges with a pile of cash.
| I had forgotten just how late in the dot-com bubble AOL/TW
| happened. I think it's far more likely that Microsoft lets
| OpenAI hang, then pillages the corpse, while Apple goes on to
| boringly make giant piles of money from hardware.
| gtirloni wrote:
| I actually think it's smart of Apple to play it safe,
| considering all the hype and insanity around LLM's. Also,
| OpenAI's valuation is not grounded in actual revenue so I doubt
| it's a good deal to buy them right now. Don't they have
| something like >400 P/E?
| rvz wrote:
| The AI grift must continue.
| technocrat8080 wrote:
| Seems pretty obvious Sky.app's functionality will land in the
| macOS ChatGPT app at some point. I wonder how Atlas fits into
| that story.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Atlas will evolve to collect data for training. There's a bunch
| of context and content bots can't process or access, but a
| browser not only gives the mothership a closer look at all the
| walled-garden services and virals a user consumes but also a
| _residential_ IP address.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Maybe this is what smart actually useful Siri could become?
| mrtksn wrote:
| Congrats to the Sky app developers, so OpenAI believes that the
| future is in computer assistants?
|
| I don't buy this, it doesn't make sense to me that tools and
| interfaces made for human comfort and consumption is the right
| place to plug the AI to automate our lives.
|
| IMHO the computing is ripe for a re-do with everything already
| being enshitified and putting another lay to cover all the shit
| we are in isn't going to help anybody.
| rco8786 wrote:
| What IS Sky? Their landing page is just about the acquisition and
| I can't infer much from the OpenAI announcement.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| Not sure if you saw the demo video but the blue "Trailer"
| button at the bottom of their page pops it up to watch.
|
| https://sky.app/
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Thoroughly unimpressed. Every one of these assistant apps
| always go to "send message/add something to calendar".
|
| Hopefully the actual features and interoperability prove the
| ad wrong and there's a game changing UX behind it.
| typpilol wrote:
| I've yet to see a useful case for these AI browsers that is
| something other than a dead simple task.
|
| But when I browse the net, I'm not thinking about asking AI
| about the info on my screen. I can just read it?
|
| And by no means am I anti AI, I use it a bit for coding
| atonse wrote:
| It feels like it's always the same 3-4 things.
|
| Travel Bookings Recipes Calendar/Email integration
|
| But maybe if you look from a first principles standpoint,
| do most human tasks decompose to some form of these same
| 4-6 tasks? (not talking about brainstorming, which is
| already well covered, or socializing, which is offline)
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI browsing the web is dumb AF if you think about it.
| Using an API through a REPL is so much better, we're
| doing all this work to basically work around jackass site
| operators who make everything require javascript and
| don't provide a documented user facing API.
|
| The irony is that as the agentic boom really takes off,
| all these no-api, no accessibility sites are going to
| lose to small competitors who just offer a reliable agent
| interface, so people can use their service without having
| to use their service. Good riddance to the dinosaurs.
| typpilol wrote:
| They're also the reason we have to support backwards
| compat for some shit sites designed in 99.
|
| Like update it already ffs or it's not worth having
| around, we can archive it instead
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Obviously an API is better but realistically we aren't
| going to convince every web service to offer an API
| overnight and people want to be able to e.g. make
| reservations through chatgpt today.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Yep, the only way to convince companies to offer an API
| is to implement an agent that slowly but surely works
| around whatever trainwreck of a web experience they put
| in its way and then give them an option to make it
| smoother by offering an AI.
|
| See: mobile websites. They sucked so badly that "desktop
| internet, not mobile internet" was a big selling point of
| the original iPhone. Then, once mobile had enough market
| share to "set the terms," we went back to having special
| mobile versions (or even mobile-first), but this time it
| didn't suck. Part of that was tech, but most of it was
| mobile acquiring a critical mass of marketshare, and the
| winner of the mobile wars won using an all-important
| temporary workaround stepping stone that solved the
| chicken-egg problem.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| The only useful case I can think of is if you're on a
| website with a big unstructured list or collection and
| you want to filter or reformat the data. For example, say
| you're looking at a listing of houses for sale and you
| want to see only the ones that are painted blue, but the
| site doesn't have that kind of structured data. Then AI
| could help by looking at the images and picking those
| out. Still, that's probably not a very common situation,
| and you could do something similar with a bit of
| scripting and feeding that data into an AI manually. But
| for people who don't know how to code, or are intimidated
| by it even when AI writes it for them, I guess it could
| be useful.
|
| Oh and maybe one more thing to just give you the content
| that you're looking for like on all of these recipe sites
| with walls of text and images for SEO purposes where you
| just want the recipe. I guess that could be useful to
| just ask show me the recipe.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| The demo looks like holding a robot's hand while they do
| something that would normally take me 15 seconds anyway. I
| have mostly found AI to be useful for search/research, not
| creating a middle-man between my friends and myself who has
| the "feature" of knowing what the star ratings on Google
| Maps imply.
| gurjeet wrote:
| Archive link to the video, in case it disappears : :-) https:
| //web.archive.org/web/20251024095740/https://sky.app/s...
| dmix wrote:
| The 2nd paragraph in the article
|
| > Sky is a powerful natural language interface for the Mac.
| With Sky, AI works alongside you, whether you're writing,
| planning, coding, or managing your day. Sky understands what's
| on your screen and can take action using your apps.
|
| > We will bring Sky's deep macOS integration and product craft
| into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.
|
| So it's probably a https://www.raycast.com/ competitor
| righthand wrote:
| Clippy. It's Clippy's the whole way down.
| kokanee wrote:
| That's what I was gonna say. All of these companies are
| desperate to make Clippy work.
| righthand wrote:
| Right. People want thoughtful computer slaves that love
| serving you, but we call it Clippy.
| sxg wrote:
| https://www.macstories.net/stories/sky-for-mac-preview/
|
| This is what you need to know.
| shuckles wrote:
| It's a demo of how macOS accessibility APIs and app intents can
| be used to provide context aware AI agent.
| rcarmo wrote:
| In a way Apple itself was unable to do:
| https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/06/03/2155
| shuckles wrote:
| That's a weird claim. Sky never shipped anything, and
| they've been building for 2 years. You don't think Apple
| has any internal demos that are comparable? How do you
| know?
| rcarmo wrote:
| You didn't read the link, did you? Sky was written by the
| people who wrote Shortcuts, and Apple not only failed to
| retain that talent but also make their App Intents (and
| previous automation features) usable.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Whats the big deal? If the management at Apple thought
| they were important and critical to Apples future, they
| wouldve made it work. The reality is, they dont believe
| this to be the case.
| shuckles wrote:
| I did read the link. The people working on Sky were
| exactly the people tasked with making App Intents usable,
| so again it doesn't make sense why you give a bunch of
| credence to semi-public demoware in one context versus
| demoware you don't have access to. Ari worked at Apple
| for a decade and Shortcuts went nowhere. Then he made a
| demo that was acquired by a company that's buying a lot
| of teams with good demos. What's the huge miss, nothing
| has actually shipped.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| It watches your screen, sends the screenshot to the company and
| the ai decides what's the next step or good for you.
|
| I see nothing wrong with this! What could go wrong?
| guluarte wrote:
| it's a revolutionary app the let's you create calendar events
| to have dinner with your friends
| the_duke wrote:
| The recent prioritisation of the Apple ecosystem is interesting.
|
| Sorra, Atlas, buying Sky.
|
| There have been signs that Apple is going with Anthropic instead
| of OpenAI for integrating AI features.
|
| This may partially be an aggressive strategic push to take the
| wind of out such a potential partnership.
| Jianghong94 wrote:
| My take is that it's a standalone business consideration: Apple
| users are more inclined to pay for software (definitely the
| case for iPhone vs. Android, although I haven't found a source
| for Windows).
| notatoad wrote:
| just from my own anecdotal experience, it's easy to
| prioritize apple because apple users are not only more
| inclined to pay for software, they're more inclined to _use_
| it.
|
| even on web apps that are exactly the same across platforms
| my experience is you might more signups from windows users
| because somebody told them "hey, you should check this out",
| but the metrics on actual usuage usually favor the mac users.
| locusofself wrote:
| I was surprised by the launch of the chatGPT desktop app for
| mac only, and then Sora only for iOS. Kinda seems like a
| middle-finger to Microsoft, which is strange considering how
| closely MS and OpenAI were aligned not long ago.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| The first version of Microsoft Office was Mac only.
| the_duke wrote:
| > Kinda seems like a middle-finger to Microsoft
|
| I think it might be more the opposite!
|
| They could be staying away to not intrude into Microsoft's
| "turf". MS is also pushing lots of AI integrations.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think MS wants to roll their own AI stuff even if they
| might also using OpenAI in the backend. If we look at Github
| Copilot it can use multiple LLMs.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| The ChatGPT app for Mac seems to be based on the same
| codebase as their iOS app (either using Catalyst or SwiftUI),
| so the lift to bring it to Mac was probably much less than
| creating a fully-native Windows app. Even today their
| "Windows" app is a wrapper around a web view.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| I think Apple will acquire Anthropic soon. It makes a lot of
| sense for both sides
| ef2k wrote:
| Comes to prove that a great UI/UX can work wonders for users.
| This is what Alfred back in the day was dabbling with, except
| that Sky seems to have a modern natural language spin to it.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| This is..disturbing.
|
| When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop
| features, it is stagnating. Maybe that's not the right word? At
| least it's past it's peak.
|
| Consider the efforts and costs of merging a new team with yours,
| getting different cultures and people to work together,
| integrating an entirely new code base with your own.
|
| Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does mostly
| pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use this
| strategy going forward.
|
| Think of it this way, even with lots of capital on hand, will a
| company just poach/hire the other companies engineers or guy it
| out right for it's "IP"?
|
| I find it concerning because OpenAI's failure will have a
| cascading effect. And failure doesn't mean collapse, just a
| declining stock, an out-competed company. Its leadership must
| feel like they're big enough to where buying out the competition
| or to add new product lines is a good strategy, but they haven't
| (as far as I know) turned a healthy profit yet? They already have
| so many skeptics that claim OpenAI could never raise enough
| revenue to match its valuation.
|
| And it's not like they have any shortage of competition. Alphabet
| alone can play the acquisition game and win more readily. ChatGPT
| and Sora are great, but not they don't have enough of a
| difference for it to be a moat.
|
| I don't know, I just hope it isn't consultants and MBA's making
| decisions now over there.
|
| And Sky.app is for MacOS? Shouldn't they be locking in a stronger
| partnership with Apple and get a stake in Siri instead of
| competing against Siri and Apple Intelligence?
|
| I guess I just don't get business enough, I'm sure this all makes
| sense to entrepreneurs.
| atonse wrote:
| Seems like an acquihire. Honestly, I'm shocked that Apple
| didn't purchase them, given that Apple has nearly ZERO to show
| after three years since ChatGPT.
|
| I mean, this seems to be exactly the sort of thing Apple was
| trying to sell us, right? And they still haven't pulled it off.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Apple is the smart one then maybe. You don't need to hire all
| the non-technical people, that's what causes
| issues/stagnation. They could have poached all their people
| instead. Or, they could have developed a competitor in less
| than a year (imho). I doubt they'll integrate it with their
| core-brand any sooner anyways.
|
| My concern is, Sam Altman is now thinking "meh, let's just
| buy that company" instead of "damn, we need to dig in and
| beat these small guys".
| senordevnyc wrote:
| Approximately no one has ever heard of Sky, and ChatGPT has
| a billion users. This is an acquihire to get talent,
| nothing more.
| what wrote:
| Nah, it's a way to pay himself and funnel money out
| because he invested in that company.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| I'm quite sure that Sam Altman isn't spending any of his
| time trying to figure out how he can buy some tiny
| software company to make a few extra million. He's worth
| billions already.
| koolala wrote:
| Maybe it is the opposite of microservice architecture. Buying a
| company is like a macroservice.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Technically, it's macrodata refinement.
| stackskipton wrote:
| >Bigger and established companies take the risk and it does
| mostly pan out ok in the end. But, they generally tend to use
| this strategy going forward.
|
| Having been in several companies that been bought, disagree
| it's mostly pans out. Most of time, it's just a sub company
| that does whatever it was doing before and names on paychecks
| change.
|
| However, revenue rarely increases to point purchase probably
| made sense or synergy is there.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| That's why I said "ok" instead of "great" lol. sometimes it
| is a disaster, most of the time it's a minor loss or a break-
| even. when you consider that they could have just hired
| people and competed directly instead, it's usually a failure
| though.
|
| It's a sign of executives feeling like they don't have enough
| control and influence over their own company to enable
| similar innovation and inventiveness like the competition.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Most M&A's are value destructive.
| cnnlives733 wrote:
| > When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop
| features, it is stagnating.
|
| That's a gross over-simplification. M&A has been the modern way
| to grow for decades.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| For startups? OpenAI hasn't been public for long enough to no
| longer be considered a startup.
| nedflanders2 wrote:
| M&A is a growth lever for startups, especially in a
| competitive market. Stripe bought Paystack. Databricks
| acquired Tecton, Neon, BladeBridge, Tabular, Arcion,
| MosaicML. Wiz bought Dazz, Gem Security, and Raftt.
| ServiceNow acquired Moveworks. Snowflake purchased Crunchy
| Data. CoreWeave agreed to buy Weights & Biases. Ripple
| acquired GTreasury. AlphaSense purchased Tegus. etc. etc.
| antonvs wrote:
| Acquisition is a common use of VC funding by startups. It
| perfectly fits the VC agenda which is to use funding to
| secure a competitive, ideally leading, position in the
| market.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| I had nearly the same reaction to the headline, I feel like
| they're hitting a wall in terms of the things they can innovate
| on in house and are flailing and are looking for the next hit,
| in more ways than one. This is just a suggestion of that.
| stopachka wrote:
| > When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop
| features, it is stagnating.
|
| Google in it's heyday acquired: (a) Android (b) Google Maps (c)
| Youtube. It was anything but stagnating at the time.
|
| From what I can tell, OpenAI is following a similar strategy.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Has Google made anything as impactful as Gmail and Chrome
| since those acquisitions? Stagnant doesn't mean unprofitable.
|
| Google videos was a thing, it died. Google had an awesome
| modular phone project (Ari?), it died too. I can imagine they
| could have done something like M-series apple chips and an
| actual modular phone and phone OS that was superior to Apple
| products.
| saurik wrote:
| > When a company uses acquisition as a strategy to develop
| features, it is stagnating. At least it's past it's peak.
|
| I feel like you might just be ignoring tons of acquisitions...
| back in 2004, Goole went on a spree and acquired a bunch of
| companies. I happen to know the founders of what later became
| Google Photos, but I think Google Maps was even more
| important... was it already past its peak?
|
| Microsoft acquired Powerpoint in 1987. I don't think they
| peaked until long after that, but, hell: Microsoft acquired DOS
| in 1981, and there is no way in hell they had peaked before
| that point, lol.
|
| I mean, you comment even talks about Siri... do you know that
| Apple bought that one in 2010? (They also bought the Shortcuts
| feature, acquiring a company called Workflow... which happens
| to be made by the same team as Sky ;P. But, I totally
| appreciate that 2017 might be considered after Apple "peaked",
| though I imagine most people would disagree, as Apple Silicon
| has been a massive market disruption... though, arguably, they
| bought PA Semi to pull off that project, lol.)
|
| This is just how companies work.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I think Siri is a bad example, apple was around long before
| 2010. But you have a good point and I mostly concede. The
| only counterargument I have is that I don't think the culture
| of acquisition was the same pre '08 (just spitballing there)?
| Or maybe I'm just unaware. But these days I hear about
| companies acquired by capital-heavy bigcorps and just fizzle
| out, the company acquiring them being profitable but stagnant
| in terms of new innovations.
|
| Look at Apple, their software game is mediocre now because of
| that culture, but they're at the top of their hardware game
| because instead of outsourcing and acquiring, they built in-
| house.
|
| Others said this is an acquihire, and that might be the case,
| but are the new hires going to easily follow OpenAI's vision
| or try to interpret things according to what they're used to?
| If OpenAI is trying to do something major in the Apple world,
| why are they not building in-house? They can attract the
| talent and have the capital and the undertaking does not seem
| relatively big. OpenAI is also over-hyped, so it needs to
| show that it can churn out value on its own much more than
| Google in '04 or Microsoft in '81.
|
| I'll conclude with this: so long as this is a tactical
| decision, you/others are 100% and I'm wrong. But if it is a
| strategic decision, then I'm bearish on the count of their
| strategy being flawed and timed poorly.
| jononor wrote:
| I suspect OpenAI wants the user data from Sky/Atlas, and Apple
| does not want to give it. Also, Apple are probably wanting to
| keep their options open wrt other AI providers - after all, it
| is increasingly clear that OpenAI is not the only game in town
| for thd core LLM tech.
| ndneighbor wrote:
| I think this acquisition makes a lot of sense and it's good
| business. Finding good MacOS developers who know the system level
| APIs more so than the docs is a tough go. It would make a lot of
| sense that OpenAI would just go ahead and hire out this expertise
| as they try to get their Mac app and their iOS app to get closer
| and closer to the system.
| geoffbp wrote:
| First I've heard of this app
|
| Interesting..
| jlarocco wrote:
| Why didn't they "vibe code" their own version?
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Aqui-hire?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I'd guess that's where PC's "vibe code" part aimed to quip
| at?
| schnable wrote:
| To adopt a persona I don't care for - you can't vibe code
| taste! And the Sky has some history of good product
| taste/talent.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My guess is they wanted to snatch all their existing customers?
| Not familiar with the app. It seems to me ChatGPT wants to
| replace Cora and Siri. The Jarvis of AI.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| There are no existing customers of a yet unreleased product.
| benterix wrote:
| This really got me curious. I watched the demo and was
| unimpressed. I mean, this is what Apple Intelligence is for
| but I never enabled it (and Apple is not pushing it too
| hard up our throats). So I wonder what's Altman plan on
| this, really. Do they really plan to market this product to
| Mac users or is something else at play? (Not that it
| matters much, with the amount of money he has he can
| experiment freely and buy whatever he wants.)
| Brotkrumen wrote:
| If I put my tinfoil hat on, one of the reasons may be in
| the disclaimer:
|
| >An investment fund associated with Sam Altman held a
| passive investment in Software Applications Incorporated
|
| Maybe it's just as banal as "Sam paid himself a bit more
| money".
| schnable wrote:
| This probably played a role (cash out before bubble pops)
| plus the acquihire. OpenAI is building a try-everything-
| and-see-what-sticks product company on top of the model
| research lab so strong product teams are very useful to
| them.
| jhatax wrote:
| Surprised that Apple didn't acquire Sky. Raycast might be an
| acquisition target if their code can become a service / extension
| for Spotlight in macOS. Usability win for macOS users if done
| right and Apple puts the right guardrails & privacy protections
| in place.
| Lorenzo45 wrote:
| Maybe they tried but the founders rejected. The founders
| created another company that was acquired by Apple and worked
| there for a few years. Probably not a fun place to work for
| ambitious engineers who want to build AI products.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I feel like they just wanted to work on new thing to make
| macOS better with no guard rails. If Tim Pool was worth his
| salt he would hire them to let them do that, Apple needs a
| skunkworks for macOS. They should "overpay" them for it. If
| it yields superior internal products whats not to love?
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| im just imagining Tim Pool being the CEO of Apple and still
| wearing that beanie at every single keynote lol
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > They should "overpay" them for it.
|
| Big companies wrap themselves in bureaucracy that makes
| this hard to do.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Apple _should_ have acquired them. They've worked with the
| people behind it before (Shortcuts) and the demo videos I saw a
| few months ago were light years ahead of what Apple has demoed.
| davidkunz wrote:
| One step closer to Skynet
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Why is this important?
| gtirloni wrote:
| Because it helps OpenAI justify its insane valuation by showing
| the market... something (which is better than the almost
| nothing we've seen lately).
| testfrequency wrote:
| OAI wants to build an OS don't they? Am I wild for assuming this?
|
| Everything to me now from them appears to be a moonshot to be the
| replacement for - not an addition to.
|
| Obviously they are not there yet with many of their products, but
| they all feel...weirdly intentional steps to overtake existing
| ecosystems.
| podgietaru wrote:
| Not surprising. The AI in her was considered an operating
| system, and OpenAI are creatively bankrupt.
| seanthemon wrote:
| A mobile OS most likely, or at least a complete cover over all
| of our applications, this is the only way for them to get more
| real training data.
| sumedh wrote:
| Their biggest fear is that Apple or Google or MS can take away
| their users.
| rramon wrote:
| It almost seems like OpenAI being a stealth operation by Apple
| with Altman becoming the new Jobs in an Nextstep like aquisition
| move.
|
| Ive/Altman.jpg, the focus on Macs, Apples unexplainable AI
| strategy and getting devs snatched by Meta. Why put up a fight if
| you already own the biggest player..
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > getting devs snatched by Meta. Why put up a fight if you
| already own the biggest player.
|
| Why match 100 million pay packages when nobody is actually
| making money? Apple is profitable. Big AI is not.
| Zufriedenheit wrote:
| Probably not easy to build this type of deep integration as a
| third party developer. Apple could easily cripple the access for
| ,,security" reasons and build a much better competitor themselves
| with first class integration into the os.
| nightfox1 wrote:
| I feel like this will also put a lot of gpt voice models into
| more dominance.
| nektro wrote:
| yet another sign OpenAI doesn't quite have the moat they'd like
| you to think they do
| dzink wrote:
| From Hackathons, to Workflow, Apple Shortcuts, Sky and now
| OpenAI... Congratulations Ari! His team knows Apple software
| better than anyone, but will Apple allow third parties access to
| all functionality under the pretext of sandboxing or security?
| fadedsignal wrote:
| I don't think it's a meaningful acquisition. I am wondering how
| much cash OpenAI is holding. They literally bought dozens of
| startups/companies while they were/are still not profitable.
| ActionHank wrote:
| I would be looking to see who is benefiting from their
| investments and acquisitions right now.
|
| They know enterprise is not seeing the gains expected and that
| the average joe likes the product if it is basically free.
| Neither means meaningful revenue for them let alone enough to
| keep shovelling money into the gpu furnace.
|
| They are going to be looking for ways to extract what liquid
| cash they can now.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I hope Apple allows me to do all this locally... I've no desire
| to be sending all this stuff to OpenAI.
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