I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large scale AI and software projects like this.

Source: I worked there

Well, they stopped.

Culture is overrated. Money talks.

They did things far more complicated from an engineering perspective. I am far more impressed by what they accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what AI labs do.

Is Apple silicon really that impressive compared to LLMs? Take a step back. CPUs have been getting faster and more efficient for decades.

Google invented the transformer architecture, the backbone of modern LLMs.

> Google invented...

"Google" did? Or humans who worked there and one who didn't?

https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...

In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…

> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.

Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.

You can understand how transformers work from just reading the Attention is All You Need paper, which is 15 pages of pretty accessible DL. That's not the part that is impressive about LLMs.

I hope that this is the start of developers being conscious of using resources efficiently again, especially in the browser.

The more rust gets written, the better AI will be able to write it for people... I like to be optimistic.

I think the Rust part of the headline is incidental in this case. The previous version that used more resources was also written in Rust.

This is true, but a team using rust will probably care more about resource use in general.

I do agree it's kind of a misleading headline, the real update is their use of Flatbuffers.

> I hope that this is the start of developers being conscious of using resources efficiently again, especially in the browser.

Me too.

> The more rust gets written,

Rust seems neither necessary nor sufficient for getting developers to care about memory efficiency again though.

It is not necessary in a theoretical sense, but in a practical sense developers that care about memory efficiency only have a handful of options.

If you also care about memory safety it further limits options.

>I hope that this is the start of developers being conscious of using resources efficiently again, especially in the browser.

AI may have forced the hand on this. Users will no longer be able to subsidize software performance with hardware upgrades due to the great DRAM debacle of 2026..

The adblocker was already written in Rust.

I think those are two separate concerns. Writing code and running a tech business are two different things. I personally love Ocaml and think it's an excellent language and very underrated. However, I (probably) wouldn't want a production-ready system written in it, because it has a weaker ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, and it's harder to hire experienced people who already know or are willing to learn the language.

> I think those are two separate concerns.

Indeed. And the latter, that is, taking over and maintaining code written by someone else, is the more common concern in day-to-day jobs. More likely that you will get to build and improve an existing system than create one from scratch.

how does this work if i import two different gems that both monkeypatch the same classes?

Even if you can see the source, it still seems difficult to understand where the monkeypatch came from if you have transitive dependencies and whatnot.

The last one wins

Did you read the article? The point is that they're adopting memory management features inspired by rust to give programmers more fine-grained control.