We Melted iPhones for Science - Apple Just Spent $10B Proving We Were Right

Summary

We meticulously manage power and surface temperature to ensure that iPhone 17 Pro always deliver exceptional performance while remaining comfortable to hold.- Greg "Joz" Joswiathan, Senior Vice-President at AppleI remember the panic. The pitch meeting had started off so well. There I was – 3 minutes into a live OASIS demo – and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was already explaining his check size and pitching his investment philosophy to me. Eight minutes in: "My phone is getting warm."Thirteen minutes in: "It's burning my hand! It's burning my hand!"His avatar froze. The call dropped. The investment evaporated.Welcome to March 2021, when my startup OASIS was accidentally beta-testing the future of AI on Apple hardware that couldn't handle it.OASIS wasn't just another video chat app. We'd built the first real-time AI video generation model for smartphones and bundled it with a patented low-bandwidth video chat protocol. Using GANs, we generated multiple photorealistic AI avatar video streams at 60fps in HD resolution. In real-time. On iPhone. In 2021. Screen recording of OASIS generating 15 unique AI avatar video streams in real-time on the iPhone 11’s Neural Engine.The app was wild. And the performance metrics were insane:Clone yourself with 128 images + 10 minutes of GPU trainingGenerate up to 15 unique AI video streams in real-time on a single iPhone 11512 x 512 pixel resolution per video5 milliseconds latency per frameRunning entirely on Apple Neural EngineThis was March 2021. ChatGPT was 18 months away. Midjourney didn't exist yet.We were so fucking early, we were living in the future.The problem? The future was literally melting the present.Slide from the OASIS Series A pitch deck.While I was pitching VCs, our QA guy was running a different kind of burn rate: three iPhones permanently disabled in three weeks. The phones would power on, but their cameras were dead. Black screens. We hypothesized that the heat from OASIS was melting the circuits connecting the camera...