Apple CEO Tim Cook has been repeatedly asked the same question by investors: What is Apple doing about generative artificial intelligence? His answer: We’re working on it. It’s coming real soon now.
AAPL investors are getting impatient.
Aaron Tilley for The Wall Street Journal:
On Wednesday, Cook once again sought to address the investor concerns, as he has on every quarterly earnings call for the past year.
“We’ve been investing and innovating in AI for many, many years,” he said at the annual shareholder meeting, pointing out several areas where Apple already uses the technology. He added: “We also see incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we’re currently investing significantly in this area.” Apple is expected to release generative-AI features in its software at its annual developer conference typically held in June.
MacDailyNews Take: The stalling for time is painfully apparent.
Apple, for years one of the most beloved stocks held by famed investors such as Warren Buffett, has had the weakest stock performance in the past year among its big tech rivals. A slowdown in the company’s core iPhone business has played a major role, but a lack of new artificial-intelligence products has also been a factor.
Microsoft has overtaken Apple as the most valuable company in the world earlier this year, a lead it looks poised to maintain for some time. Among large tech companies, Microsoft has found itself in the lead position in generative artificial intelligence as the largest investor in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s time a having a caretaker CEO to milk products and services conceived and created under Steve Jobs will, hopefully, draw to a close sooner than later. For AAPL investors, shares of Apple closed yesterday at $181.42 or 59-cents less than it closed over two years ago on January 3, 2022.
See also:
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
With better management, Apple should be worth at least a trillion more than Microsoft currently. But, you can’t achieve those sort of results when you do things like miss transformative technologies like AI because you lack a visionary leader and have to resort to spending and scrambling madly trying to catch up to whatever you’ve blindly missed. – MaDailyNews, January 12, 2024
The difference between an operations guy following a static playbook — reacting to events instead of determining them — versus a visionary genius becomes ever more apparent with each passing year. – MacDailyNews, March 8, 2023
See also:
• Apple acquired 32 AI startups in 2023, the most among major tech companies – February 8, 2024
• Gene Munster: Apple stock likely to get a boost when ‘good enough’ generative AI arrives later this year – January 9, 2024
• Apple caught flat-footed on generative AI; company preps AI features for devices, software – October 23, 2023
• Apple posts number of job listings seeking generative AI talent – May 22, 2023
• Apple reportedly to ‘re-examine’ Artificial Intelligence development – March 8, 2023
Siri’s launch in 2011 made Apple an early entrant in consumer-focused AI products, but the company has since fallen behind in recent years. Siri struggled to keep up with rival voice assistants from Amazon and Google in accuracy and usefulness.
Android competitors have begun introducing new artificial-intelligence features into phones. Rival smartphone-maker Samsung Electronics has recently introduced its latest high-end Galaxy phones that takes advantage of some of the latest advancements in generative AI, with features such as translating languages in real time on phone calls, summarizing notes and editing photos.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple is clearly not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs who even started the company’s work on Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro, but the company — thanks to Jobs and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure — now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
If Apple can manage to train its generative AI in an unbiased way – a big IF – Apple will be just fine in generative AI soon enough. The company has an install base of more than 2.2 billion active devices in the hands of the highest quality customers; even “good enough” generative AI will be just fine. Anything above and beyond that will just be icing on the cake!
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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I remember an engineer asking Steve Jobs a similar question as to why a particular technology was not in all their products. Steve’s answer was masterful.
If you start with the technology first and then search use cases, you will always be chasing the customer and many times releasing something that is of little value to the user.
If you start with the user first and ask how do I make their lives better or how do I solve a problem that they are facing in a way that is natural to them – you end up with a much better result – most of the time. Apple has had some flops too.
Generative AI is in a gold rush moment right now and there have been some terribly embarrassing results of putting the tech out there before it’s ready. Tim Cook recently said that they have finally figured out a good use case for generative AI which I’m sure will make its debut at WWDC.
“For AAPL investors, shares of Apple closed yesterday at $181.42 or 59-cents less than it closed over two years ago on January 3, 2022.”
In that time period, Tim Cook was paid over $160 million dollars in salary and stock options.
In that time something like $200B was returned to shareholders.
The biggest failure was not doing Siri right. The rest is forgivable.
It will turn out to be a good thing Apple sat out this first round of generative AI “products”.
They’re working like crazy behind the scenes, I’m sure. But watching this unfold over the last year has shown there’s a lot of promise and a lot of landmines.
The power of AI will be in where and how it’s deployed. Nobody has figured this out yet.
“Rival smartphone-maker Samsung Electronics has recently introduced its latest high-end Galaxy phones that takes advantage of some of the latest advancements in generative AI, with features such as translating languages in real time on phone calls, summarizing notes and editing photos.”
Perhaps Apple should catch-up with at least the real time translation in video and texting or face many users buying specialized Android devices for the feature which then gateways into switching to Android more heavily.