Apple seems to have lost the AI race in the technology industry but CEO Tim Cook is full of optimism. Instead of accepting the failure, Cook told his employees that Apple will grab hold of AI and will do a modern version of it, unlike the ‘Big Tech’ that’s operating without regulations and ‘is ruining the user experience’.
In an internal communication within the company, which was sourced by Bloomberg, Tim Cook apparently spoke for an hour with his employees, assuring that Apple is fully committed to artificial intelligence and hailed it as the next major opportunity for Apple. “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,” said Cook to his employees
Tim Cook says Apple
This assertive stance comes as Apple faces growing pressure to compete with rivals like Google and Microsoft, who have been seen by many as early leaders in the AI race. Google recently released its AI-rich Pixel 10 smartphones and announced several updates to Gemini, thus extending all the modern features that current-gen iPhone lack.
Cook, however, directly addressed this perception, acknowledging Apple’s history of not being the first mover in a new market. “We’ve rarely been first,” he said, citing the Mac not being the first PC and the iPhone not being the first smartphone. “This is how I feel about AI,” he stated. Cook indicated that despite a later start, Apple will ultimately define the AI landscape in the future, as with all other technologies in the past.
Cook went on to compare the present to the dawn of the internet, smartphones, and cloud computing, describing the AI revolution as being “as big or bigger” than those pivotal moments in technological history. He made it clear that a company-wide effort is required to get going, “All of us are using AI in a significant way already, and we must use it as a company as well. To not do so would be to be left behind, and we can’t do that.”
Apple is already working on it
Apple isn’t sitting on this notion, though. The company is already making notable investments in AI, hiring 12,000 new employees in the past year, with almost 40 per cent of them dedicated to research and development teams. Senior VP Craig Frederighi has confirmed that the company has scrapped the idea of a hybrid Siri setup and is rebuilding the assistant from the ground up, based on new LLM models.
The company is also building specialised AI infrastructure, including cloud-computing chips and a new AI server facility.
