Apple CEO Says It’s Not Too Late to Win the AI Race

Let’s face it. Apple’s AI efforts have been anything but amazing. For a company as big as it is and with as many resources as they have, Apple is absolutely getting creamed by AI startups, which, in all honesty, have done a much better job. However, Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks the AI race is far from over and that Apple still has a chance.

Apple CEO thinks they have a chance with AI

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook recently held an all-hands meeting to rally employees around the company’s future in AI. Cook was quoted as telling employees, “Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it.”

Cook acknowledged that Apple is rarely the first when it comes to new products. However, he believes that Apple has the ability to modernize those products. “We’ve rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.”

It’s not surprising that Cook is giving Apple staff a bit of a pep talk. Apple Intelligence has failed to impress. It has also caused concern among Apple’s investors and analysts over at Wall Street. Apple lagged behind the competition with Siri, so many were hoping that they would get it right with Apple Intelligence. But we all know how that went down.

Apple was also supposed to revamp Siri with an Apple Intelligence upgrade, but that hasn’t happened yet either.

Potential investments

So, what will Apple do about its future in AI? Cook has teased that Apple plans to make more investments in technology. However, he stopped short of sharing what kind of investments he’s talking about. There are rumors that Apple could be eyeing Perplexity. If it buys Perplexity, it could help Apple close the gap between itself and its rivals.

In fact, analysts believe it is the right move and have called upon Apple to do it. This could set Apple back $40 billion, but we think it’s a small price to pay if the company doesn’t want to be left behind. We’ve seen countless stories of tech giants who seemed too big to fail, like Nokia and BlackBerry. Apple definitely doesn’t want to head down that path.