Ives: How Apple can avoid a “Blackberry Moment” in AI

While Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives is pleased with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s latest efforts to appease the Trump administration, he cautioned that the iPhone maker could face a “Blackberry Moment” thanks to its failures with AI.

“While the AI Revolution led by Big Tech is racing ahead like an F1 track in Monza focused on monetizing the biggest tech trend in the last 40 years, Apple is on a park bench drinking lemonade watching this technology innovation change the world,” Ives wrote this morning.

What’s Apple to do? Ives recommends three things — all of which require looking beyond its Cupertino headquarters.

Acquire Perplexity to help with Siri.
Add executives from outside Apple to the leadership team. “The current management team including Cook has Apple on an AI treadmill on 2.5 speed going nowhere,” Ives wrote.
Partner with Google to fully integrate Gemini AI onto the iPhone.

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Rani Molla1h

Estimates for Tesla’s Q4 deliveries are declining

Analysts across the board are expecting Tesla’s fourth-quarter deliveries to decline from last year, as record deliveries fueled by the end of the EV tax credit come to grips with the actual end of the EV tax credit. And as the end of the quarter nears, estimates have sunk further.

Currently the FactSet consensus estimate expects Tesla to deliver 449,000 vehicles in Q4, down 9.5% from last year’s 496,000 and down from 450,000 earlier this month. Bloomberg now pegs the number at 445,000, down from a 448,000 consensus estimate at the start of December.

Prediction markets are even less bullish. The market-implied odds derived through event contracts show that less than a quarter of traders believe Tesla will surpass 430,000 deliveries in the quarter ending December. The actual delivery numbers are expected to be released in early January.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

How many vehicles analysts think Tesla will deliver this quarter

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Tesla has two days to remove Robotaxi safety drivers in Austin to reach Elon Musk’s repeated goal

It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

Rani Molla2h

Jon Keegan12/24/25

Chinese AI chatbots reportedly must answer 2,000 questions, prove censorship compliance

For American companies building AI today, it’s basically a free-for-all, a self-regulation zone with zero federal restrictions.

But for Chinese AI companies, the Chinese Communist Party exerts strict control over what models get released and what questions they cannot answer.

A report in The Wall Street Journal details the rigorous tests that AI models are subjected to before being released on the global stage to compete with Western AI models.

AI models must answer 2,000 questions that are frequently updated and achieve a 95% refusal rate for queries related to forbidden topics, like the Tiananmen Square massacre or human rights violations, according to the report.

The strict regulatory framework does have some safety advantages, such as preventing chatbots from sharing violent or pornographic material as well as protections from self-harm, an issue that American AI companies are currently wrestling with.

China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule—and Is Trying to Tame It

A report in The Wall Street Journal details the rigorous tests that AI models are subjected to before being released on the global stage to compete with Western AI models.

Rani Molla & Jon Keegan12/24/25

Report: OpenAI has started mocking up what ads in ChatGPT could look like

2025 saw OpenAI ink a flurry of massive deals. To pay for it all, the company has realized that it can’t get there on $20-per-month subscriptions alone; it also needs to monetize its hundreds of millions of free users.

To this end, despite repeatedly denying that ads are coming to ChatGPT, a new report says OpenAI is actually working through all those details.

Citing people familiar with the discussions, The Information reports employees have discussed different ways to prioritize sponsored information in ChatGPT in response to relevant queries.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, its offerings have been ad-free, relying instead on a freemium subscription model. But with Google recently telling advertisers it plans to bring ads to Gemini next year, and with OpenAI burning through truckloads of cash, the pressure to follow suit is growing.

OpenAI is looking at its AI model-developing competitors Meta and Google, which are pulling in hundreds of billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue, to arrive at this conclusion. It’s also seemingly inspired by Amazon’s (and Google’s) idea of sponsored product placement.

Per the report, in addition to trying to build new kinds of ad units, OpenAI is considering a few options:

Leaning into chats that are clearly about buying a product and giving priority placement to sponsored results — though this works out to only about 2.1% of queries, according to OpenAI.
Showing ads based on the treasure trove of information it has on users, by mining their chat histories.
A “sponsored” sidebar showing ads related to the conversation.

But the company realizes it has to be careful to not turn off users, who might not trust a chatbot that peppers sensitive conversations with ads.

OpenAI’s Ads Push Starts Taking Shape

Citing people familiar with the discussions, The Information reports employees have discussed different ways to prioritize sponsored information in ChatGPT in response to relevant queries.

Per the report, in addition to trying to build new kinds of ad units, OpenAI is considering a few options:

Leaning into chats that are clearly about buying a product and giving priority placement to sponsored results — though this works out to only about 2.1% of queries, according to OpenAI.
Showing ads based on the treasure trove of information it has on users, by mining their chat histories.
A “sponsored” sidebar showing ads related to the conversation.

But the company realizes it has to be careful to not turn off users, who might not trust a chatbot that peppers sensitive conversations with ads.

Rani Molla12/24/25

NHTSA investigates Tesla Model 3 over concerns mechanical door release is “not readily accessible or easily identifiable”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Wednesday it is investigating the emergency exit controls on 179,071 model year 2022 Tesla Model 3 vehicles after receiving a defect petition alleging the vehicles’ “mechanical door release is hidden, unlabeled, and not intuitive to locate during an emergency.”

The investigation is separate from a probe the agency announced this fall into instances of electronic door handles on 2021 Tesla Model Y vehicles becoming inoperable from the outside.

The action follows a series of reporting from Bloomberg examining the role of Tesla’s door designs in accident fatalities. Tesla has previously said it is working on redesigns to its door handles.

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