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Bad Apple

Maybe Apple isn’t an AI company after all

Apple’s stock is just fine as AI companies get whacked.

1/27/25 9:38AM

Thanks to news that China’s DeepSeek has developed a competitive AI chatbot for what is reportedly a fraction of what its Western counterparts have spent, AI stocks are seeing a steep sell-off. Nvidia, Broadcom, and Microsoft are all in a tailspin. Apple, which has hitched its future to AI by reinventing its signature product to run on its own Apple Intelligence and developing its own AI chips, on the other hand, seems notably fine, with its stock modestly in the green today at the time of writing. So, what’s going on?

Perhaps Apple has been failing so hard in the AI department that it’s not really considered an AI stock.

As noted last week by John Gruber in his Apple enthusiast blog Daring Fireball, where he compared Siri’s responses to the same trivia question with its competition:

New Siri — powered by Apple Intelligence™ with ChatGPT integration enabled — gets the answer completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong. It’s also inconsistently wrong — I tried the same question four times, and got a different answer, all of them wrong, each time. It’s a complete failure.

This tracks with our own experience with Siri of late, which requires assistance from ChatGPT to answer basic questions.

I asked Siri last night if it was a full moon. It offered to have ChatGPT answer the question (!!?), or do a web search (???). I chose the latter but it did not produce the correct search to get an answer. For the record, this information is IN THE NATIVE WEATHER APP. Great job Apple.
— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky.com) January 14, 2025 at 10:16 AM

Consumers seem to be sharing the sentiment, because Apple’s AI integration hasn’t pushed more people to pick up the latest iPhone. Sales were down in the US and China during Apple’s important holiday quarter.

But, at least for today’s sell-off, being bad at AI seems to be a good thing for Apple. For what it’s worth, DeepSeek is currently the most downloaded app in Apple’s App Store.

Rani Molla18h

After Tesla earnings, prediction markets think unsupervised FSD is less likely than ever to be rolled out this year

Tesla’s unsupervised full self-driving technology, which would autonomously ferry passengers around without a human driver having to pay attention, is supposed to help catapult the electric vehicle company’s valuation further into the stratosphere. It was also supposed to be available this year, but prediction markets participants, as well as former Tesla self-driving leaders, no longer think that will happen.

On Tesla’s earnings call this week, CEO Elon Musk said the company now had “clarity” on achieving unsupervised full self-driving — something he’s repeatedly said would be available at least in some markets this year.

The comments seemed to give Polymarket prediction markets participants some clarity. There, the market-implied probability that Tesla will release unsupervised FSD this year reached its lowest point since the event contract was opened in May.

The odds of it happening had been pretty high up until late June, when Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi launched with a safety driver in the passenger seat. The unsupervised FSD event contract specifies the feature can have “no requirement for human intervention.”

Rani Molla23h

Banks prepare record $38 billion debt financing to fund Oracle-tied data centers

Banks led by JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ are preparing a $38 billion debt offering to fund two Oracle-tied data centers in Texas and Wisconsin, Bloomberg reports. The projects, developed by Vantage Data Centers, will support Oracle’s $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure push with OpenAI and Nvidia.

The loans — $23.25 billion for Texas and $14.75 billion for Wisconsin — are expected to mature in four years, price about 2.5 percentage points higher than the benchmark rate, and mark the largest AI infrastructure financing to date.

Oracle executives recently said that the company anticipates cloud gross margins will reach 35% and that it expects to see $166 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue by FY 2030.

Oracle is up 1.5% premarket.

Record $38 Billion Debt Sale Nears for Oracle-Tied Data Centers

Oracle executives recently said that the company anticipates cloud gross margins will reach 35% and that it expects to see $166 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue by FY 2030.

Oracle is up 1.5% premarket.

Rani Molla24h

Google rises on official announcement of Anthropic deal worth “tens of billions”

Google has made its deal to expand AI compute to Anthropic, reported earlier this week by Bloomberg, official. In order to train and serve its Claude model, Anthropic has agreed to pay Google Cloud “tens of billions of dollars” to access up to 1 million tensor processing units, or TPUs, as well as other cloud services.

Google, of course, has a 14% stake in Anthropic, making this one of the many circular AI deals happening at the moment.

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao said in the press release. “Our customers — from Fortune 500 companies to AI-native startups — depend on Claude for their most important work, and this expanded capacity ensures we can meet our exponentially growing demand while keeping our models at the cutting edge of the industry.”

The announcement has sent Google up again, more than 1% premarket.

Rani Molla24h

Report: Snap seeking $1 billion to finance its AR glasses division in “existential” fundraise

Snap is down more than 1% this morning following news that the company is attempting to raise $1 billion for its AR glasses unit in what someone told Sources.news was an “existential” fundraise.

A Snap spokesperson countered, “We do not need to raise money to execute against our plans to publicly launch Specs in 2026, but remain open to opportunities that could accelerate our growth.”

Multiple investors are involved in the talks, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, according to Sources.news. The report also noted that Snap plans to turn the unit that makes its Specs glasses into an independent subsidiary à la Google’s Waymo “that can continue raising capital from investors.”

Snap plans to produce about 100,000 units of next year’s Specs, pricing them around $2,500.

The beleaguered stock saw quite a bit of retail interest last month, amid r/WallStreetBets chatter that its low nominal price made it a potential acquisition target.

Snap eyes $1 billion fundraise for AR glasses

Snap plans to produce about 100,000 units of next year’s Specs, pricing them around $2,500.

The beleaguered stock saw quite a bit of retail interest last month, amid r/WallStreetBets chatter that its low nominal price made it a potential acquisition target.

Rani Molla

10/23/25

After a record quarter, analysts point out that Tesla’s car sales don’t really matter anymore

Tell that to Apple and its iPhone.

New Tesla Model 3 With Full Self-Driving Activated