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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.

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To make the feature shiny and new, the company is adding “counts,” along with a dedicated poke button and page, so users can keep track of who they poked or were poked by and how much.

Meta is hoping the updated feature will lead to more usage from young people, who’ve already started to adopt the practice thanks to previous pushes by Meta. Social media companies, like Snapchat and TikTok, have previously gotten into hot water before for similar gamification elements like “streaks” that critics have said are addictive.

The average age of Facebook users has been ticking up for years as the company loses young people to newer services, including Instagram, which Meta bought more than a decade ago, back when it was still called Facebook. According to the latest data from Pew Research Center, released last winter, teens were way less inclined to use Facebook than TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.

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OpenAI is working on a “jobs platform” for people who lose their jobs to AI

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The company announced plans for the OpenAI Jobs Platform, in partnership with Walmart, John Deere, and Accenture, to help workers looking to level up their AI skills, and match them with companies seeking such candidates.

In a blog post announcing the plan, the company wrote:

“But AI will also be disruptive. Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us—from shift workers to CEOs—will have to learn how to work in new ways. At OpenAI, we can’t eliminate that disruption. But what we can do is help more people become fluent in AI and connect them with companies that need their skills, to give people more economic opportunities. “

Using AI-powered instruction, users can receive certification for their training, and OpenAI said it is committing to certifying 10 million Americans on its platform by 2030.

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