Maybe Apple isn’t an AI company after all
Apple’s stock is just fine as AI companies get whacked.
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?
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.
