Tim Cook confirms Apple will ramp up AI spending, ‘open’ to acquisitions
Apple first unveiled its artificial intelligence strategy at the company’s WWDC event last year. More than a year later, some of the iPhone maker’s so-called ‘Apple Intelligence’ features have still not arrived, while the rollout of many others has been marred by unwanted surprises.
However, CEO Tim Cook remains committed to Apple’s AI roadmap. During the recent earnings call on Thursday, he stated that the company is “significantly growing our investments” in artificial intelligence. In an interaction with CNBC, Cook also noted that Apple is “embedding it across our devices, across our platforms and across the company.”
Tim Cook confirms Apple’s openness to acquisitions
More importantly, perhaps for the first time ever, Cook confirmed that Apple is open to acquisitions in order to accelerate its AI roadmap. He also noted that Apple had acquired “around” seven companies this year, but none of them had been “huge in terms of dollar amount.”
“We’re very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap. We are not stuck on a certain size company, although the ones that we have acquired thus far this year are small in nature,” Cook stated.
“We basically ask ourselves whether a company can help us accelerate a roadmap, and if they do, then we’re interested,” the Apple CEO further added.
A previous report from Bloomberg revealed that Apple leaders had internally discussed acquiring the AI search startup Perplexity to catch up in the AI race. Meanwhile, another recent report noted that the company could rely on LLM architecture from OpenAI or Anthropic to power its AI Siri.
Notably, Apple already employs ChatGPT to answer more difficult queries on Siri, but the company is also working on an AI version of the voice assistant that was announced at WWDC 2024 and has since faced multiple delays.
Meanwhile, Apple also faces the challenge of retaining its talent, as Meta builds its Superintelligence Labs division by poaching employees from other top companies. A report this week revealed that at least four people from Apple’s foundation models division have been hired by Mark Zuckerberg’s company so far.
