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 Molla13h

Amazon expands low-price Haul section to 14 new markets as Amazon Bazaar app

Amazon is expanding its low-cost Amazon Haul experience to a new stand-alone app called Amazon Bazaar.

Amazon launched its Temu and Shein competitor a year ago as a US mobile storefront on its website and has since expanded to about a dozen markets. Consumers could purchase many items for under $10, as long as they were willing to stomach longer delivery times.

Now, thanks to success in those places, the programming is expanding to 14 new markets — Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria — with a new app and name: Amazon Bazaar.

“Both Amazon Haul and Amazon Bazaar deliver the same ultra low-price shopping experience, with different names chosen to better resonate with local language preferences and cultures,” the company said in a press release.

Amazon extends Haul’s ultra low-price shopping experience to 14 new destinations with new Amazon Bazaar app

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea

While data centers on land are getting all the attention, Big Tech’s vast network of undersea fiber-optic cables carry 99% of all international network traffic.

Jon Keegan14h

After watching small drones reshape the battlefield in Ukraine, the US Army has announced plans to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, according to a report from Reuters.

The military threat of China’s dominance of the quadcopter-style drone industry is also driving the decision. But China’s control over much of the supply chain for drones, including rare earth magnets, sensors, and microcontrollers, will make it much harder for American drone manufacturers to catch up.

Rani Molla

They’re Out There

17h

The wildest stuff Elon Musk said at Tesla’s shareholder meeting

Get ready to text and drive while the Optimus robot cures poverty.