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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.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5