Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner mentioned DeepSeek’s AI fashions symbolize “innovation that drives effectivity” throughout an earnings name Thursday whereas fielding questions from analysts concerning the iPhone maker’s AI ambitions.
“Usually, I feel innovation that drives effectivity is an efficient factor. And, you understand, that’s what you see in that mannequin,” mentioned Cook dinner, responding to an analyst’s query about how DeepSeek’s AI fashions would influence Apple’s margins.
Cook dinner went on to notice that Apple leverages a hybrid mannequin for its AI, through which it runs some easy duties regionally — utilizing its personal AI fashions on its machine’s customized silicon chips. In the meantime, different, extra sophisticated duties run within the cloud via partnerships with AI mannequin suppliers.
Cook dinner additionally mentioned Apple has at all times taken a “prudent and deliberate” method to most of these expenditures.
Apple presently solely has one AI partnership, with OpenAI, which permits ChatGPT to reply complicated questions from iPhone customers in a non-public cloud.
OpenAI claimed this week to have evidence that its AI models were used to train DeepSeek’s AI models via a course of referred to as distillation. If true, that will violate OpenAI’s utilization insurance policies and undermine DeepSeek’s accomplishments.
That didn’t cease Apple’s CEO from tossing a praise towards DeepSeek.
Apple has indicated its OpenAI partnership shouldn’t be unique, and it could combine different corporations’ AI fashions into the iPhone sooner or later, reminiscent of Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude. Cook dinner didn’t go so far as to counsel Apple would combine DeepSeek’s fashions, nonetheless.
Past OpenAI’s allegations of IP theft, a number of tech analysts have steered that DeepSeek’s AI fashions were trained with significantly more GPUs and computation costs than the corporate claims. That will imply DeepSeek’s AI fashions weren’t skilled fairly as effectively as some suspected. Nonetheless, the Chinese language AI lab sells entry to its fashions at a steep low cost in contrast with what American AI labs cost.
Buyers additionally peppered Cook dinner with questions concerning the success of Apple Intelligence.
The phased launch of Apple’s AI options doesn’t seem to have created the fast increase to iPhone gross sales that some predicted. As an alternative, gross sales barely declined within the final quarter, in comparison with final 12 months.
Hoping to spin the decline extra favorably, Cook dinner claimed the corporate noticed stronger gross sales in areas the place Apple Intelligence had rolled out than areas the place it had not.
Apple has confronted different points with its AI options, past their lack of availability. It lately paused its AI summaries of reports articles this month after the characteristic produced deceptive headlines. In a single case, Apple Intelligence hallucinated and changed a BBC news headline to incorrectly learn that Luigi Mangione, the person charged within the homicide of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself, which was unfaithful.