| Hi, this is Vlad in Hong Kong. The world's most valuable tech company and the biggest tech storyline of the year are strangely divorced. But first... Today's must-reads: • The Bank of England said stablecoin use may need limits
• Tesla reported another fatal US crash involving automated driving
• SpaceX postponed launch of starship rocket moments before liftoff The global excitement around ChatGPT, and the haste to copy it, resembles the introduction of an Apple Inc. product. Everyone is stoked to try it, and other tech companies are working late nights to reverse engineer it. This time, Apple is nowhere to be found. Has the speed of it all caught the world's most influential tech company by surprise? Microsoft Corp. has poured $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and reconfigured how it builds server farms to accommodate more of Nvidia Corp.'s class-leading processors for training artificial intelligence. Alphabet Inc.'s Google has made responding to ChatGPT a top priority. Amazon.com Inc. has also jumped into the fray with its cloud division. That's four of the world's top seven most valuable companies, and yet, the most valuable of them all seems to have no ready answer for what's coming. Bloomberg reported on an internal AI summit Apple held in February, when machine learning and other deployments of the tech across Apple products were discussed, but there was no hint of anything in the genre of generative AI. AI in Apple products today is like irrigation for its walled garden, essential and helpful for an increasing number of functions, but ultimately it's the hardware fruit that Apple sells. Generative AI could come in like a tidal wave. Apple, by all appearances, squandered the lead it established since becoming the first big tech company to make an AI-powered voice assistant. Siri was clearly flawed from the start, but it looks ancient by the standards of ChatGPT. To compete in this new AI race, companies need massive, bespoke computational clusters that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Cloud services are not Apple's strongest suit right now, as its chief for that division is leaving, and iCloud has been the subject of lament in this very newsletter. The company is investing significant resources in the augmented-reality headset we expect to debut in June and the long-mooted, capital-intensive automotive initiative. To be sure, Apple's AI has steadily improved and the technology has made its way to more parts of the company's devices. Much of Apple's AI work is also focused on improving the day-to-day experience of its products, rather than within Siri itself. For instance, recent camera improvements like Photographic Styles and the ability to peel a subject out of a photograph rely on AI. The self-driving car is a monster AI project, while the headset will leverage AI for live processing of a wearer's surroundings and to create realistic avatars. The sanguine reasoning may be that Apple doesn't need to be in the generative AI fight. Whoever wins, they'll probably just deliver their services in the form of an app in Apple's store. But what if AI blossoms to its fullest potential, as projected by industry pioneer Kai-Fu Lee, and turns into the post-mobile platform? Lee sees an accelerating development toward AI as the thing you build products and services on top of. Apple should look to its own history. In the early days of the iPhone, it defeated Nokia and BlackBerry not by building a better physical keyboard but by getting rid of it altogether. And so it is with threats to its business empire today; they won't come from Xiaomi Corp. or Samsung Electronics Co. doing iPhone-like products. It's when our entire way of interacting with tech changes, when the focus shifts to these cloud-based AI services — and, importantly, the data troves required to train and improve them — that Apple might feel less comfortable. It's a remarkable achievement for Sam Altman and his startup OpenAI to capture imaginations in a way that few outside Apple ever do. The wave of new services that sprout from this is likely to be transformative. What they'll mean for Apple in the long run — well, that's for the company to decide. As Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. chief Daniel Zhang said recently, all tech companies are "at the same starting line." —Vlad Savov Apple is set to reveal its stock repurchase plans after spending $573 billion on buybacks since 2012. Sales in India alone hit a new high of almost $6 billion in the year through March. Volkswagen unveiled its ID.7 EV Sedan in a fight for market share in China. Watch: Netflix apologized after its service buckled under the strain of demand for a livestreamed reunion episode of the dating reality show Love Is Blind. Akshata Murty, daughter of the Infosys co-founder, lost £49 million from her holdings in her dad's company in a single day. Network International got a takeover bid of £2.1 billion from CVC and Francisco. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment