Just one day after revealing its financial results and fielding questions about Apple’s lag in AI, Tim Cook turned inward, holding what Bloomberg described as an ‘hourlong pep talk’ during a company-wide all-hands meeting. Here are the details.
‘Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab’
As reported by Mark Gurman, Tim Cook held a company-wide meeting today at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, and stated that “the AI revolution is ‘as big or bigger’ as the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps,” as he promised to make the investment to do it:
“‘Apple must do this. Apple will do this. This is sort of ours to grab,’ Cook told employees, according to people aware of the meeting. “We will make the investment to do it.’
The meeting comes as Apple faces high-profile defections to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs initiative. Internally, teams have also faced setbacks, including leadership shakeups, competing priorities, and disagreements over strategic directions.
The Siri team, for instance, was reportedly blindsided by the delay of its AI revamp, and equally surprised to learn that Apple was pursuing partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, rather than continuing in-house development.
The company has also held internal discussions about acquiring AI search startup Perplexity, a possibility that was lightly alluded to during yesterday’s earnings call.
Craig Federighi also took the stage briefly during today’s meeting to speak directly to those issues.”
“Federighi explained that the problem was caused by trying to roll out a version of Siri that merged two different systems: one for handling current commands — like setting timers — and another based on large language models, the software behind generative AI. “We initially wanted to do a hybrid architecture, but we realized that approach wasn’t going to get us to Apple quality,” Federighi said.”
Back to Cook, he reportedly leaned on a familiar counter-argument when addressing concerns about Apple’s late entry into the AI race:
“‘We’ve rarely been first,’ the executive told staffers. ‘There was a PC before the Mac; there was a smartphone before the iPhone; there were many tablets before the iPad; there was an MP3 player before iPod.’
But Apple invented the ‘modern’ versions of those product categories, he said. ‘This is how I feel about AI.’”
During the meeting, Cook also reportedly addressed the upcoming retirement of long-time COO Jeff Williams, as well as matters such as Apple’s recent investments in health-related initiatives, and Apple TV+ performance.
When talking about regulatory pressure, he said:
“The reality is that Big Tech is under a lot of scrutiny around the world,” Cook said. “We need to continue to push on the intention of the regulation and get them to offer that up, instead of these things that destroy the user experience and user privacy and security.”
As Bloomberg noted, today’s meeting marked a rare departure from Apple’s typical small, town hall-style gatherings. More than anything, it signaled that Apple felt the need to rally its troops, take control of its AI strategy, and hopefully stem the ongoing brain drain to rival companies.
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