Apple CEO Cook tells staff AI is ‘ours to grab’ in rare all-hands meeting

Apple CEO Tim Cook
After Apple’s Q325 earnings report, CEO Tim Cook held an unusual all-hands meeting, giving a pep talk to employees about the company’s promising artificial intelligence outlook and an “exciting” product pipeline.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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The executive gathered staff at Apple’s on-campus auditorium Friday in Cupertino, California, telling them that the AI revolution is “as big or bigger” as the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps. “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 iPhone maker has been late to AI, debuting Apple Intelligence months after OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and others flooded the market with products like ChatGPT. And when Apple finally released its AI tools, they fell flat.
But Cook struck an optimistic tone, noting that Apple is typically late to promising new technologies.
“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.”
The meeting included Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, who discussed the future of Apple’s Siri voice assistant… “The work we’ve done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the results we needed,” the engineering executive told employees. “This has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned. There is no project people are taking more seriously.”
“The product pipeline, which I can’t talk about: It’s amazing, guys. It’s amazing,” Cook said. “Some of it you’ll see soon, some of it will come later, but there’s a lot to see.”

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MacDailyNews Take: Really, after finally waking up, what else are Cook and Federighi going to say?
But, after WWDC24’s embarrassing vaporware video charade and the middling “Apple Intelligence” stuff that has shipped to date, at this point we’ll believe it when we see it.
Real artists ship. – Steve Jobs

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