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Apple Faces Pressure to Catch Up in AI 💥
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Gina Acosta
August 01, 2025
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
With growing pressure from analysts and investors who criticize the company for being caught off guard by the AI era, CEO Tim Cook has announced that Apple is ready to open its wallet and ramp up its AI efforts.
Let’s take a look!
Read Time: 4.5 min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Apple to ‘Significantly’ Increase AI Investments, Says CEO Tim Cook
Google Rolls Out Its Most Powerful Gemini Model Yet
AI Tutorial: Turn written content into professional designs with Claude + Canva
AI Tools to check out
AI Findings/Resources
The Latest in AI and Tech 💡
AI News
APPLE
Apple to ‘Significantly’ Increase AI Investments, Says CEO Tim Cook
Apple has struggled to keep pace with rivals, and although the company has rolled out a series of new AI features, they’ve mostly been notable for delays and underwhelming performance. But CEO Tim Cook has signaled that the company is now getting more serious about its plans to catch up in the AI race.
Details:
Apple is the second-worst performer this year among the so-called Magnificent Seven, with its stock down over 15% as of Tuesday’s close.
"We are significantly growing our investments," Cook said about AI on the Q3 2025 earnings call with investors.
He added that they are “reallocating a fair number of people” to focus on AI and are “very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap.”
The company claims it has already acquired seven companies this year, and recent reports suggest it may also be looking to enlist the help of other AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic to power its much-anticipated improved version of Siri.
Despite this, Apple delivered better-than-expected iPhone sales and record revenue in Q3, signaling that its core businesses remain strong. However, investors remain unconvinced, believing the company is missing a key opportunity to capitalize on AI.
Google Rolls Out Its Most Powerful Gemini Model Yet
Google has just released Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, its most advanced AI model to date. The new system can explore and consider multiple ideas at once to arrive at the best possible answer.
Details:
This is Google’s first publicly available multi-agent model, which, unlike traditional models, uses several AI “agents” to work on a problem simultaneously.
This makes it better at answering complex questions, solving math problems, and even writing code. However, the process also requires significantly more computational resources.
It also automatically uses tools like code execution and Google Search, and is capable of producing “much longer responses” than traditional AI models.
A variation of this model, which “takes hours to reason,” made headlines last week for earning a gold medal at this year’s International Math Olympiad.
In benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 Deep Think achieves state-of-the-art performance on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) and LiveCodeBench6, outperforming leading models like Grok 4 and OpenAI’s o3.
The new model is impressive, but it's gated behind Google’s $250-per-month Ultra plan, and that likely won’t change anytime soon, as the strong performance of these multi-agent systems comes with significantly higher costs.
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AI Tools to check out
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AI Findings/Resources
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The latest in AI and Tech
The funding round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with many new investors participating, including private equity giants Blackstone and TPG, as well as mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price.
The round, reportedly five times oversubscribed, has left some early investors dissatisfied after receiving smaller allocations to make room for the new participants.
The open weights text-to-image model is designed to generate more realistic images with fewer of the exaggerated, AI-typical textures. Model weights are available on Hugging Face, with commercial licenses offered through the BFL licensing portal.
The company’s stock price today pushed its market valuation past $4 trillion for the first time, making it the second company to reach that mark after Nvidia surpassed a $4 trillion market cap earlier this month.
The surge in stock price follows stronger-than-expected financial results, driven in part by growing momentum in AI.
The experimental feature let users make their chats discoverable by search engines like Google. Although it required users to opt in, the company admits it “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn't intend to.” The feature will no longer be available after today.
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Gina 👩🏻💻