Apple Lost the AI Race — Or Did They? 🤔

Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,

In today's issue, we take a look at a video where popular tech reviewer Marques Brownlee dives into a hot topic in tech right now: did Apple completely miss the boat on AI, or have they quietly positioned themselves to win the whole thing?

Let’s jump right in!

Read Time: 4.5’ min

Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI

• Chart of the week: The 30 Most Profitable Companies in the World

• OpenAI Is Shutting Down Atlas

• AI Findings/Resources

• AI tools to check out

• Video of the week

TOGETHER WITH KALSHI

You already have a take on which AI lab ships next.

Claude or Gemini? OpenAI or Anthropic? GPT-7 before year-end or not? If you read tech newsletters, you've already formed opinions on all of it.

Kalshi has real-money markets on which AI model leads benchmarks this week, which lab ships AGI first, when Anthropic releases Mythos, whether OpenAI raises ChatGPT pricing, and which company has the best coding model at year-end. These aren't abstract questions — they're live markets with real money on both sides, moving as labs ship, benchmarks drop, and announcements land.

The edge belongs to whoever actually follows this space. Not the casual observer — the person who reads model cards, tracks evals, and notices when a new release outperforms the field before the mainstream press catches up.

That person has a genuine edge. If that's you, Kalshi lets you act on it.

Trade the model race

Chart of the week

The 30 Most Profitable Companies in the World

• Alphabet is the world’s most profitable company, with $160 billion in annual profit, followed by Microsoft, Apple, and NVIDIA.

• Technology dominates the rankings, driven by AI infrastructure, semiconductors, cloud computing, and digital advertising.

• Outside of tech, Saudi Aramco leads the energy sector, while major financial institutions and Amazon round out the world's biggest profit generators.

Source

AI News

OPENAI

OpenAI Is Shutting Down Atlas

OpenAI is discontinuing Atlas, its AI-powered browser, less than a year after its launch.

Details:

• OpenAI is retiring Atlas and moving some of its agentic browsing features to ChatGPT's desktop app and a Google Chrome extension.

• The new ChatGPT extension on Chrome gives it access to the context of the page you're viewing, letting users ask questions about web pages, summarize content, or start longer tasks all from the browser.

• The desktop app will now feature a more robust browser that allows users to browse websites, log into accounts, download files, and interact with web pages without leaving ChatGPT.

This comes as reports suggest the company is doing away with 'side quests' in order to focus on catching up with Anthropic on productivity features. Just a few months ago, OpenAI also shut down the video generation app Sora and discarded plans for a ChatGPT 'adult mode.

Source

AI Findings/Resources

👀 Grok 4.5 review

🐈 AI cat sings about gifting his ungrateful human

💀 This guy got banned from OpenAI... so he had an AI investigate, defend, and appeal the ban for him — and it actually worked

💸 OpenAI launches a $50,000 bounty for anyone who can universally jailbreak GPT-5.6’s biosafety protections

🤯 This woman connected a 1920s rotary phone to an AI agent that answers through a mechanical display on her wall

AI Tools to check out

🎬 Dreamina: An all-in-one AI creative platform powered by advanced image and video generation models, turning ideas into high-quality visuals

💥 AdsCreator: Turn any website into scroll-stopping ads.

👉 SnapVee: AI content workspace built for creators.

🔊 Typecast: Create voiceovers easily with 700+ customizable AI voices, AI avatars, text-to-speech, voice cloning and video editing

🤝 Recrutly: An AI recruiting platform that helps teams create jobs, screen resumes, conduct AI interviews, generate candidate analysis and more.

Video of the week

Apple “Lost” the AI Race

The debate over Apple’s AI strategy boils down to a fundamental disagreement over what the "AI race" actually is. There are two competing arguments, each framing Apple's position in a completely different light.

The Argument That Apple Lost:

Critics point to Apple's uncharacteristic scrambling over the past two years as a sign of panic. When the generative AI paradigm shift exploded, competitors like Google, Meta, and OpenAI moved at breakneck speed while Apple famously refused to even utter the acronym "AI" at its events.

• Subpar Capabilities: Early iterations of Apple Intelligence have underperformed. Siri still lacks the deep personal context, memory, and sheer capability found in the native ChatGPT or Gemini apps.

• The Integration Deficit: Siri cannot execute complex backend tasks or handle large requests natively. By relying on third parties to patch its software gaps, Apple is functionally conceding the software race to agile AI native companies.

The Argument That Apple Won:

The counter-argument shifts the focus entirely from cloud-based software models to the physical devices that consumers use daily. Apple’s ultimate moat isn't its AI software, it's the iPhone.

• The On-Device Future: The fastest, most secure generative AI tasks will eventually happen entirely on-device rather than in the cloud. As local, on-device models become highly optimized, users will rely on the cloud less and less.

• The Ultimate Gatekeeper: Just as Apple doesn't own a major search engine but profits immensely from selling the devices people use to Google things, Apple is positioned to sell the premium, high-memory hardware required to run the future of local AI. Apple Intelligence doesn't actually need to be groundbreaking; it just needs to be "good enough" to satisfy investors and keep users locked into the hardware ecosystem.

The Two Separate Races:

Race 1: The sprint for the ultimate software model, which Apple has arguably forfeited to companies like OpenAI.
Race 2: The marathon for the hardware layer. The core question is whether a pure AI company can successfully launch a new hardware product so good that it gets people to switch from the iPhone, or if Apple's ecosystem dominance will keep consumers anchored for good.

That’s a wrap!

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Gina 👩🏻‍💻