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- Apple stock briefly jumped as much as 2% on Wednesday after Bloomberg reported on the company's AI ambitions.
- The stock-price surge added as much as $71 billion to the company's market cap.
- According ot the report, Apple is building a large language model and already has an internal chatbot.
Apple stock surged as much as 2.3% to a record high on Wednesday after Bloomberg reported on the company's artificial intelligence ambitions.
Shares later pared gains to just under 1%, but the surge added as much as $71 billion to the company's market valuation at its peak on Wednesday, bringing Apple's total market capitalization to a record $3.12 trillion.
The one-day gain is equivalent to the entire market valuation of large-cap companies like Micron, Waste Management, and is more than the entire valuation of 390 other S&P 500 companies.
The most valuable company in the world has been very quiet on AI and the potential it has, while mega-cap tech peers Microsoft, Alphabet, and others have detailed plans on how they're going to capture the AI market opportunity. Microsoft surged as much as 6% on Tuesday after it announced a $30 subscription for its AI tool set.
Now, Apple is developing generative AI tools in a bid to catch OpenAI and the massive success it saw with the release of ChatGPT last year, Bloomberg said.
The iPhone maker has codenamed its AI project as "Ajax," which includes the creation of a chatbot service that some engineers call "Apple GPT," according to the report.
Apple has an entire career page dedicated to recruiting engineers that are experienced in machine learning infrastructure, deep learning and reinforcement learning, and natural language processing and speech technologies, with 179 current job openings.
The AI push at Apple has become a major effort in recent months, according to the report, with several teams at the company collaborating on project Ajax. Some areas of the work include addressing potential privacy concerns related to the AI, as Apple has long prided itself on having strict privacy rules.
In a May conference call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said there are still a "number of issues that need to be sorted" when it comes to AI technology, and that the company would implement AI capabilities into its products on a "very thoughtful basis."
According to Bloomberg, Apple still lacks a clear and decisive strategy in terms of delivering its AI technologies to consumers, aside from small improvements to the search capability of photos and Apple Maps as well as Siri for its iPhone users.
For its AI chatbot, sources told Bloomberg that it's essentially a replica of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet's Bard, and that it has a stripped-down design that was not meant for public consumption. Right now, it appears the focus of Apple is to improve its underlying large language models that serve as the foundation of its AI ambitions.