The moment that Bloomberg News reported that Apple was considering a consumer friendly artificial intelligence competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, the company’s market cap shot up by $67 billion, with its share price moving up by $3.80 per share to more than $197, according to data pulled from FactSet.
Traders saw an opportunity to sell and the stock price fell by around $2.67 per share as of press time, but is still up 0.71% on the day. The company’s market cap is sitting around $3.06 trillion and APPL is trading around $195 a share as of 4:30pm ET on July 19.
The price increase reflects how investors see generative AI (which are large language models and not really AI) increasing earnings over time. Investors may have also sold the stock after digesting the news and realizing that Apple’s chatbot will only be used internally. At this point, Apple is only considering what a generative AI for consumers would look like.
Other companies have also seen their stock prices rise after announcing new integrations with AI tools, including Microsoft and Buzzfeed. Whether or not these generative AI integrations will show up in earnings reports remains to be seen.
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Apple has been integrating AI into various parts of its business, including Siri and autocorrect, but this tech is an attempt to compete with other popular large language models (LLM) that have captured the imaginations, and fears, of consumers.
Apple’s chatbot was created for internal use last year, but its rollout was stopped over security concerns, Bloomberg noted. Apple employees are also not allowed to develop features for customers based on the chatbot’s output. They do use it to help with product prototyping, however. It replicates ChatGPT and Bard’s features but won’t be pushed to consumers.
Samsung has followed this same path of creating an internal chatbot after it banned its staff from using ChatGPT because it spotted a data leak.
Apple also has a corporate trial of OpenAI’s tech and is considering a partnership with OpenAI, according to Bloomberg. Publicly, CEO Tim Cook has warned about LLMs introducing bias and misinformation while also calling for regulation.