Nvidia is primed to overtake Apple as the world’s second-most-valuable company, trailing behind Apple-rival Microsoft, as investors cannot get enough of the semiconductor maker whose chips power popular generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.
An AI-induced jaw-dropping rally in Nvidia shares has taken the company’s valuation from $1 trillion to more than $2 trillion in just nine months…
Nvidia’s market capitalization currently hovers around $2.38 trillion, lagging Apple by just about $230 billion and Microsoft by about $645 billion.
The relentless rise in shares of Nvidia, which controls 80% of the high-end AI chip market, has been instrumental in pushing Wall Street to record levels this year, while giving the company a more than 5% weightage on the benchmark S&P 500 index.
Meanwhile, Apple, which is grappling with slowing iPhone sales, ceded its position as the most valuable U.S. company to Microsoft for the first time since 2021 in January.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple was once led by a visionary who set the agenda for entire industries, now led by a reactive caretaker who heard somewhere that VR headsets and electric cars were the next big things (probably read it in Wired), so those are the tasks he directed the company to tackle, while completely missing artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, and now is scrambling to catch up to something Steve Jobs would have focused on long before anyone ever even heard of OpenAI.
Steve Jobs bought Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs would never have ignored Siri, basically let it rot, for well over a decade and counting. Steve Jobs would have made Siri the first conversational generative AI assistant years before anyone else. And the company would today be worth at least a trillion dollars more than it is currently. (Yes, we’re lowballing that estimate.)
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Apple said to be spending ‘millions of dollars a day’ on generative AI to supercharge Siri – September 7, 2023
• Apple’s Siri turns ten, still acts like a two-year-old – October 4, 2021
• Former Apple employees reflect on Siri’s ‘squandered lead’ over Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – March 14, 2018
Clearly, Apple is not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs, but the company — thanks to Jobs’ work and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure — now has more than enough money to make up for the myopic Cook’s lack of vision.
When, not if, Apple catches up and has at least “good enough” generative AI to tout, the bleeding will stop.
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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