Apple CEO Tim Cook says DeepSeek shows 'innovation that drives efficiency'

DeepSeek has come in like a wrecking ball in the AI industry, knocking down OpenAI and its leading ChatGPT, and now Apple CEO Tim Cook has had some comments about the Chinese company.

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In Apple's recent investors call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the disruptive new AI model is a positive development for the iPhone giant. During the call, analyst Ben Reitzes from Melius asked Cook about how the arrival of DeepSeek is viewed by Apple. DeepSeek is far cheaper in development costs for training advanced AI models, as well as the running costs of these AI models.

Reitzes asked: "Hey, Tim. I wanted to ask you, you knew this one was coming, but there's a perception that you're a big beneficiary of lower cost compute, and I was wondering of your worldly perspective here on the deep situation, and if you are going to, if anything's happened to change your views in terms of the tailwind to margin and your ability to execute, even due to the potential for cost to come down due to that development and probably what's going to happen that happened anyway, but I love your perspective on that".

Cook said: "In general, I think innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing. And, you know, that's what you see in that model". Our tight integration of silicon and software I think will continue to serve us very well. As you know, we do things on the device and we do things in the private cloud, which mimics from an architectural point of view, what happens on the device".

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Cook continued: "And from a CapEx point of view, we've always taken a very prudent, deliberate approach to our expenditure and we continue to leverage a hybrid model, which I think continues to serve us well".