Apple CEO Tim Cook (L); John Giannandrea (C), senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy; and Craig Federighi (R), senior vice president of software engineering, speak during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Nic Coury | AFP | Getty Images
Apple fully embraced artificial intelligence on Monday, as company executives explained the features and reasoning behind Apple Intelligence, the company’s new AI software suite.
But Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference launch event was carefully crafted to distinguish the iPhone maker from current AI leaders, such as Microsoft and Google, at a panel discussion Monday afternoon.
Software chief Craig Federighi and AI chief John Giannandrea said during the panel that Apple has a different approach to the technology than its Silicon Valley rivals. Unlike companies that are building AI for a broad range of products, Apple is instead focused only on the devices it sells and the personal data that AI could use.
Apple revealed a more limited approach that eschews future-focused thinking about the potential of the technology in favor of small tasks that can be done now without burning up battery life.
“We think AI’s role is not to replace our users but to empower them,” Federighi said.
Apple’s AI may be the first that its over 2 billion users interact with. If its AI features are favored over cloud-based competition from Microsoft or Google, it could change how billions of dollars in AI infrastructure per year is built and shift the direction of products that use the technology.
Much of the AI development that has captured investor and technological interest has focused on building or securing powerful supercomputers equipped with Nvidia chips to develop even more power-hungry AI models. In this scenario, users access the AI software by communicating with equally powerful servers over the web.
Apple’s AI is mostly on your device
Apple Intelligence was unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
Apple’s vision for AI isn’t about one big model — it’s a slew of smaller models that don’t require the same amount of computing power and memory, running on Apple’s devices and chips themselves. If the AI on the phone can’t do it, then Apple, or an app using Apple’s tools, reaches out to the cloud to access a larger AI model. Apple partnered with OpenAI, for example, to give users access to ChatGPT if Siri can’t provide an answer. These features come into play only if users allow it.
Apple executives don’t refer to this strategy as using one or multiple models. Instead, they package it as just “Apple Intelligence.”
“We think that the right approach to this is to have a series of different models and different sizes for different use cases,” Giannandrea said.
Giannandrea said the company worked to create a 3-billion parameter model as part of Apple Intelligence. ChatGPT’s GPT-3 model from 2020, in comparison, is much larger, at 175 billion parameters. The more parameters, the more memory and computing power needed to run the model.
Apple’s approach is faster than the cloud-based options and has privacy benefits. However, there can be issues when the models are too small to get anything done. Apple is betting that through a user’s iPhone, its AI can tap into personal data about appointments, location, and what the user is doing. One example provided by Federighi is that his phone knows who his daughter is.
Apple also says it’s making sure its small models work only on tasks they can excel at, rather than give users an open-ended chatbot interface.
“There’s a critical extra step, which is we’re not taking this teenager and telling him to go fly an airplane,” Federighi said.
Many AI features Apple announced on Monday are similar to products already announced this year. Apple’s AI can summarize and rewrite documents, generate small images, and translate conversations in real time. One notable feature will enable users to generate new emojis using AI without connecting to the internet. The new features will be released this fall in a beta version.
Apple’s approach to privacy
Private Cloud Compute unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
Privacy will be a challenge for Apple as it embraces AI. It has used privacy as one of its primary marketing tools for years, highlighting that Apple’s business model doesn’t require ad targeting and that it has the best interests of its users in mind versus data brokers and spammers.
Other AI companies collect user data and store it to improve their software, a practice that doesn’t fit Apple’s current privacy policies. Much of Apple’s presentation on Monday pointed to steps the company has taken to prevent the impression that it’s hoovering up user data to improve its AI.
“We’re not going to take that data and go send it to some cloud somewhere,” Giannandrea said. “Because we want everything to be very private, whether it’s running locally or on a cloud computing service, and that’s the way we want it so we can use your most personal data.”
Apple didn’t detail what data was used to train its AI models, beyond that it uses files scraped from the public web in addition to licensed data, such as news archives and stock photography.
Apple said it developed its own servers using its Apple chips, called Apple Private Cloud, to prevent user data sent back to an AI server from being stored or re-used. It will allow third parties to inspect the software, a notable move for a secrecy-focused company that usually doesn’t provide information about its infrastructure.
“Even if a company maybe makes a promise and says, ‘Well, hey, look, we’re not going to do anything with the data.’ You have no way to verify that,” Federighi said, explaining why Apple will allow inspection of its AI server software.
More AI to come
ChatGPT integration with Apple iOS 18 announced during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, on June 10, 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
At times, Apple officials seemed to downplay how big a shift this is in the company’s AI strategy, saying that it’s a continuation of the machine learning work the company has already done to edit photos or transcribe text, or to put AI-specific blocks on its chips.
“It’s only recently that others are starting to suddenly claim like there’s some new category there,” Federighi said. “But those are things we’ve been shipping for a long time.”
However, Apple didn’t bet it all on a single approach. It will offer ChatGPT built into its operating systems, allowing users to prompt OpenAI’s model for free and offering users a more powerful and larger AI model. However, OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be marked in Apple’s software, telling users that data will be sent to OpenAI servers, which run on Microsoft’s cloud. Answers will indicate that they were generated by ChatGPT, too, just in case they go off the rails.
Apple said it could offer different models in the future, signaling that Apple Intelligence is not the only AI system it expects its customers to use. Federighi said that one day some of its customers might want a medical AI system or legal AI model built into Apple products, for example. Or maybe one of Google’s models.
“We’re going to look forward to doing integrations with models like Google Gemini, for instance, in the future. I mean, nothing to announce right now,” Federighi said. “But that’s our direction.”
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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Honor launched the Honor Magic V5 on Wednesday July 2, as it looks to challenge Samsung in the foldable space.
Honor
Honor on Wednesday touted the slimness and battery capacity of its newly launched thin foldable phone, as it lays down a fresh challenge to market leader Samsung.
The Honor Magic V5 goes will initially go on sale in China, but the Chinese tech firm will likely bring the device to international markets later this year.
Honor said the Magic V5 is 8.8 mm to 9mm when folded, depending on the color choice. The phone’s predecessor, the Magic V3 — Honor skipped the Magic V4 name — was 9.2 mm when folded. Honor said the Magic V5 weighs 217 grams to 222 grams, again, depending on the color model. The previous version was 226 grams.
In China, Honor will launch a special 1 terabyte storage size version of the Magic V5, which it says will have a battery capacity of more than 6000 milliampere-hour — among the highest for foldable phones.
Honor has tried hard to tout these features, as competition in foldables ramps up, even as these types of devices have a very small share of the overall smartphone market.
Honor vs. Samsung
Foldables represented less than 2% of the overall smartphone market in 2024, according to International Data Corporation. Samsung was the biggest player with 34% market share followed by Huawei with just under 24%, IDC added. Honor took the fourth spot with a nearly 11% share.
Honor is looking to get a head start on Samsung, which has its own foldable launch next week on July 9.
Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at the International Data Corporation, said the Magic V5 is a strong offering from Honor.
“This is the dream foldable smartphone that any user who is interested in this category will think of,” Jeronimo told CNBC, pointing to features such as the battery.
“This phone continues to push the bar forward, and it will challenge Samsung as they are about to launch their seventh generation of foldable phones,” he added.
At its event next week, Samsung is expected to release a foldable that is thinner than its predecessor and could come close to challenging Honor’s offering by way of size, analysts said. If that happens, then Honor will be facing more competition, especially against Samsung, which has a bigger global footprint.
“The biggest challenge for Honor is the brand equity and distribution reach vs Samsung, where the Korean vendor has the edge,” Neil Shah, co-founder of Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
Honor’s push into international markets beyond China is still fairly young, with the company looking to build up its brand.
“Further, if Samsung catches up with a thinner form-factor in upcoming iterations, as it has been the real pioneer in foldables with its vertical integration expertise from displays to batteries, the differentiating factor might narrow for Honor,” Shah added.
Vertical integration refers to when a company owns several parts of a product’s supply chain. Samsung has a display and battery business which provides the components for its foldables.
In March, Honor pledged a $10 billion investment in AI over the next five years, with part of that going toward the development of next-generation agents that are seen as more advanced personal assistants.
Honor said its AI assistant Yoyo can interact with other AI models, such as those created by DeepSeek and Alibaba in China, to create presentation decks.
The company also flagged its AI agent can hail a taxi ride across multiple apps in China, automatically accepting the quickest ride to arrive? and cancelling the rest.