One intrepid Morgan Stanley analyst dared to ask how Apple will make money on its AI investments. The answer will not shock you.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook provided a vague, non-specific answer when asked during an earnings call how the company plans to monetize its AI investments. Despite Apple reporting $143.8 billion in quarterly revenue, Cook only stated that AI creates "great value" and "opens up opportunities" without detailing any concrete monetization strategy. The piece highlights how Big Tech companies, including OpenAI (which isn't expected to be profitable until 2030), have taken a largely unclear approach to AI profitability despite massive investments.

Guys, I don't think Tim Cook knows how to monetize AI

I think Apple are doing just fine anyway

My guess is their strategy is to first wait for the bubble to pop and the hype to settle down as enshitification is imminent.
Then they implement smaller, more personal on-device models as the technology matures.

I think this is actually a hole in capitalism. Imagine you are creating values on a general tools, now you want to monetize, how do we even know a free plan going to be same “moral” conditions with the monetized plans, and vice-versa?
Google search provides same output (monetized by keywords …) but with your own justifications and platform’s (websites) credits or branding value. Now, LLM are going to provide you with the answer directly, and it provides its own credibility, you don’t even check the refs of sources (the refs are added after the demands of original sources).
My gf is asking AI for which brand she can go for a purse, well I hope Apple won’t pay the most to AI partner to “just go buy Apple’s purse that attach to your iphone, if not having iphone, please buy one, it’s the best phone out there”
It seems capitalism and the AGI would not play well together…

at least they didn’t say, “Oh yeah we’ll shove ads in it.” As a matter of fact Sama himself said that Ads + AI isn’t a pretty bad combo while he was giving a speech at harvard.