WHAT’S INSIDE

👇️ Todays’ Feature: Apple's Answer Engine + AI Strategy Pivot

• Tech News: Markets, BLS Firing, Musk’s $29B Payout, Apple's ChatGPT Rival

• Company Watch: Mistral, Vast Data, Joby, LG Innotek, Robinhood, OpenMind

• Buzzy Tools: Latest Buzzy tech, AI and financial tools

• Deep Tech: The latest in deep tech, biotech, futurism and more

• Space Tech: Latest news in the space race and aerospace tech

• Crypto: Blockchain and crypto policy and startups or protocols to watch

TECH IN THE NEWS

Market Rebound Rally — US stocks tumbled Friday on weak jobs data, new tariffs, a Fed governor resignation, and Trump's firing of the BLS commissioner. Then on Monday Stock indexes saw their largest daily gains since May 27 on rate cut hopes.

Labor Saga — Trump fired the BLS commissioner after weak jobs data, sparking criticism over political interference. The move boosted hopes for Fed rate cuts, strengthening his criticism of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Mega Package — Tesla awards Elon Musk a $29B compensation plan amidst fierce AI talent competition. The package includes 96 million shares, vesting in two years, addressing shareholder and legal concerns.

Apple's AI Play — Apple is developing a ChatGPT competitor via its new team, 'Answers.' The iPhone 17 has been sighted, hinting at upcoming product innovations.

Perplexity in Hot Water — Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of bypassing restrictions to scrape data from websites blocking AI. Despite denials, significant activity was noted, echoing past plagiarism claims and raising concerns about AI ethics.

AI Data Center Boom — Despite economic challenges, a surge in AI data center investments by major tech firms is underway. Experts warn of a potential bubble, as heavy reliance on private credit could risk financial stability if revenue falls short.

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Apple’s Renewed Enthusiasm and Ambitions for AI

By Vivien Wang for The Tech Buzz

As we have covered before, Apple’s conservative AI strategy has been characterized by heavy emphasis on privacy, limited investments, and enhanced product features that are constantly getting delayed. However, this may soon change. In a company-wide meeting, reportedly the first in years, CEO Tim Cook signalled that Apple might finally be ready to catch up to its competitors in AI. 

Apple’s Historically Cautious AI Strategy

Apple has noticeably been unusually cautious when approaching AI, staying relatively quiet while competitors like Microsoft and Google announced intense AI enhancements and poured cash into AI infrastructure. Last year, it began announcing features like text summarization and image generation, branded as “Apple Intelligence.” A major part will be the upgrades to Siri, including more personal context and the ability to navigate between apps to perform tasks for users. However, Siri’s updates have been delayed yet again, now being planned for release in 2026. Apple’s moves – or lack thereof – have sparked skepticism among investors, but reflect the company’s mission of prioritizing quality, privacy, and reliability over hype. 

Apple’s decision to play the long game with AI could prove to be successful; competitors’ rushed products have resulted in wrong answers and hallucinated results, and users might appreciate Apple’s refusal to ship an imperfect product. Amid privacy and security concerns about AI, Apple has been painfully meticulous about users’ personal data – most Apple Intelligence features are designed to run directly on users’ devices and advanced tasks utilize private cloud compute. Apple has also promised not to train AI models on private information, which limits its AI capabilities, but could boost customer confidence. 

Wall Street is Less Optimistic 

Despite strong performance in Apple’s Q3 earnings report, which showed healthy growth in iPhone sales and overall revenue, investors are concerned that Apple’s wobbly AI strategy could harm these numbers in the future. In a poll taken earlier this year, only 13% of people who purchased iPhones did so for the new AI features. Most of them just needed a new phone. This sets up major competitive risk from companies like Google, which offers AI-integrated devices and Android, and OpenAI, which has announced plans to release voice-based AI gadgets. As these products are polished and released, Apple may find themselves falling behind yet again. 

In fact, Wall Street firm, Lightshed, recently concluded Cook is no longer the right CEO for Apple, saying it “now needs a product-focused CEO, not one centered on logistics... AI is not something that Apple can merely ‘pull the string’ on. Missing on AI could fundamentally alter the company’s long-term trajectory and ability to grow.”

A Pivot Towards Increased Investment and Development

After years of Apple deliberately taking its time, CEO Tim Cook’s tone has shifted, calling AI “one of the most profound technologies of our lifetime” and signaling aggressive investment into people, M&A, and capital expenditure to chase after competitors. Being characteristically fiscally frugal in the past, Apple is now planning to increase spending on AI and data centers, and Cook has expressed Apple’s openness to buying larger firms, as opposed to its usual strategy of purchasing smaller firms with highly specialized technical teams.

In 2025, Apple has spent over $1B on Nvidia AI chips and pledged over $500B in US investments for the coming years, much of which could be intended for powering AI through data centers, silicon, and advanced manufacturing. Its existing data center footprint spans the US, Europe, and China with major expansions underway, such as a new 250K square foot server facility in Houston that is set to specifically support Apple Intelligence. Apple’s own M2 Ultra chips, originally crafted for high-end Macbooks, are also being repurposed for server use. 

Beyond data centers, Apple is also reportedly working on an “answer engine”, an in-house system designed to fetch web-based knowledge on demand, rivaling Google’s AI-powered summaries and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Apple’s new Answers, Knowledge, and Information team, the team tasked with building this engine, aims to embed search-like intelligence throughout Apple’s ecosystem of Siri, Spotlight, Safari, and more. Unlike a pure chatbot, this engine is intended to provide real answers to user queries by directly crawling the web, but promises to do so with Apple’s privacy-first ethos in mind. This signals Apple’s aim to reduce its reliance on third-party solutions such as its current integration of ChatGPT.

AI Summaries, Search, and the Data Center Boom

Apple’s ambitions are unfolding against a backdrop of intense AI-catalyzed change. Google’s AI summaries and ChatGPT have already reshaped web search and the media ecosystem. Studies reveal that in the presence of AI summaries, users are much less likely to interact with traditional links, slashing vital traffic to online media sites. These changes are devastating to publishers, who are now being forced to utilize paid subscriptions – which often also depend on traffic – rather than advertising for revenue. The answer engine is not just an Apple project; many major players (and startups like Perplexity) are converging on the notion that search, as we know it, will soon be replaced by gen AI that summarizes, digests, and answers users directly.

At the same time, conversation is circling on whether the current arms race for AI, especially within the surging investments in data centers, is a legitimate, long-term boom or a bubble about to pop. It’s been well-established that compute is absolutely essential to the growth and improvement of AI, making data centers potential huge money-makers. The investment going into these data centers is insanely high, with the Magnificent 7 tech firms collectively spending a record $102.5B on capex in their most recent quarters. However, if AI revenue doesn’t grow fast enough to keep up with all this spending, the data center industry could see a crash similar to those after the telecom and railroad booms. 

While it’s hard to tell for sure what the fates of search or the data center industry will be, Apple’s shifting strategy once again affirms that the control of data, infrastructure, and distribution of answers is now a frontline of competition in tech. Apple’s investments and product choices stand as both a late-stage catch-up play and a critical test of whether they’ll just be table stakes or instead key differentiators for its next generation of devices and platforms. 

COMPANIES TO WATCH

[OpenDeal] Mistral — The AI startup is targeting a $10B valuation in its latest fundraising effort. This ambitious valuation indicates significant growth potential, positioning Mistral as a key player in the evolving AI sector.

[OpenDeal] Vast Data — AI storage technology, Vast Data is in talks with Alphabet's CapitalG & Nvidia for funding that could value it at $30B, up from $9.1B in 2023. With $380M raised and $200M ARR expected to grow to $600M next year.

OpenAI — Raised $8.3B at a $300B valuation with strong backing from Dragoneer, Blackstone, and TPG. The oversubscribed round highlights its growth, with ARR at $13B. In talks with Microsoft on its for-profit transition.

Joby Aviation — The CA-based air taxi startup is acquiring Blade Air Mobility's helicopter rideshare business for up to $125M and partnered with L3Harris Technologies to develop a gas-turbine hybrid VTOL aircraft for the DoD.

LG Innotek — Partnered with Aeva Technologies to produce the Atlas Ultra 4D lidar sensor for automotive, consumer electronics, and robotics. LG Innotek is investing $50M for a 6% stake to support product development and team expansion.

Robinhood Earnings — The online exchange surpassed earnings expectations with $81M extra, 2.3M new users, and 45% revenue growth.

OpenMind — Developing OM1, an open, hardware-agnostic software layer for humanoid robots, akin to Android. Founded in 2024, it raised $20M to launch its first robotic dogs by September.

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BUZZY TOOLS

Buzzy Tech Tools To Watch & Use

Google — Best yet, Deep Think reasoning model on AI Ultra $250/mth.

Apple — Developing AI "answer engine" to enhance Siri, challenge Google.

Grok Imagine — AI video generator creates short videos from text prompts.

D-Wave Quantum Inc. — O-s toolkit integrates quantum computing with AI.

Cohere — Command A Vision model excels in enterprise visual tasks.

BUZZY TECH

The Latest Deep Technology & Trends To Watch

Google — AI finds 20 security flaws in o-s software, verified by experts.

Self-Cleaning Glass — Electric fields remove 98% dust in seconds.

Optical Brain Imaging — Affordable EEG-like imaging with fMRI depth.

China 2T Drone — First offshore EVTOL delivery drone cuts 10 hr trip to 1.

Protein Pill Technology — Pill replaces painful protein injections.

Plastics Crisis — Global treaty urged as $1.5T crisis impacts health.

CRYPTO WATCH

Bitcoin — Weak U.S. jobs data saw BTC drop below $115K, as only 73,000 jobs were added in July. The unemployment rate hit 4.2%, prompting market declines and increasing the likelihood of a rate cut.

Bitcoin Volatility Surge — Amid a $300B crypto sell-off, BlackRock's potential ETF expansion could reshape markets. Analysts predict a Bitcoin price shift as institutional interest grows.

BitMine's Ethereum Surge — BitMine has increased its Ethereum holdings to 833,000 ETH, becoming the largest public ETH treasury worldwide. The company added 208,000 ETH in just two weeks, reclaiming the top holder position.

SPACE_RACE

Skyrora_Secured U.K. license for Skylark L suborbital rocket in 2026.

NASA_Terminated Lunar Trailblazer exploration mission, lost contact.

Space Command_Emphasizes integrated space power w/ air, land, sea forces.

China_Completes 3rd launch in 8 days of private Guowang satellites.

Justin Sun_TRON founder joins Blue Origin flight, youngest private astronaut.

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