Apple, known for deterministic and polished products, faces a significant cultural shift. It must now embrace the non-deterministic, "hallucinatory" nature of AI, which will inevitably lead to public failures and PR challenges unlike anything it has managed before.
When a company's marketing shifts from emphasizing its brand prestige (e.g., "It's a Ferrari") to highlighting performance metrics (e.g., horsepower), it indicates the product is becoming commoditized. This shift often precedes margin compression as competition becomes spec-based.
Founders often fixate on bad pitch meetings, but these are low-stakes encounters since they can simply walk away. The real risk lies with problematic VCs on the board post-investment. Diligence should focus on how a VC behaves as a long-term partner, not their conduct in an introductory call.
VCs may invest in two tranches at different valuations (e.g., $500M and $1B) but allow the founder to publicize only the higher number. This practice can make the company seem more valuable than its blended price, potentially misleading employees and future investors.
Apple's claim of using a "private cloud" for AI at a billion-user scale raises questions. This level of inference requires enormous data center capacity that hasn't appeared in CapEx reports and would likely be detectable through other means, like ESG emissions data.
Despite persistent predictions of mass unemployment from "black-pilled AI leaders," strong economic indicators like the May jobs report show continued labor market resilience. This suggests the feared AI job apocalypse is, at a minimum, delayed and not the immediate threat it's portrayed to be.