What Apple Knows About AI That Silicon Valley Won't Admit

Apple spent $14 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, just 2% of the $670 billion committed by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft for AI infrastructure, signaling a fundamental disagreement with Silicon Valley's AI investment frenzy. The company named hardware engineer John Ternus as CEO instead of an AI-focused leader and is opening Siri to third-party AI models, treating artificial intelligence as a commodity rather than a transformative technology. Apple's strategy suggests the company believes its rivals are investing out of fear rather than genuine conviction, positioning it as the most powerful tech firm by betting against the industry's core AI thesis.

What Apple Knows About AI That Silicon Valley Won't Admit Apple looked at AI and said: this changes nothing Hey, Alberto here 👋 I have an IMPORTANT REMINDER for you. I’m running a 50% discount offer on annual subs that ends on June 5th. Get yours now and enjoy the discount forever. If you read the free edition and have been thinking about subscribing, this is the best time. I won’t do another offer anytime soon. AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists—guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case. In 2026, the four largest cloud and AI infrastructure providers—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft—committed to spending $670 billion on CapEx https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-tech-strikes-gold-with-ai-but-at-a-steep-cost-f6d82a22 . Apple, in contrast, spent $12.7 billion on capex last fiscal year and projects $14 billion for 2026 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2026/02/20/apples-ai-gamble-can-a-14b-budget-compete-in-a-700b-arms-race/ , 2% of what its peers are spending. The conventional reading in Silicon Valley is, naturally, that Apple is losing. Siri has been a punchline for years—an internal executive called the delays ugly and embarrassing https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/apple-s-siri-chief-calls-ai-delays-ugly-and-embarrassing-promises-fixes —and critics say that Apple has not been the same without Steve Jobs. It is falling behind https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/apple-ai-siri-development-behind-9ea65ee8 , they say, and moving way too slowly for AI. I disagree with this portrayal: Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world right now because it’s acting according to what it believes. Tim Cook—far from an “AI guy”—announced in April 2026 that he would step down as CEO https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-announces-ceo-john-ternus-2826465d . His successor is John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who runs hardware engineering. Cook could have named someone who would reorient the company around the most hyped technology in a generation. Instead, he picked another non-AI guy https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/macbooks/i-interviewed-john-ternus-right-before-he-was-named-apple-ceo-heres-the-5-quotes-that-stand-out-to-me . That is what a true non-believer looks like. One who is not only an atheist but fearless about it. If anything, Apple oozes defiant conviction. In March 2026, Bloomberg reported https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-26/apple-plans-to-open-up-siri-to-rival-ai-assistants-beyond-chatgpt-in-ios-27 that Apple is opening Siri to third-party AI models. “Smart move,” I thought. Users will be able to route queries to ChatGPT or Claude directly from Siri. Apple is building a menu that lets you choose which AI powers your assistant rather than get lost in a zero-sum race with fake believers and actual advocates that would be Anthropic, the only AI lab with a conviction comparable to Apple’s . You do this if you believe AI models and agents are swappable; a commodity that will play out like electricity, not a divine machine. So Apple’s position is clear. What is everyone else’s? The same; they just won’t say it. The AI industry is playing cool. And right now, roleplaying as a fanatic is the cool thing to do meaning: it is what keeps the revenues coming, shareholders happy, and valuations intact . The moment the wind changes, we will see their true colors. But for now, let’s look at the data to compare. Mark Zuckerberg can say shit about “ personal superintelligence https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/?srsltid=AfmBOorI77mhlwXjP8tIDbuR7fdyEPYSI As-HYLV0hjbwZvXk9b-MIY ” to attract investors, but he will pour billions on whatever tech is hot, from 3D printing https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/deepmind-google-demis-hassabis-5bd6de54 to the metaverse. Meta’s primary consumer-facing product is a chatbot that lives inside WhatsApp. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet CEO, will happily announce Spark https://gemini.google/overview/agent/spark/ , a “24/7 personal agent” for mundane tasks, side-by-side with Omni https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-omni/ , an AGI seed. As if they’re the same. Google spent ~$93 billion on AI last year and then embedded Gemini into Gmail, where it suggests slightly worse replies, and into Search, where it makes up responses https://www.theverge.com/tech/936176/google-ai-overviews-search-disregard . Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, will invest in OpenAI before anyone else, but then forces its Office clients to stick to Copilot https://www.reuters.com/business/accenture-roll-out-copilot-all-743000-employees-boost-microsoft-2026-04-27/ . Elon Musk will build a giant AI datacenter and then rent it at a profit to a competitor https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/elon-musk-kingmaker . The entire AI ecosystem is made up of entrepreneur types trying to inflate the pie to take a portion before it explodes. Even Sam Altman. Sam Altman doesn’t believe in anything. Or rather, he believes in everything at different times, whatever the public wants to hear, he obliges https://www.openaifiles.org/ . And so on. These guys keep praying to all the gods just in case their own is not the real one. That’s not what a company that believes “AI will change everything” does. They are bolting AI onto existing products the way they once bolted social features onto existing products. To them, AI is, if lucky, a new dot-com boom. They speak like revolutionaries but ship like bourgeois. They believe what Apple believes but behave like cowards; if they genuinely believed God was watching them, they wouldn’t hedge. What they’re doing has a more charitable name in theology: Pascal’s Wager . They can’t prove AI will be transformative. But if it is and they don’t invest, they’re dead. Or worse: the laughing stock. However, if it isn’t transformative and they invest, they only lose some cash they will recoup anyway by doubling down on ads. So they tithe. They go to church on Sunday. Then fast for Ramadan, keep Shabbat, leave offerings at the shrine. They even perform hecatombs, and, every few months, bathe in the Ganges. Apple is willing to let its actions match its actual beliefs. That’s a stance I can respect. The rest are performative sheeple overdrinking from the fountain of fear.