Apple first unveiled its artificial intelligence strategy at the company’s WWDC event last year. More than a year later, some of the iPhone maker’s so called ‘Apple Intelligence’ features have still not arrived while the rollout of many others have been marred by unwanted suprises. 

However, CEO Tim Cook remains commited on Apple’s AI roadmap and during the recent earnings call on Thursday stated that company is “significantly growing our investments” on artificial intelligence. In an interaction with CNBC, Cook also noted that Apple is “embedding it across our devices, across our platforms and across the company.”

More importantly, perhaps for the first time ever, Cook confirmed that Apple is ‘open’ to acquisitions in order to accelerate its AI roadmap. He also noted that Apple had acquired “around” seven companies this year but none of them had been “huge in terms of dollar amount.”

“We’re open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap,” Cook stated.

A previous report from Bloomberg had revealed that Apple leaders had internally discussed acquiring the AI search startup Perplexity to catch up in the AI race. Meanwhile, another recent report had revealed that the company could rely on LLM architecture from OpenAI or Anthropic in order to power its AI Siri. 

Notably, Apple already employs ChatGPT for answering more difficult queries on Siri but the company is also working on an AI version of the voice assistant that was announced at WWDC 2024 but has since been delayed numerous times. 

Meanwhile, Apple also faces the challege of retaining its talent as Meta builds its Superintelligence Labs division by poaching employee’s from other top companies. A report this week revealed that at least four people from Apple’s foundation models division have been poached by Mark Zuckerberg’s company so far.