Tim Cook was asked about AI, the “Topic of the day, topic of the year” during Apple’s Q2 2023 financial results conference call during the questions and answers session.

The Apple CEO’s response began as expected: “As you know, we don’t comment on product roadmaps…” but quickly continued “But I do think it’s very important to be deliberative and thoughtful in how you approach these things. There are a number of issues that need to be sorted. The potential is very interesting. We’ve obviously made enormous progress integrating AI and machine learning, and we’ve been weaving it into products and services.”

In recent weeks more evidence has come to light that Apple has been working to integrate more generative AI into products like Siri. Still, Apple has typically been reserved in introducing features that may need to be more predictable.

“We see that in Fall Detection and Crash Detection, ECG, these aren’t just great features but they’re saving lives out there. We view AI as huge. We’ll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis.”

Tim Cook

Recent reports have pointed to Apple’s engineers working on large language models for Siri, including the “Blackbird” project, which sought to rewrite Siri from the ground up in 2019, while the more conservative “Siri X”, which primarily moved Siri processing from the cloud to the user’s device for increased privacy was the version which finally shipped, according to a report from The Information.

Following the earnings call, Apple’s stock climbed +$3.05 in after-hours trading to $168.84, and earlier in the day Tim Cook commented that Apple did not plan for mass layoffs, calling such a move a “last resort“.