11 years later, on August 2, local time, Apple's intraday market capitalization also exceeded 1 trillion US dollars, becoming the second broken trillion company after PetroChina.
Apple's share price closed at $207.39, an increase of 2.92%. During the trading period, its market value once increased to $1.006 trillion. On the 1st of this month, Apple announced the latest earnings report with higher-than-expected results, and announced that it will repurchase 20 billion US dollars of stock. Since then, its share price has risen by about 9%, achieving the best two-day gain since April 2014.
The current market capitalization is higher than the market capitalization of Exxon Mobil, P&G and AT&T (TN), and accounts for 4% of the total market value of the S&P 500. The more obvious metaphor is: It is equivalent to 2 Ali, 3.5 ICBC, 175 Sina.
Moreover, it has become the most profitable US listed company with a net profit of $48.4 billion.
On such an enviable day, let's talk about Apple's artificial intelligence business and see what new moves and layouts it has.
Integration and establishment of AI/ML team Layout artificial intelligence strategy
In April of this year, Apple dug John Giannandrea from Google, responsible for Apple's machine learning and artificial intelligence strategy, reporting directly to Tim Cook.
John graduated from Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science and an Honorary Doctorate. Prior to joining Apple, John worked at Google for 8 years, leading machine intelligence, research and Search team. Prior to this, he founded two technology companies, Tellme Networks and Metaweb Technologies. In his early career, John was a senior engineer at General Magic.
According to TechCrunch, the internal structure of Apple's Siri and Core ML teams will remain unchanged.
Core ML is Apple's high-performance machine learning framework that integrates a trained machine learning model into an application. Apple believes that a well-trained model is the result of a machine learning algorithm that trains data sets. For example, With the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the model of regional historical housing training can predict the price of the house. The core ML supports visual image analysis, natural language processing, etc. It is worth mentioning that this year WWDC2018, Apple launched the upgraded Core ML 2.
Netease has a CEO Zhou Feng once commented that this new framework can solve a series of problems in the past cloud data processing, and is relatively mature compared to Android's TensorflowLite, worthy of attention of developers of artificial intelligence.
Beyond Core ML, Siri, who has been criticized and delayed, has also been placed under John Giannandrea. At the Apple WWDC 2017 conference, Cook released a smart speaker with built-in Siri, named HomePod, and the NetEase phone was evaluated. The comments given later are: Siri is still at the elementary level, the competitors are already in high school, the sound quality is first class, but Siri is too weak chicken.
This also illustrates the urgent need for Apple Siri from the side door, and gives a strong shot to Siri, who has a bad reputation. After all, the house leaks and the night rain, Apple voice assistant Siri co-founder Tom Gruber is one of the three co-founders of Siri. I chose to leave Apple after the department integration.
Continue to invest in self-developed AI chip A12
At the beginning of this year, the market research report released by market research institute Counterpoint Research showed that the mobile phone chip market is the first in Qualcomm, Apple is the second, and MediaTek is the third. Apple relies on a single product online list, which is not easy, and its strength is obvious.
At present, Apple has launched 13 A series processors. The current flagship model is A11, which is mounted on the iPhone X. Apple calls the CPU, GPU, performance controller, neural network unit, ISP, etc. of the A11 biochip. Independent design and development.
In terms of parameters, A11 uses TSMC's 10nm FinFET process and integrates 4.3 billion transistors. It is equipped with a 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture with 6-core CPUs, including two performance cores called 'Monsoon' and four The high-eggiciency core named 'Mistral' has a performance core that is 25% faster than the previous generation A10, and the energy efficiency core is 70% faster.
It is said that A11 will allocate tasks reasonably between the performance core and the energy efficiency core, intelligently manage tasks appropriately, and hand over lightweight tasks or background tasks to the energy-efficient core for processing, such as texting or browsing the web, many daily Most of the things that are done can be done by an energy-efficient kernel, which consumes less power.
Moreover, this is a neural engine chip that can be used to accelerate artificial intelligence tasks such as face recognition, expression generation, augmented reality, etc. This engine recognizes people, places, objects, and processes machine learning at 600 billion times per second. Mission, at present, augmented reality and one of the main features of Apple's mobile phone.
The latest news is that Apple's A12 chip has entered the final stage, and will be unveiled with the new machine in September this year. The A11 can already match the performance of the notebook chip, which makes the A12 more full of expectations.
Plan to invest $14 billion in research and development in the next 2018
Apple expects R&D costs to reach $14 billion in 2018, nearly double the amount in four years, and the highest percentage of revenue in 14 years, highlighting Apple's growing product ambitions.
Although autonomous driving is an important driver of Apple's R&D spending growth a few years ago, there are now two new projects that have driven the surge in recent R&D spending, and you may not be able to imagine it.
The first is smart glasses. Given Apple's M&A records and patents, we see that Apple is building its smart glasses R&D team, and the team working on this effort can be huge.
This is followed by content distribution. Apple seems to have developed a broader strategy for content. Apple is providing music, video, applications, news and written content to more than 850 million users, and has invested heavily in this area.
Of course, this may be the engine that causes R&D expenses to rise, but research and development in mobile phones and chips must continue and be heavily invested. They certainly hope to continue to lead the way in new technologies in the future.
Apple spent $150 million around 2005 to build the first iPhone. At the time, it was a very substantial cash for Apple. In addition, there was competition for Apple to move forward. It was not enough to control hardware and software. Apple The company has opened a series of R&D centers around the world (China, Japan, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Italy, Israel, Sweden and the UK). Many of the R&D centers are tasked with developing hardware, while some R&D outposts are Apple. The result of the acquisition of the talent team.
Written at the end
According to research firm Ned Davis Research, Apple, Amazon, Google's parent company Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook accounted for 15% of the total value of the S&P 500 index as of June 2018, 澎湃 commented that the technology industry has reached the market A historic dominance.
And Apple, as a trillion-dollar tycoon, needs to secure their lead.
After all, the voice of sing is now a year.