Apple briefly overtakes Microsoft to become world's most valuable company

New York: With a brief return to the top spot, Apple overtook Microsoft as the largest corporation in the world on Wednesday based on stock price. Since revealing AI technologies at its annual developers' conference on Monday, the iPhone behemoth is on a Wall Street tear.

As investors praised Microsoft for its unabashed release of new generative AI products under the CoPilot name, Apple, which had been slow to develop its AI strategy, lost its long-held top rank in January.

Microsoft lost the lead for a few hours on Wednesday, but with a $3.27 trillion valuation, they narrowly came back to the top by the end of the day. In value, Apple was $3.26 trillion.

Apple Intelligence, a new AI platform that the company introduced on Monday, will be progressively integrated into an upcoming iOS 18 operating system release.

Only Apple's highest-end hardware will support the technology, so interested parties will have to shell out more money to take advantage of the AI features, AFP reported.

Although initially lukewarm, analysts are now of the opinion that the iPhone's enhanced capabilities will encourage the company's 1.5 billion users to update their devices in order to utilise the AI capabilities.

Apple CEO Tim Cook explained in an interview that the company has carefully embraced generative AI, "which has its downsides," but that the ChatGPT-style technology "was never off the table."

"It was always about pursuing it in a thoughtful way," he told the Marques Brownlee podcast on Wednesday.

"We've implemented it in ways that are less likely to create issues" on violating data privacy, he said.