In the race to dominate artificial intelligence, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta has just upped the game and Apple, once the undisputed king of innovation, is now quietly shopping for brains it didn’t build. As Meta launches its Superintelligence Labs with billion-dollar bets and $100 million signing bonuses, Apple is weighing whether to outsource Siri’s smarts to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Building up the momentum, Meta recently smashed through its all-time stock high, soaring to $747.90 in midday trading, a clear signal that Wall Street is all-in on Zuckerberg’s AI endgame. The surge comes months after the company ruthlessly trimmed 5% of its workforce, cutting what it labeled “low performers,” in a brutal refocus on AI dominance. Now, with its Superintelligence Labs officially launched, investors are betting big on Meta’s new outlook – fewer humans, more machine minds.

Joining the likes of Microsoft and Nvidia, Meta now sits comfortably among the tech titans rewriting stock market records – while laggards like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Tesla are still trying to claw their way back to peak valuation territory. But what sets Meta apart isn’t just its market cap, it’s the muscle behind its hiring spree.

Zuckerberg is more than just a CEO in the present, he is the leading commander of an AI arms race, throwing down $14.3 billion to pull in Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief, and snapping up Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, minds behind Safe Superintelligence. Meta even tried to buy the startup outright, only to be blocked by AI guru and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, proving not everyone can be bought, even in Silicon Valley.

Still, Meta’s raids haven’t stopped. It’s been poaching top-tier AI scientists from OpenAI, reportedly offering signing bonuses as jaw-dropping as $100 million. Even OpenAI boss Sam Altman has acknowledged the battlefield, while Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth called this talent war “unprecedented” in his two-decade tech career.

Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs are now home to projects like Llama and foundational research units – Meta’s brain factory – making his ambition known, he’s not just building products anymore but building a mind that might one day outthink us all.

….And Apple?

While Meta is busy constructing its own AI super gods, Apple appears to be fumbling through a spiritual crisis and may soon outsource Siri’s brain!

In what marks a stunning reversal for a company that once prided itself on closed ecosystems and vertical control, Apple is now reportedly in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic to power the next version of Siri. Yes, the same Siri that has barely evolved beyond setting timers and mishearing basic commands may soon get a brain transplant but from someone else’s lab.

The news sent Apple’s stock up 2%, but behind the scenes, the move reeks of urgency more than strategy. Although, discussions are still early, and no deal has been inked, but the fact that Apple is even entertaining third-party large language models and asking them to train custom versions for Apple’s own cloud  suggests Cupertino knows it is late to the AI party and might not have time to build its own engine from scratch.

This scramble comes on the heels of repeated delays. Earlier this year, Apple quietly announced that meaningful AI updates to Siri will not arrive until 2026 (an eternity in AI years). Tim Cook’s frustration reportedly boiled over, triggering a behind-the-scenes shake-up that saw John Giannandrea, Apple’s former AI chief, lose control of Siri to Mike Rockwell.

Meanwhile, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple served up “practical” features like real-time call translation, useful, sure, but miles behind the sweeping AI ambitions Meta and Google are aggressively chasing. Software chief Craig Federighi tried to salvage the situation by opening Apple’s in-house foundational model to third-party developers and adding OpenAI-powered code suggestions into Xcode, but even that felt more like catch-up than innovation.

The Last Bit, Meta vs. Apple

At the heart of Silicon Valley’s AI fever dream, two tech giants are moving in sharply different directions. Meta is going all-in (recruiting the brightest minds, pouring billions into infrastructure, and openly chasing superintelligence like it’s a moonshot mission) Apple, on the other hand, is tiptoeing its way through the AI maze, stuck between maintaining control and confronting the uncomfortable truth that it may have fallen behind.

While, Meta’s approach is clear – build fast, build big, build in-house. Whether it’s aggressively hiring from rivals with $100 million offers or attempting takeovers of frontier startups like Safe Superintelligence, Zuckerberg is signaling that AI isn’t just a feature but Meta’s future. 

Apple, meanwhile, is hedging. Faced with missed deadlines, executive reshuffles, and a Siri that’s still stuck in the 2010s, it now finds itself considering what was once unthinkable –  letting OpenAI or Anthropic handle the heavy lifting. The world’s most secretive and self-contained company is now quietly testing third-party models on its own cloud, trying to play catch-up while preserving its image of polished perfection.

The contrast – Meta wants to own the intelligence of tomorrow. Apple just wants Siri to stop embarrassing itself. And in the battle for AI supremacy, that philosophical divide may be what separates the builders of tomorrow’s minds from those just trying to rent one.

While Meta engineers minds, Apple is still debugging Siri, period!