New Delhi, June 30 -- Since the 2022 launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which kicked off today's AI race, Apple Inc has been seen as a laggard in the arena of artificial intelligence (AI). The company that was once the world's most valuable has no generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), foundation model or noteworthy AI-first products of its own-unlike OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia.

The latter two are seen as AI infrastructure leaders. Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, has embedded its generative models into Azure, Office and GitHub. Nvidia, whose GPUs power nearly every major large language model, has enviable profit margins. Their market caps reflect their AI heft: both touch $3.7 trillion, while Apple lags a...