We recently published a list of Top 10 AI News You Shouldn’t Miss. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stands against other top AI news you shouldn’t miss.

All everyone could talk about in the technical AI landscape these days is DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese open-source LLM that analysts believe can give major American AI companies a run for their money. Why is DeepSeek making waves and why is it called a breakthrough in the AI race?

DeepSeek AI model is several times cheaper to use for professional purposes when compared to its American counterparts including OpenAI’s o1 model. Media reports also suggest the model beat almost all key AI models in the industry by significant margins.

CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa explained what makes these Chinese models a challenge for US tech companies:

“The cost, I mean, these models coming out of China are just built at a fraction of the price when you think about OpenAI. That’s spending $5 billion a year, burning through billions of dollars a year. These models, the DeepSeek for example, they say they built it for less than $6 million. ByteDance as well, you know, shows that it was built and you can access it at much, much lower prices. So, this really turns on sort of this truth that we have thought about generative AI for the last few years—that you need hundreds of millions of dollars to develop bigger and better models. What the Chinese labs and companies are doing is they’re going straight to the frontier. They’re building with sort of infrastructure and outputs that are already out there, built in many cases by American companies and startups, and they’re improving on it, they’re innovating on it, and producing models that are just as good, in some cases, at a fraction of the cost.”

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For this article, we picked 10 AI stocks currently in the news. With each company we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 158

Bonawyn Eison, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner, Wynsource Partners, recently said on CNBC that he does not believe AI would be a strong enough driver for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to take the company to the next level.

“I just don’t understand what the real drivers of the super cycle are, and if AI is the catalyst behind it, I can understand that. They don’t have the same cashback spend as some of the other MAGs, so there’s a floor there. But in terms of what’s going to take what is already a fully valued company to the next level and lead to, either for me, P/E expansion, I don’t think AI is a story yet, or I don’t see it.”

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is desperately in need of new catalysts. The company’s revenue in China fell 8% in fiscal year 2024, following a 2% decline the previous year. The Chinese market accounts for about 15% of Apple’s total revenue, so this downtrend cannot be ignored.

Investors had hopes from the Wearables, Home, and Accessories segment, but so far its performance has been weak. Vision Pro faces tough competition from Meta’s $500 Quest and the more affordable Quest 3S, making it hard to justify its $3,500 price tag. The failure of Apple’s HomePod, unable to compete with Amazon’s and Google’s lower-priced offerings, further highlights the challenges in this market.

Apple’s iPhone 16 has not shown promising growth prospects yet and investors are still in a wait-and-see mode on the AI platform.

CDT Capital Management stated the following regarding Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

“The crowd. While this evolution in AI is going to change the world, market expectations for the technology have become unhinged. The crowd, which is more like an exuberant mob, anointed the Mag 7 with spectacular, nonsensical valuations based on the premise that AI will be an amazing, money-printing growth engine for these companies – and the truth is it likely will be. The problem is that the math just isn’t mathing.

Let me explain what I mean by picking on the world’s most valuable stock, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL). For background, Apple does not have a robust homegrown AI platform, nor does it have a plan to meaningfully monetize AI from Apple users. Right now, from our perspective, Apple’s, Apple Intelligence strategy of implementing third-party AI tools to stay competitive will likely be more of a cost of doing business than an avenue for sales and yet in 2024, the stock soared +33% based on the AI dream as exemplified by the quote below.

Overall, AAPL ranks 3rd on our list of top AI news you shouldn’t miss. While we acknowledge the potential of AAPL, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AAPL but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.