Tim Cook’s praise for DeepSeek AI is politics, not endorsement

Tim Cook enthusing in an interview about China’s app developers — image credit: China Daily

During his latest visit to China, Apple CEO Tim Cook has praised the country’s DeepSeek AI technology, but the resulting claims that this means Apple will adopt it are exaggerated.

Cook’s China visit has included a stop at Zhejiang University, which is the alma mater of Liang Wenfeng, founder of the DeepSeek AI technology. And according to Bloomberg, Cook has now also visited DeepSeek’s home town.

However, that’s not remotely as significant as it is being portrayed, since that home town is Hangzhou — which is where Zhejiang University is based. It’s also where Alibaba is located, which is the firm confirmed to be working with Apple on bringing Apple Intelligence to China.

Cook flew to China, at least partly, in order to attend the annual China Development Forum in Beijing, which is about 800 miles from Hangzhou. According to the South China Morning Post, Cook took time out of that conference to praise DeepSeek.

Just not very much time. Cook called DeepSeek’s Large Language Models “excellent” — and that was it. Even the South China Morning Post said that he wouldn’t elaborate.

It’s not as if Cook had the slightest reluctance to praise China. In an interview with the China Daily Twitter channel, for instance, he enthused about how the creativity of Chinese developers is “second to none.”

In comparison, called DeepSeek’s LLMs “excellent” sounds like something you say when pressed for a comment. It does not sound like Tim Cook is necessarily a fan of DeepSeek.

He could well be, since what’s notable about DeepSeek’s LLMs is that they are used particularly efficiently. And developing them cost a few millions of dollars, compared to the billions that have been invested in OpenAI.

So maybe Cook was hoping to catch the eye of DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng, maybe he is building up to proposing a partnership. Maybe there already is a deal with DeepSeek coming to Apple Intelligence in the way that ChatGPT has, and Google Gemini is expected to.

But when you’re visiting someone’s home, it’s only polite to say nice things. Even if you weren’t also Apple’s unofficial political strategist.