Apple exec shares a shocking take on Google's future
In the last few years as the tech sector has embraced artificial intelligence, we’ve seen a lot of rapid changes and big predictions about even more change to come.
It seems as if AI is suddenly everywhere and being stuffed into everything, causing some consumers to complain that they never asked for it. Did we really need summaries under every Facebook post to further explain each aspect of what we were looking at? Some users feel additions like this are unnecessary, but they keep coming.
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The amount of money companies are plowing into AI development clearly signifies that there’s a strong belief in the possibilities of the technology. Microsoft and OpenAI, for instance, are planning to build a $100 billion supercomputer to build and run AI models, according to The Information. Apple (APPL) has vowed to spend $500 billion in the next four years in the U.S., with a large portion of that investment going into AI.
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Now a key Apple executive has spoken out about the future of AI search engines, and if he’s right, it would change the way we use the internet in a massive way.
Apple says this technology could actually replace Google
While testifying in a Washington federal court for the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet (GOOGL) regarding its illegal domination of search markets, Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue shared some information that shook investors so hard that Alphabet’s stock took a sharp 7.3% drop, hacking about $150 billion from the company’s market value.
According to Cue, AI search engines will eventually replace the search engines we know and have used for decades, such as Google. Cue also said he expects to add AI services to Safari in the future, which would be sourced from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic.
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Searches on Safari fell 11% in April for the first time in 22 years, which Cue attributes to users more often using AI instead.
Should Cue’s prediction come to pass, it would have an earth-shattering effect on the two companies. Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine for iPhone — $20 billion in 2022, according to the testimony in the trial.
Cue said he has “lost a lot of sleep” over the possibility of the Google/Apple deal potentially coming to an end.
Google addresses Apple’s take
Google released a response to Cue’s comments on May 7 on its official blog, saying, “We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens. We’re excited to continue this innovation and look forward to sharing more at Google I/O.”
In other words, Google is not worried (at least not publicly). And while AI is fast becoming a part of everyday life, research indicates that we aren’t at the point of seeing Google vanish off the map just yet. A surprising 44% of people think they do not regularly interact with AI, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 11,004 U.S. adults. And the number one thing people are using AI for in 2025 is therapy and professional support, per data from Harvard Business Review.
So while Cue may be seeing a version of the future, it’s certainly not here yet. But the idea that we would no longer “Google” things and instead just ask AI — which frequently provides incorrect answers — is a wild thought indeed.
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