"The news of Apple launching its own model and talking with Google and OpenAI to license a foundation model speaks to the degree that the company's growth North Star has changed over the past month."

Read More Gene Munster believes Apple now gets it (i.e. AI)

"We demonstrate that for large-scale multimodal pre-training using a careful mix of image-caption, interleaved image-text, and text-only data is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art few-shot results across multiple benchmarks."

Read More Apple reports AI training breakthrough

Cook had told investors on an Nov. 1, 2018, analyst call that although Apple faced sales pressure in markets such as Brazil, India, Russia and Turkey, where currencies had weakened, "I would not put China in that category."

Read More Apple agrees to pay shareholders for Tim Cook's China happy talk