I love Apple and almost exclusively purchase their products. That being said, they will never lead in this realm. The worst students from my graduate studies joined Apple and NVIDIA. The top researchers in this field went into Google and OpenAI. Just look at linkedin profiles. Over time, Apple is destined to fall behind, given they do not pay as much as their competitors, and are much less reluctant to invest in the capital required to improve these models (despite larger capital, Apple leadership is surprisingly illiterate. Cook and Ternus are not software guys). Google has TPUs, and I am of the opinion their model will be used in future iphones (Sundar and Sam Altman are other illiterates, but there are very talented people at Google rn and should they have the reigns, I am confident they will dominate this field). Just looking at linkedin, the people that published tiny improvements in models are at Apple, those who truly contributed to these models through publications are at Google.
The recent revelations from The Information and quotes supporting it that came from Gurman last week back up your overall prediction.
Interestingly, Cook is said to be a huge believer in AI, yet he was unable to execute on it, even by making an ideal hire in John Giannandrea. JG toiled at Apple for years, unable to make groundbreaking progress due to Apple's corporate culture. It's an ol' boys club of forceful execs who have worked together for decades, and they all opposed spending what JG wanted.
If JG couldn't make an impact, no one will. What disappoints me the most is that Apple's "Not Invented Here" syndrome is so severe that I suspect they'll never admit full defeat and let users replace the rotten-to-the-core "Siri" assistant with a competent one, no matter how far behind they fall.
Right now it's Google's game to lose. Once Android devices are doing the kinds of things that should be easy for current models to do, real things as useful as a human assistant could do, it'll be the first meaningful challenge to Apple's dominance on the high end of the market. Things like "Answer all my calls while I'm in meetings, tell all sales calls I'm not interested, and for all others, if it isn't an emergency, take a message and tell them I'll call them back, and book 15 minutes on my calendar within the next day to do it."
I can’t really tell if this is true or Apple just has a laggard’s strategy and they will just wait it out and build their tech on the cheap.
I agree. I lost hope in Apple's AI "efforts" when I found out that their MLX team (responsible for making a Pytorch/CUDA alternative for Apple Silicon) DOES NOT have access to the source code of ANE (Apple Neural Engine)!! Only the team behind Apple Intelligence uses ANE, not the MLX team.
Talk about fragmentation and lack of trust/hope in your product.