Apple is only "behind" if you think they're in the same race. They haven't shown any interest in developing frontier models or taking on the enormous costs of doing so.

Did you even watch Apple Intelligence ads? They were very much in the race, just that they got ahead of themselves a bit.

They were touting the same features that other companies are now delivering. Point the phone at something, and it'll tell you what you're looking at. Or summarize news articles etc. Instead we got .. emojithingy