>I don't know what happened to them. When AI breakthrough happened, I expected them to put up a fight. They never did.

Apple always had the luxury of time. They work heavily on integrating deeply into their ecosystems without worrying about the pace of the latest development. eg. Widgets were a 2023 feature for iOS. They do it late, but do it well.

The development in the LLM space was and is too fast for Apple to compete in. They usually pave their own path and stay in their lane as a leader. The impact on Apple's brand image will be tarnished if Google, Meta, OpenAI, MS all leapfrog Apple's models every 2-3 months. That's just not what the Apple brand is associated with.