Maybe, but being a foundation model provider means running neck to neck with small incremental improvements twice a year at astronomical expense. Maybe Apple has intentionally decided to sit it out and swoop in later once things have settled down.

This strategy makes a lot of sense if you believe that progress will plateau at the current level with small incremental improvements in reliability and UX. Apple really only pays a price if failing to develop their own foundation model results in their phones not selling, which doesn't seem to be the case, regardless of how much of an embarrassment Siri is. Right now, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Grok are all bludgeoning each other with trillions of dollars and creating a perfect situation for Apple to swoop in in a couple years when reliability is sorted out and GPU compute has crashed to rock-bottom prices.

Well, exactly.

"Providing tokens" is the bottom layer of the value chain. If you can't build a moat around it, it's a race to the bottom because you can only compete on price.

Apple doesn't compete on the bottom of the value chain.

This makes a lot of sense