> Anyone with money can trivially catch up to a state of the art model from six months ago.

How come apple is struggling then?

Apple is struggling with _productizing_ LLMs for the mass market, which is a separate task from training a frontier LLM.

To be fair to Apple, so far the only mass market LLM use case so far is just a simple chatbot, and they don't seem to be interested in that. It remains to be seen if what Apple wants to do ("private" LLMs with access to your personal context acting as intimate personal assistants) is even possible to do reliably. It sounds useful, and I do believe it will eventually be possible, but no one is there yet.

They did botch the launch by announcing the Apple Intelligence features before they are ready though.

Anyone with enough money and without an entrenched management hierarchy preventing the right people from being hired and enabled to run the project.

It looks more like a strategic decision tbh.

The may want to use 3rd party or just wait for AI to be more stable to see how people actually use it instead of adding slop in the core of their product.

Sit and wait per usual.

Enter late, enter great.