> and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?

A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.

So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty big deal.

But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that even if LLMs did somehow lead to AGI that the same result wouldn't be achieved by everyone currently building "State of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within days/months of each other).

So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and I'm not particularly an Apple fan.