> they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution

I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.

I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.

They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.

They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.

They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.

Let's be very real about Siri... it is a sad implementation of what has a lot of potential.

Talking to my HomeKit, turning on and off lights, sometimes, other times, "I don't know what lights you are talking about", "I can't find those lights" even though they're visible and reachable and controllable about the app.

"Do X" "Okay", "Do [very very similar synonym for X]" "I don't know what you're talking about."

CarPlay and Siri, unless you make sure permissions match, with CarPlay giving you navigation, press the Speech button, "Find me the nearest Starbucks." "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".

It has nothing to do with "not being in the LLM laboratory business". I get, and agree with that. But Siri has been around for 14 years at this point and is barely more than a simple voice control for alarm clocks and timers and "play music", at this point.

I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?

> I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.

I mean, they said it was.