I was talking more about massive investments in compute and model development. Voice assistants are barely AI, but real AI might help make better ones in the future. Similarly, I think Apple's failed attempts to add AI to macOS and iOS are a huge justification of avoiding capital investments in compute and AI frontier models.

There's two separate things here: 1) the underlying models, and 2) how they are applied to real world tasks. Both are changing at tremendous speed. The underlying models, 1), can be purchased as a component, so there's little advantage to vertical integration, as long as there's a robust competitive market, and boy is there ever. And Apple was never going to be the big B2B provider for LLM compute and models, such sales are just not in their corporate DNA.

For 2), application of AI in Apple's products, nobody knows how to do that correctly yet, and it's going to a wild few years of people trying things and failing before something comes to pass. Waiting to see where to actually find a competitive edge totally makes sense. Microsoft's Copilot bungling was far worse than Apple AI's bungling, for example. I can't even get access to Microsoft Office anymore, it seems, I'm instead confronted with a dumb chat interface that doesn't even know how to launch a new document or open existing ones. At least Apple never destroyed their brand like that...