Genius would have been for Apple to get Siri in a better state after so many years.

This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.

I imagine that Google assistant only makes money for Google because they’re an advertising company. Alexa loses money for Amazon and it’s becoming more gated to Prime subscription features as a result. Amazon thought everyone would be buying stuff with their voice and that future never panned out.

It turns out that voice assistants aren’t all that important. Customers aren’t willing to pay for them and they’re more of a nice to have convenience feature.

They didn’t invest in Siri and became the most valuable company in history. I don’t think Siri being better would have mattered much to be honest. Not joining the financial black hole that is AI training seems to have benefited them well so far. But yes, it’s definitely a case of failing upwards.

Adding quotes around “genius” as it seems you misunderstood what I meant

Meh, AI is deep in it's diversification stage -- there are soooooooo many players in the game right now and basically one maybe two will survive once the dust settles. All these frontier labs are fighting tooth and nail to be the one left standing. Apple is making a measured approach saying "hey, we're probably not going to be the Google of AI, but the smartest thing for us to do is to put infrastructure in place so that once there is a contraction (which there will be, think the search engine landscape in the 2000s) we're relatively ahead for relatively little effort/cost."