> While Apple's focus seems somewhat orthogonal to these other players in terms of its mobile-first, consumer oriented, "edge compute" focus, if it ends up spending enough money on its new contract with OpenAI to provide AI services to iPhone users, you have to imagine that they have teams looking into making their own custom silicon for inference/training

This is already happening today. Most of the new LLM features announced this year are primarily on-device, using the Neural Engine, and the rest is in Private Cloud Compute, which is also using Apple-trained models, on Apple hardware.

The only features using OpenAI for inference are the ones that announce the content came from ChatGPT.