One possibility here is that Google is dribbling out cutting edge releases to slowly bleed out the pure play competition.

> Anyone with money can trivially catch up to a state of the art model from six months ago.

How come apple is struggling then?

Apple is struggling with _productizing_ LLMs for the mass market, which is a separate task from training a frontier LLM.

To be fair to Apple, so far the only mass market LLM use case so far is just a simple chatbot, and they don't seem to be interested in that. It remains to be seen if what Apple wants to do ("private" LLMs with access to your personal context acting as intimate personal assistants) is even possible to do reliably. It sounds useful, and I do believe it will eventually be possible, but no one is there yet.

They did botch the launch by announcing the Apple Intelligence features before they are ready though.

It looks more like a strategic decision tbh.

The may want to use 3rd party or just wait for AI to be more stable to see how people actually use it instead of adding slop in the core of their product.

> It looks more like a strategic decision tbh.

Announcing a load of AI features on stage and then failing to deliver them doesn't feel very strategic.

In contrast to Microsoft, who puts Copilot buttons everywhere and succeeds only in annoying their customers.

But apple intelligence is a thing, and they are struggling to deliver on the promises of apple intelligence.

This is revisionist history. Apple wanted to fully jump in. They even rebranded AI as Apple Intelligence and announced a hoard of features which turned out to be vaporware.

Sit and wait per usual.

Enter late, enter great.

Anyone with enough money and without an entrenched management hierarchy preventing the right people from being hired and enabled to run the project.

Being known as a company that is always six months late than the competitors isn't something to brag about...

I was referring to a new entrant, not perpetual lag

Apple has entered the chat.