> 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.

Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.

Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.

Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.

> Apple used to be a genuine AI leader

when?