Apple might be right.

There's no money in llm itself.

OpenAI and Anthropic are in pure competition with Chinese labs in race to the bottom of price while ever more difficult effort to improve the models.

Then there's Apple sitting back and letting billions and billions roll in doing nothing.

And when the time comes, Apple can rebrand the llm layer with some Chinese frontier lab's open sourced llm calling it Apple Intelligence and call it the most privacy focused AI there is. People will pay for monthly subscription for 9.99 because it's integrated with iOS at OS level and apps will develop around it.

Do nothing and win. The apple way.