They should be. The slight improvements in messaging autocomplete in iOS 17 have made a noticeable difference in my texting. To have an iPhone that understands me, and a Siri that doesn’t say, “Here’s what I found on the web” is extremely valuable.
Idk. It looks like Apple is happy to sell you the hardware to do the image recognition etc on your own device and receive the result. They can claim privacy and save on computation.
The problem is that a significant amount of the already-made GPUs are in use. Even if they can afford to throw money at it, where is that money going to go?
The best they can do is out-bid their competitors, for the competitors hardware. I'm sure apple doesn't want to pay Google for GCP resource to train an AI. Again, there may not be enough companies renting out GPUs at all.
Apple has a lot of cash to throw at it. Question would be if Apple is even interested in it.