But at this point, I think the only ways to catch up is to gobble up a few AI powered startups with their cash.
If this fails, I don't think 'Apple has little experience with building AI-driven software' will be a prominent reason. It would in a simulated world where Apple was not allowed hire any expertise, acquire any companies or technology and spend none of its cash, but could only divert the engineers who worked on Siri to this project. Sure. But that just isn't the case.
They don't. Android was an acquisition and so was Waymo.
Now, many years later and with normal amounts of turn over? That's a different question all together.
What they bought likely doesn't even exist anymore in the current code base.
Additionally, the origin of iOS is based on Apple's acquisition of NeXT.
Is good enough for the cast majority of users but not as slick and quite as feature rich as the competitors? Sure.
But the privacy angle means it’s the only game in town as far as I’m concerned
Apple keeps that history tied to a unique user identifier for six months but doesn't let the user see it.
A bit? The gap is large and only getting larger by the year.
Google has been working on understanding humans for 20 years and building global scale services. It's no coincidence that it is moving much faster than Apple in this space.
Waymo's software also drives plenty of virtual miles in the very same "cloud" using collected data - aspects that gp disparages as irrelevant.