You can't be AI leader when every AI leader is staying away from you by 10ft pole. When Ian Goodfellow joined Apple, there was literally rain of criticism on him from ending his career as researcher to bowing down to money. I don't know of any researcher who does want to have continued research career willing to join Apple. They simply don't allow that kind of freedom or publishing results. While Apple has some strong points in imaging (thanks to their 1000+ people team) and wrist rejection, virtually everything else they do that requires AI sucks and lags behind competition, including, Siri, maps, autocorrect, spell check, iCloud, search, calendar, spam detection, recommendations etc. For most of these things, most people don't even count them as real competition. Google on the other hand is able to achieve very competitive performance through software and AI without such large team on phone camera and frankly quite pathetic hardware.

These kind of reality distortion pieces aren't going to help them. They have $100+B, in cash, they can easily start reputable open research lab that can rival FAIR, OpenAI or DeepMind. Even a smaller companies like Intel and Adobe is starting to realize that this is necessary so they can tap into expertise on demand. At minimum that will be totally worth for a talent pipeline that can be motivated to do "rotation" or "sabbaticals" into product groups from an open lab.