I've always thought this was the critical point where Google missed the boat. It was 2015. Google was clearly and unambiguously ahead in AI and ML. They also were rampaging to massive majority market share in the mobile OS space. They had the opportunity right at that point to turn Android into the very first AI native operating system. I remember seeing a glimpse of this when I found buried in the Android SDK a face detection feature that accurately located eyes and faces in photographs. I thought at the time: this is it - this is where Google will build AI level features into Android and expose them as platform OS features and Android will race ahead in the computing space and take over the world. The whole programming model will look completely different as devs start using first class AI as a basic feature of their toolkit.

And then it never happened. They focused on cloning iPhone features and approach, dumbing down and simplifying the OS to the point where it's pretty hard to distinguish any more.