My guess is a leapfrog would have more to do with how LLMs are integrated into an operating system, rather than just coming out with a better model. I don’t think we’re gonna get a substantially more capable LLM than GPT-4 anytime soon, but fine-tuning it to sit on top of the core of an operating system could yield results.
Feels like Microsoft already beat them to the punch. Their ONNX toolkit has better ARM optimization than Apple's own Pytorch patches, and their collaboration with OpenAI places them pretty far ahead of the research curve. I'm convinced Microsoft could out-maneuver Apple on local or remote AI functionality, if they wanted to.
