Earlier quoted context omitted.
In retrospect this is very similar to the Apple strategy: don’t invest heavily in doing something that isn’t already a core competency, position for novel uses of the tech but don’t build it per se. Apple probably would have benefitted in the last 4 quarters from hyping a custom model stack but it doesn’t seem that this strategy paid off to even close to 20% ROI while Apple got to hold their cash and organizational f…
But paying so little attention to it that it no longer is a core competency? As in, the people most representative of that competency leaving in droves? I doubt that was the plan.
My own personal opinion is that they’re great at design, UX, hardware, and even some power user desktop software (lifetime Logic Pro addict here). I would say it’s a stretch to call anything they have ever done with ML to be anything near cutting edge compared to Google, for whom all of the “hard” problems of recommendation, search, NLP, and other ML have been the absolute focus of their SaaS, white papers, and web offerings for close to 30 years