Apple's AI work is decent for what it is, and their AI hardware is fine too, but so much of this article is just weird.

It starts by talking about how until recently Apple wasn't doing AI work where it needed to be. Then there's the weird excerpt where he claims Google is “not known for shipping consumer experiences that are used by hundreds of millions of people.” The author then raises the legitimate point that AI benefits from having lots of data to train on, but then quotes an answer by Giannandrea to a different question, which includes him stating that bigger models aren't more accurate than smaller ones. The point that on-device inference is more responsive is valid but not unique to Apple; the article says “Android phones don't do nearly as wide an array of machine learning tasks locally”, but I don't think this is true.

Apple’s chips are way better so whether they’re doing more locally or not they have the headroom to do a lot more.

I would agree with that characterization of Google. They have a very small handful of successes and an enormous pile of failures that they’ve discarded. They give every impression of not really knowing what to do.

I think Giannandrea was also referring specifically to the kinds of experiences Apple can provide on the iOS and iPadOS platform because of their high end hardware and deep software integration. Google has yet to replicate that, and even seem to be bored with Android recently: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/08/05/wear-os-music

What AI failures have Google had? Google Home is much better than Siri or Alexa. The camera feature in Google Translate works really well. Their new auto subtitles on Android work really well. Searching photos for objects works really well.

The only thing I can think of is that think they demoed that would call restaurants to book them for you, but that was clearly highly experimental, and it's not like Apple has done that.