My MacBook Pro runs local models better than anything else in the house and I have not yet needed to install a small nuclear reactor to run it, so, I feel like they're doing fine.

Being rationale.

Rational.

Ha, that too.

Maybe we're not sure if they're being rational or rationalizing.

Apple doing fine and often spend the same 100B in a year buying back Apple stocks.

Losing the race

Right, but is the race to the pot of gold, or the stoplight (in which case by "losing" they save on gas)?

This is not something that can be won. The LLM architecture has been reaching it's limitations slowly but surely. New foundational models are now being tweaked for user engagement rather than productive output.