> It does not make much sense if you want to work on some niche project not made for the general audience.

I think that depends on your perspective. "General audience" products are always a conglomeration of "niche projects not made for the general audience". There's still fun to be had.

Waymo had similar pay structure with similarly huge payouts in the early days while still a part of google. People figured out how go game the performance metrics got their bag and then promptly retired

Apple is shipping a ~3 billion parameter LLM for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS; it's the largest LLM for mobile devices. Right now, Meta, Google, etc., mobile LLMs are in the 1.5—2 billion parameter range. It can seamlessly use much larger models via Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers.

Probably within a couple of weeks of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 shipping this fall, Apple will have the most widely deployed LLMs accessible to 3rd-party app developers.

In beta versions of the operating systems, end users can already create automations that incorporate the use of these Foundation Models.

More details: "Meet the Foundation Models Framework" -- https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286