Sounds a lot like a company that wanted to build a new house of the future but found out they prefer redesigning the light fixtures, faucets, etc rather than the house itself. Aka the general UX details rather that would be ideal in a modern house rather than the house itself.
Apple probably would never have developed the smartphone first but they did a hell of a good job at getting all the details right with the iPhone once the bigger picture was worked out by other companies - and general technical progress.
I'd imagine the same thing for the future AI interface. I'd want my AI front-end to be developed by Apple but my pedestrian detection algorithm developed by Google, and my car designed by BMW.
The most important thing for talented people (and by proxy organizations) to figure is what they are best at contributing to the world and focusing on that. Instead of trying to do everything.
"Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively"
For Apple's task of building a automated car, industrial design is an "unimportant but easy-to-grasp" issue since Apple's expertise is design. They should have focused on the harder core problem of a car that can drive itself.
In fact this seems almost like an archetypical example of bikeshedding.
