Regarding journalism and AI, you might find this Atlantic article of interest (You need an Apple New+ or Atlantic journal subscription to read it (I have both). I generally find the Atlantic to reflect thoughtful journalism.
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Yeah, thatās better than most Iāve seen. Itās interesting that the title presents the crash almost as a forgone conclusion. The article does a decent job of painting the picture of the precarious position of the financial underpinnings of the companiesā investments in relation to profits as well as the scale of the build out thus far and the proposed future build out in the context of previous bubbles and collapses.
But in the end sort of leaves it as an open question. We might conclude that it has to be left as open as the future is unwritten. But sometimes there is enough evidence to be more predictive.
Maybe Iāve been listening/reading too many skeptics like Ed Zitron, but I see no evidence to suggest that there will be any outcome other than a massive crash and likely much public money spent to bailout the mistake.
All that said, I think the bigger question to be asking why our public information system and discourse around important new technologies is so muddied. The structure and motivations of that system will prove to be a core of our future problems.
I think the answer in part is that we have allowed ourselves to become acclimated and addicted to a fragmented, siloed, hyperlinked, social media-fueled, superficial, tech-enabled, sensationalized (everything is a crisis), and algorithmically manipulated world of our own making and choosing. Other than that, we are doing fine. 
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Yep. I got my first Gmail account in 2004, and may have used Google search every day I worked in I.T.
Iāve been reading articles and books by Cory Doctorow for over 20 years. His latest book is Enshittification and while I havenāt read it yet I expect Google and every other major tech firm will be mentioned in it. Many were in his most recent interview with the Verge.
No one gets to be one of the largest companies in the world with perfectly clean hands.
Though I generally agree with your sentiment, I do have to say that we didnāt make or chose the algorithms being used or to even use an algorithm.
Much of our world has been made by a fairly small group of people. This is especially true of the digital world.
It all becomes a bit difficult to discuss. I could say that many continue to āchooseā to use those sites even with some knowledge of the manipulation but I think itās also true to say that what any of us on the outside knows or understands about the degree of manipulation is limited. Choice in such a system is really not the correct word to use.
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I really hope that that thereās a second wave of companies who can provide AI powered browsers (more) safely and privately. Maybe Apple will be in that second wave. I had a proper play with Comet the other evening and, yeah, it was kind of amazing.
I opened up Power Automate in Office 365, described a Flow I wanted it to create, and it built the entire thing from scratch via the UI, including some more complex stuff like putting conditional authorisations in, stuff like that. That would usually be a solid 30 minutes work for me to get that set up manually, and it did it entirely in the background after one slightly long prompt.
I then asked it to look through my Inbox, and any emails that had actions for me, summarise what they are in a table. I then scanned the actions it shortlisted, and any I agreed with that needed actioning, I got it to forward the respective email to my Omnifocus account. The rest it archived. Worked great.
I then opened up a OneDrive folder and chucked a random assortment of files in there, and asked it to organise the folder into suitable sub-folders. Which it went away and did quite happily.
Then I went to SharePoint, asked it to find a company policy, open it in Word Online, search for typos, and list them all in a table. Worked flawlessly.
At the moment, this feels like such a vulnerable tech that Iām really not comfortable using it all the time. I definitely wouldnāt use it to browse the general web.
But having played around with it, thereās a lot of possibilities that keep popping into my head that could be huge time savers. So, yeah, someone needs to evolve this tech fast.
I think that is fair, though many may have far more choice than they chose to exercise. We sometimes make a priority of things that perhaps should not be a priorityāIām thinking of mindless TikTok scrolling as a simple example. 
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Yes, that is a small example of what I have in mind for an AI platform, with privacy, that can do many things and over time, replace many apps.
The example provided by @nfdksdfkh is totally Microsoft-based, and it goes to show how MS is busy adding AI capabilities to a existing set of server based tools that Apple does not have (mentioning Flow, Sharepoint, Power Automate)
They donāt need GPT-5 for this, most of this stuff is simple for previous gen models so they are keen to begin monetizing it through Office 365 subscriptions.
How is Apple going to tackle similar capabilities with its privacy-first approach and its less featureful iCloud? Intriguing!
I donāt think they will. So far their goals for Apple Intelligence are things that can run on an iPhone and/or in their private cloud compute.
Since most businesses use either Microsoft or Google, and they already offer AI tools for their customers, I would expect Apple to partner with both of them.