Apple has a large AI group, including both the Siri team and the one designing the Inference hardware in the A/M series processors (the "Neural Engine"). And you can bet that there are a lot of AI people working in the heavily rumored auto group. None of those are directly LLM directed, but I don't know why you think that apple does not have any experience in this space.

I work in this space (language & sequence modeling) and I also know people who work in the self-driving space.

They have little expertise in language specifically. Relative to almost all other tech companies, they have a very small amount of the DL practicioner share.

Self driving is a completely orthogonal problem and Apple is mostly relying on classical techniques there, not DL. Hardware groups are not modeling groups.