A day later, Jony Ive and Sam Altman kicked down the door and told Google, “Hold my beer.”

Well-funded and big-name partnerships often end in failure. And ex-Apple employees don’t have a great record of success.

Apple’s own struggles with artificial intelligence lend additional power to this narrative. In one of its most damaging setbacks in years, it has failed to come up with a set of AI features that it promised would transform the way people complete tasks on the iPhone.