Apple's tune will completely change the second they get a leading LLM - Look at all the super important and useful things you can do with "Apple General Intelligence"!
I suppose it's "fair" since it's published on the Apple website with the authors' Apple affiliations, but historically speaking, at least in ML where publication is relatively fast-paced and low-overhead, academic papers by small teams of individual researchers have in no way reflected the opinions of e.g. the executives of a large company. I would not be particularly surprised to see another team of Apple researchers publishing a paper in the coming weeks with the opposite take, for example.
On the other hand future events have no bearing on what Herring was saying, only the accuracy of it.