If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly diversified revenue stream.
Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
> Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product
Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.
Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
Apple is rarely first to the party. They wait until the tech is ready for prime time and until they have an implementation that makes sense and feels inevitable. Then the rest of the industry tends to uses that as the model and shifts to copy them.
Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, but once they made the iPod, everyone wanted an iPod. It was cool. Most other players pivoted to be more iPod-like.
Apple didn’t make the first smart phone. Smart phones were semi-niche devices for businessmen and nerds. Once the iPhone came out, everyone wanted it and the whole market changed.
Apple didn’t make the first smart watch, but once they did, their smart watch was more capable and integrated than the others and went on to outsell Rolex.
Apple didn’t make the first tablet. Microsoft tried to push the idea repeatedly 10 years earlier. Apple waited and came out with the iPad once multitouch was a thing and they could build an OS around touch. 15 years after its launch, it’s still the only tablet anyone actually talks about.
Steve Jobs talked about putting the customer experience first and selecting technologies that will be around for the next 10+ years, rather than chasing the latest bleeding edge tech, just to say you’re using it and trying to find a way to shoehorn it in.
To know what tech is going to stick around and to find how to best implement it takes time for things to mature a little bit. This means sacrificing the bleeding edge for a more thoughtful and stable approach.
Tim Cook doesn’t have the same kind of vision as Jobs, so I think some of this has been lost, but this has been their history for a long time, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful.
Everything you said is so true, but it doesn't negate the fact that Apple has been all-in on LLMs since GPT-3, but they've been struggling to integrate LLMs into Siri while being fully aware of market demand... Going so far as to sell an entire line of new AI iPhones without ever actually shipping core features from the keynote.
In your examples market demand from existing customers of iMacs wasn't pointed at Apple to create the iPod. iPod customers weren't demanding that Apple create the iPhone. And iPhone customers weren't seething over the lack of a first-party watch option. Apple customers are looking across the landscape and can see every other phone manufacturer running circles around Siri, and this integration with Gemini really feels like they're throwing in the towel.
You’re right. This is where Cook lacks the clear vision and stubbornness of Jobs to either keep quiet publicly, or say that the technology simply isn’t up to Apple’s standards yet to release… and tack the lumps in the meantime. Jobs did this a lot.
The thing is, Siri doesn’t need an LLM for Apple customers to use an LLM. The App Store exists and iPhone users can download ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc, etc, etc. They can map their favorite one to the action button if they want quick access.
I don’t see a major need for Apple to rush something out the door that doesn’t live up to their quality standard. From my use of LLMs, I still don’t think it lives up to the standards needed to hand out to a billion people and say “use this, you can trust it”. Even if their internal models were as good as the best ones on the market, I still think the press would treat it as another Apple Maps situation. I’m saying that with LLMs of today, not even the ones from the GPT-3 days.
Cook is too eager to say stuff that will please the stockholders, so he teased the AI stuff and had a big AI phone release before they had a product that was viable to release. That’s a theme with him.
Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
Weeeeelllll that was mainstream a long long time before they adopted it. And I'm still annoyed that the only devices with Lightning in our house are my Airpods en iPhone mini 12 and wife's iPhone 14 Pro.
Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.
It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
Same… I love MagSafe and would prefer to use it. I’m always worried about yanking the computer with the USB-C charger in and breaking the cable or the port.
But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.
The battery life is sufficient that I never feel the need to leave it umbilical-ed to an outlet across the room. I'll leave it docked at my desk, or use it wirelessly, or charge it at a conference room table, or recharge it after the day is done in my hotel room as I sleep.
Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.
I might as well just use the official magsafe power cable that came with my macbook if I were to do that. The point was more convenience. I have a USB-C charger at my desk, at my bed, at the couch, etc. Anywhere I am I can just plug in without fiddling with other cables (or connectors). Ultimately I'm lazy and just want to simplify my cable management :)
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
This is very much what apple wants you to believe; they have very good PR.
In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.
Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p
> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.
USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.
The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
It's short term annoyance for a long term greater good. I'm not oblivious - but of course the impact on me is simply negative (and I'm not going to leave the walled garden anyway so what were we ever achieving really)
They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence.
There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Lately, they've arguably been starting from their own priorities (i.e. pushing and protecting their "services" revenue at all cost) and working backwards to an acceptable user experience from there.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Then again, remember millimeterwave? But yes, as a general rule I think your point still stands.
> Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats
I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them?
I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"
Is the iPod your only example? That was a quarter century ago.
What's hot about less ports, no headphone jack, no SD card, a tax when buying apps for your phone, planned obsolescence, antagonistic behavior towards app and software developers, an unchanged aluminum rectangle, thinner devices that look cool at the cost of performance and efficiency, heaviest laptops and phones on the market, phones made out of glass front and back, the touchbar, the notch, etc.?
> if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
A pair four-trillion dollar companies striking a deal in the hottest technology space since the internet getting headline treatment is not evidence of a forcing function.
> Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though
That's evidence they forced themselves. Not that there was a forcing function. That's the whole point of the top comment. (Mine.) They rushed where they didn't have to. And I still don't think they need to rush.
That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there:
A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.
The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.
Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.
But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.
This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:
1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.
2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier
3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities
4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code
I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.
But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.
That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.
Apple provides high-value services like iMessage, iCloud, iPhotos, Apple Maps, Apple Health etc. They hold mountains of people’s personal data and interactions. These services provide the personalized experiences that allows Apple’s hardware to be so sticky.
These services are threatened by the emerging competitive landscape. Apple is panicking, and there is a forcing function, because their users are spending more and more time with LLMs having the most personal experiences they’ve ever had with any software, and Apple isn’t getting a piece of that pie. They’re in a very high risk position because this is the heart of their brand and as data is slowly siphoned away into apps and services that are providing the experiences their users are growing to expect, that moat and stickiness is eroding.
That said, this precisely why it’s taken so long. While Apple is desperate, they are completely unwilling to disrespect their users trust and mishandle their personal data or compromise their privacy.
I mean, maybe if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Or maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises and it was all intentional and part of a well orchestrated plan from the outset? Seems like an odd strategy
> if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Which is not how headlines work.
You may have an argument that Apple is under pressure. But your headline argument is bananas.
> maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises
Where did you get that?
The attitude I called "fucked up" is precisely rushing to make promises and then meet them. Apple's sales don't suggest customers are putting material pressure on Cupertino. Apple's share price doesn't suggest investors are panicking. The promises have already been broken. If Apple is pushing something out, again, because they feel they have to on the basis of those promises, it's–again-a fuckup.
> Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
They don't though, Android is clearly ahead in AI integration (even Samsung are running TV ads mocking iPhones AI capability) yet still iPhones sales are breaking records - the majority of their phone buyers still prefer an iPhone over an AI capable other phone.
They can take their time to develop AI integration that others can't deploy - 'secure/private', deep integration with iCloud, location services, processing on device etc. that will provide the product moat to increase sales.
I think this is the wrong framing. Nobody cares whether there's an LLM in their phone. What people do want is features like improved Siri (still, debatable beyond setting timers) or other improvements, that could potentially come from LLMs.... if they actually work. So far other providers (such as Amazon Alexa) have struggled to deliver a reliable voice assistant powered by LLMs.
I’m almost certain even something as ad-hoc as Opus 4.5 with access to iOS native APIs at the level of Siri exposed via MCP would run circles around Siri in January 2026.
I strongly agree with this. Frankly even ChatGPT 3.5 could do better. I am baffled that Apple has stuck so stubbornly to whatever insane architecture they have that results in my daily cornucopia of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand" as well as own goals like it forgetting that Apple Music is the only music service I have, or calling a girl I haven't seen in 20 years instead of my wife who has the same first name.
I am also baffled that how common I do something never updates the model. I often use Siri to start a playlist while running but had to rename them because Siri would play some unknown to me public playlist instead of what would seem to me be the highest likelihood target - my own
> The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
I don’t think that’s true. People just use the LLM apps. What people don’t feel like they need right now is deep LLM integration across the whole OS. IMO, that’s more of just not showing people the killer product yet.
Live translation? Circle to search? All the magic reframing and relighting stuff in the camera app? I don't know how good the Apple equivalents are, but those are all deeply integrated into Android and are used pretty heavily as far as I can see.
I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
I don’t need a Siri LLM. The current Siri is more than adequate for responding to texts and calling while driving. A lot of the “ai integrations” is marketing material for features nobody will actually use
1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in more meaningful ways.
2. Answer questions like a modern LLM does. Siri often responds with very terse web links. I find this useful when I'm sitting with friends and we don't remember if Lliam Neeson is alive or not - for basic fact-checking. This is the only use case where it's useful I've found, when I want to peel my attention away for the shortest period of time. If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case. Otherwise Siri isn't good for long questions because it doesn't have the intelligence, and as mentioned before, has no user interface.
3. Be able to do things conversationally, based on my context. Today, when I "Add to my calendar Games at Dave's house" it creates a calendar entry called "Games" and sets the location to a restaurant called "Dave's House" in a different country. My baseline expectation is that I should be able to work with Siri, build its memory and my context, and over time it becomes smarter about the things I like to do. The day Siri responds with "Do you mean Dave's House the restaurant in another country, or Dave, from your contacts?" I'll be happy.
For 1, I think we are getting farther away from this.
Siri's current architecture now provides context into the prompt, such as the app/window that has focus and the content loaded into it. In that sense, Siri is more like the MacOS menu bar than an app. A consolidated view of Siri history may look disjointed, in that there is a lot of context hidden if all it shows is a query like "when was this building built?".
Even more so, it might not provide the functionality desired if you go look at historic chats and ask "who was the architect?", unless all that context was actually captured. However, that context was never formatted in a way that was intended to be clearly displayed to the user. That in itself creates a lot of challenges around things like user consent since Siri can farm off queries to other (online) tools and world-knowledge AI services.
There is at least a UX paradigm for this - clipboard history. Coincidentally, Tahoe built clipboard history into Spotlight. But clipboard history lends itself to perhaps being more a complete and self contained snapshot. I'm not sure Siri is being built to work this way because of implicit context.
For 2, at a certain point this gets farmed off to other tools or other AI services. The Gemini agreement is for the foundational model, not large "world knowledge" models or backing databases. Today, Siri answers this question by providing bibliographical information inline from Wikipedia, using internal tools. The model itself just isn't able to answer the actual question (e.g. it will just say his birthday).
For 3, the model already has substantial personal context (as much as apps are willing to give it) and does have state in between requests. This is actually one of the issues with Siri today - that context changes the behavior of the command and control engine in interesting ways, phone to phone and sometimes moment to moment.
Unfortunately, I think stopping and asking for clarification is not something generative AI currently excels at.
Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth made a massage appointment with the head of Xbox programming (luckily Siri was not that competent that it said "Mr. Appointment" in the invite)
> Isn’t its voice the ui? It should respond using the same context of the request. Voice and natural language.
Yeah it’s an interesting idea, but visuals are required sometimes. Even the simple task of “List the highest rated Mexican restaurants near me” works perfectly well enough with old crappy Siri. You’ll get a list of the highest rated Mexican restaurants near you. But as soon as you open the first restaurant, Siri closes and the list is gone. You can’t view the second restaurant. To get the list back you need to ask Siri again.
There’s no world in which that user experience makes a viable product. It’s a completely broken user experience no matter how smart the Gemini model is.
I'm chuckling at the idea of pirating software in 1996.
iirc even in 1999, I couldn't figure out why Windows update required me to use internet exploder. It would take forever to download updates over dialup.
Don't remember if it was the 90's, but we got trial versions of Photoshop on some magazine CD and it was then all about searching for cracks / patches to it. These were quite small and bearable to download on dialups. And of course, even otherwise, dialups really taught all of us patience ... our generation thus knows the value of delayed gratification :).
BBS existed long before that, and even before that we had "sneakernets" or "copy parties". I assume the term "pirating" is much newer than the concept of copying software, or copyright of said software.
I should be able to completely control my phone with voice and ask it to do anything it is capable of and it should just work:
"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."
Could it just fucking work? "Hey Siri turn on the [room name] room lights" and it gives me a positive chime and ... doesn't turn any lights on? In any of my rooms?
I consider Apple to be practical, Also Apple will be running Gemini on its own hardware. This is better than Buying perplexity and running chinese model on which Perplexity runs. Training Models is a money on game, Its better to rent models than training your own. If everyone is training models they are going to be come commodity, also this is not the final architecture.
I still think Apple should, at least to Apple One customers, offer small, private models, trained on your personal imessage, image and video archives in icloud. With easy-to-use, granular controls for content inclusion/exclusion.
Will make it much easier to find those missing pictures from a few years ago...
Also: they've dealt with Google for default search engine deals before even through the early Android/iPhone competition days (and for early iPhone Weather, Stocks, etc.) It's a familiar enough dynamic.
I was more thinking about this being driven by the fact that Google pays Apple $20B a year for being the pre-selected search engine and this way, Apple still gets $19B and a free AI engine on top.
Counterpoint: iOS’s biggest competitor is Android. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
Counterpoint: Google is paying Apple $20b/year to keep themselves as the default search engine in iOS. Android's biggest competitor is iOS. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
It's strategically devastating because no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google and now they have no choice but to have Google AI on-board their machines.
I respect Google's engineering, and I'm aware that fundamental technologies such as Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers are unavoidably integrated into the software fabric, but this is is avoidable.
I'm surprised Google aren't paying Apple for this.
> no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google
Unfortunately, it probably actually is a small number comparatively. Or at least I would need to see some sort of real data to say anything different.
I feel like people who distrust Google probably wouldn't trust Apple enough to give them their data either? Why would you distrust one but not the other?
Apple still is in the business of selling devices, not customer data - with Google being an external company , I bet there'll be an extensive permissions systems you can limit what the AI can do (or turn it off altogether).
Yes but I may want to use Apple intelligence and now I have to use Google intelligence instead. This is not the product I paid thousands of dollars for.
Second I'm developing privacy focused apps that were going to use foundation models. Now I need to seriously reconsider this.
Just don't update your phone, they'll probably switch it on without asking like they do for Apple Intelligence. Or use Carplay, for which Siri is required.
Is android really iOSs competition ? I feel like the competition is less android more vendors who use android. Every android phone feels different. Android doesn’t even compete on performance anymore the chips are quite behind. The target audience of the two feels different lately.
It ISN'T in this day and age. People don't switch back and forth between iOS and Android like it's still 2010. They use whatever they got locken in initially since their first smartphone or where Apple's green/blue-bubble issue pushed them to or what their family handed them down or what their close friend groups used to have.
People who've been using iOS for 6+ years will 98% stick to iOS for their next purchase and won't even bother look at Android no matter what features Android were to add.
The Android vs iOS war is as dead as the console war. There's no competition anymore, it's just picking one from a duopoly of vendor lock-ins.
Even if EU were to break some of the lockins, people have familiarity bias and will stick with inertia of what they're used to, so it will not move the market share needle one bit.
Of course android is iOSs competition. android is also 75% of the market that apple surely wants bigger piece of.
Performance? We are many years past the point somebody cared about performance. I am writing this on iphone 11 pro and the experience is almost exactly the same as current iOS.
You know what's not the same? Android became pretty great OS. I recently got older Pixel to see how GrapheneOS works and was surprised about Android (which i havent seen for a decade). iOS on the other hand has recently gone trough with very bad ui redesign for no reason.
Imho the main thing Apple has going for it is that Google is spyware company and Apple is still mainly hardware company. But if Apple decides to pull their users data to gemini… well good luck.
True. Also Gemini is the boring model, heavily sanitised for corporate applications. At least it admits this if you press it. It fits Apple here very well.
Personally I wouldn't use it, it still belongs to an advertiser specialised on extracting user information. Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher. But clean smell also means bland smell.
I suspect you're exactly right about it being the most sanitized model.
I don't however like the idea of having Google deeply embedded in my machine and Siri will definitely be turned off when this happens. I only use Siri as an egg timer anyway.
This seems like a odd move for a company that sells privacy.
Google, as the designer of the original transformer, is designer of the original "mechanism" for inserting ads into a prompt answer in realtime to the highest bidder, so it makes sense from that part too.
Given my stance about AI, I'll definitely not use it, but I understand Apple's choice. Also this choice will give them enough time to develop their infrastructure and replace parts of it with their own, if they are planning to do it.
> Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher.
Breaching privacy and using it for its own benefit is AIs business model. There are no ethical players here. Neither from training nor from respecting their users' privacy perspective. Just next iteration of what social media companies do.
>If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs.
I dont think the model is that much different if they thought Siri was half decent enough for so long.
Judging from the past 10 years, I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services. When everything else being roughly equal.
Instead of raising price again Paying Apple even more per user, How about we pay the less but throw in Gemini with it?
Apple has been very good, if not the best at picking one side and allowing the others to fight for its contract. They dont want Microsoft to win the AI race, at the same time Apple is increasing the use of Azure just in case. Basically playing the game of leverage at its best. In hindsight probably too well into it they forgot what the real purpose of all these leverage are for, not cost savings but ultimately better quality product.
> I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services.
Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
Google shouldn't be able to charge a fee on accessing every registered trademark in the world. They use Apple get get the last 30% of "URL Bars", I mean Google Search middlemen.
Searching Anthropic gets me a bidding war, which I'm sure is bleeding Google's competition dry.
We need a "no bare trademark (plus edit distance) ads or auto suggest" law. It's made Google an unkillable OP monster. Any search monopoly or marketplace monopoly should be subject to not allowing ads to be sold against a registered trademark database.
I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.
But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.
Aren't both of those companies also both at the whims of Microsoft for the actual compute hardware? I'm not good at keeping track of who has actual hardware vs. who runs in one of the big clouds
OpenAI aren’t using their cloud directly, but have signed data center partnerships with them that are effectively huge amounts of debt not backed up with revenue. That’s all liability that Google doesn’t really have because they have revenue from other areas.
I agree with your point about Google being more stable company then the rest so the decision probably makes sense. But there was a study done by multiple news companies in Czechia by asking about news topics and Gemini was consistently the worst in citations and straight up being incorrect (76% of its answers had "issues", I don't have exact issues specification).
It has nothing to do with how good Gemini is relative to others. Apple is picking Gemini because they don’t want AI to be the selling point for Android phones. Apple execs do not care about innovations. They only care about keeping their monopoly intact.
With Anthropic or OpenAI they would have had to pay for it, but Google already pay them $20bn+ per year to be the default search engine - so they just knock $1bn off Google's bill for Gemini
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
It's a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
Setting aside the obligatory HN dig at the end, LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of the intelligence system Apple is building. The hidden-in-plain-sight thing Apple is doing is exposing all app data as context and all app capabilities as skills. (See App Intents, Core Spotlight, Siri Shortcuts, etc.)
Anyone with an understanding of Apple's rabid aversion to being bound by a single supplier understands that they've tested this integration with all foundation models, that they can swap Google out for another vendor at any time, and that they have a long-term plan to eliminate this dependency as well.
> Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own.
I'd be interested in a citation for this (Apple introduced two multilingual, multimodal foundation language models in 2025), but in any case anything you hear from Apple publicly is what they want you to think for the next few quarters, vs. an indicator of what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are.
My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on paper.
Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors that asked for more money (Anthropic)
Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a different provider.
For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual improvement
I’m not so sure. Just think about coding assistants with MCP based tools. I can use multiple different models in GitHub Copilot and get good results with similarly capable models.
Siri’s functionality and OS integration could be exposed in a similar, industry-standard way via tools provided to the model.
Then any other model can be swapped in quite easily. Of course, they may still want to do fine tuning, quantization, performance optimization for Apple’s hardware, etc.
But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.
> But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.
That’s not the issue. The issue is that once Gemini is in place as the intelligence behind Siri, the bar is now much higher than today and so you have to be more careful if you consider replacing Gemini, because you’re as likely as not to make Siri worse. Maybe more likely to make it worse.
Oh well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it? Siri being so good that they don’t want to mess it up.
That gives them plenty of runway to test and optimize new models internally before release and not feel like they need to rush them out because Siri sucks.
Doubt it. Of all the issues I run into with Siri none could be solved by throwing AI slop at it. Case in point: if I ask Siri to play an album and it can't match the album name it just plays some random shit instead of erroring out.
Um if I ask an LLM about a fake band it literally say I couldn't find any songs by the fake band did you type is correctly and it's about a millions times more likely to guess correctly. Why do you say it doesn't solve loads of things? I'm more concerned about the problems it creates (prompt injection, hallucinations in important work, bad logic in code), the actual functionality will be fantastic compared to Siri right now!
Because I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs waiting for random pages to go through their anti-LLM bot crap. LLMs create more problems than they solve.
Um if I ask an LLM about a fake band it literally say I couldn't find any
songs by the fake band did you type is correctly and it's about a millions
times more likely to guess correctly
Um if Apple wrote proper error handling in the first place the issue would be solve without LLM baggage. Apple made a conscious decision to handle "unknown" artists this way, LLMs don't change that.
Ollama! Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model! They’ve kept the last 10 years with a Siri who doesn’t know any contact named Chronometer only to require the best in class LLM?
The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak to the Google Voice Assistant.
I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it said "I can't help with that right now, please try again later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox and found it for me.
Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the experience with Android Auto becomes more and more garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're going to have 2 google product voice assistants.
Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at this point.
I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.
I'm genuinely curious about this too. If you really only need the language and common sense parts of an LLM -- not deep factual knowledge of every technical and cultural domain -- then aren't the public models great? Just exactly what you need? Nobody's using Siri for coding.
Are there licensing issues regarding commercial use at scale or something?
Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.
Probably repeatability and privacy guarantees around infrastructure and training too. Google already have very defined splits for their Gemma and in house models with engineers and researchers rarely communicating directly.
That said, Apple is likely to end up training their own model, sooner or later. They are already in the process of building out a bunch of data centers, and I think they have even designed in-house servers.
Remember when iPhone maps were Google Maps? Apple Maps have been steadily improving, to the point they are as good as, if not better than, Google Maps, in many areas (like around here. I recently had a friend send me a GM link to a destination, and the phone used GM for directions. It was much worse than Apple Maps. After a few wrong turns, I pulled over, fed the destination into Apple Maps, and completed the journey).
> what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are
Seems like they are waiting for the "slope of enlightenment" on the gartner hype curve to flatten out. Given you can just lease or buy a SOTA model from leading vendors there's no advantage to training your own right now. My guess is that the LLM/AI landscape will look entirely different by 2030 and any 5 year plan won't be in the same zip code, let alone playing field. Leasing an LLM from Google with a support contract seems like a pretty smart short term play as things continue to evolve over the next 2-3 years.
This is the key. The real issue is that you don’t need superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don’t need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a decent job of approximating college grad level human intelligence let’s say 85% of the time which is helpful and cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models. There will come a time when a model capable of college grad level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry that will in the next few years become dominated by open models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up with another product that has more of a moat.
My impression is that solar (and maybe wind?) energy have benefited from learning-by-doing [1][2] that has resulted in lower costs and/or improved performance each year. It seems reasonable to me that a similar process will apply to AI (at least in the long run). The rate of learning could be seen as a "pace" of improvement. I'm curious, do you have a reference for the deceleration of pace that you refer to?
1) the dearth of new (novel) training data. Hence the mad scramble to hoover up, buy, steal, any potentially plausible new sources.
2) diminishing returns of embiggening compute clusters for training LLMs and size of their foundation models.
(As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve.
So there's a tension.
Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling for training.
While the cost of applications using foundation models (implementing inference engines) is decreasing.
Someone smarter than me will have to provide the slopes of the (misc) learning curves.
I was not aware of (or had forgotten) the term "Wright's law" [1], but that indeed is what I was thinking of. It looks like some may use the term "learning curve" to refer to the same idea (efficiency gains that follow investment); the Wikipedia page on "Learning curve" [2] includes references to Wright.
I don't think anyone really knows, because there's no objective standard for determining progress.
Lots of benchmarks exist where everyone agrees that higher scores are better, but there's no sense in which going from a score of 400 to 500 is the same progress as going from 600 to 700, or less, or more. They only really have directional validity.
I mean, the scores might correspond to real-world productivity rates in some specific domain, but that just begs the question -- productivity rates on a specific task are not intelligence.
That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're in-media-res watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality software are all theater. We have no altruists defending these principles for us at Apple or Google.
Apple won't switch Google out as a provider for the same reason Google is your default search provider. They don't give a shit about how many advertisements you're shown. You are actually detached from 2026 software trends if you think Apple is going to give users significant backend choices. They're perfectly fine selling your attention to the highest bidder.
There are second-order effects of Google or Apple removing Twitter from their stores.
Guess who's the bestie of Twitter's owner? Any clues? Could that be a vindictive old man with unlimited power and no checks and balances to temper his tantrums?
Of course they both WANT Twitter the fuck out of the store, but there are very very powerful people addicted to the app and what they can do with it.
In the current US environment, no one can survive going against Trump, and as recently evidenced, this is meant literally.
The US, for all intents and purposes, is now a kleptocracy. Rule of law, freedom of speech, even court orders, all of that doesn't matter any more in practice. There will always be some way for the federal government to strong-arm anyone into submission.
Not with that attitude they can’t. Let’s see what happens to the first person to call his bull shit. If jpow folds or is actually indicted, you may be right. Let’s see what happens with Exxon though i think they’re gonna bend the knee.
Why would you not bend the key ? There's a reasonnable chance Trump is gone in less than 3 years and MAGA tears itself apart. Better bet on that than try to make a stand now and lose everything.
> Let’s see what happens to the first person to call his bull shit
Well, ICE just executed a woman in broad daylight with multiple cameras filming, and a day later you got Kristi Noem standing on a podium with a slogan referencing to an OG Nazi massacre [1][2] and half the US government gaslighting the country, spreading outright lies [3] without consequences so far.
When they can get away with this level of lies, they can get away with anything. Trump's infamous "I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters" quote [4] wasn't a joke - it was a clear prediction of what he intended to enable eventually.
I do not usually comment on politics but just this one time, and hopefully I can wordsmith it without taking a political stance.
When Trump started his campaign, circa 2011 with the birth certificate, he did not know he will win or not, but he made it his life's mission.
Countering him will take the same zeal. I know we have a precedence of presidents retiring, but unless Obama (and Hillary and Biden and Kamala) hits the streets as the leader of resistance, the resistance will be quelled easily by constant distracting. Yeah maybe AOC, maybe Bernie, maybe someone else, but no ... Trump is smart and dedicated (despite the useful idiot role he plays), he can not be countered by mid-term and full-term campaigns. We are not in Kansas any more. Been a while. The opposition needs a named resistance leader whose full time job is to engage Trump.
I'm not American, but in my opinion Newsom+AOC might have the zeal and voter base to MAYBE do something.
Newsom (or his PR team) knows how to play the troll game correctly, hitting low blows and not sticking to the fucking high ground.
AOC on the other hand will make the MAGA base _so_ irrationally angry they might do something actually stupid. She's also got Bernie's views, which might make America a place I want to visit some day in the next decade again. I've literally turned down all expenses paid company trips to USA a few times because I just don't want to risk either not getting into the country or not getting back.
Apple’s various privileged device-level ads and instant-stop-on-cancel trials and special rules for notifications for their paid additional services like Fitness+, Music, Arcade, iCloud+, etc are all proof that they do not care about the user anymore.
Why? Grain is a commodity, but I buy flour at the store rather than grow my own. The “commmodity” argument suggets that new companies should stay away from model training unless they have a cost edge.
An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Invented-Here syndrome/handicap in this case.
Apple might have gotten very lucky here ... the money might be in finding uses, and selling physical products rather than burning piles of cash training models that are SOTA for 5 minutes before being yet another model in a crowded field.
My money is still on Apple and Google to be the winners from LLMs.
And when the cost of training LLMs starts to come down to under $1B/yr, Apple can jump on board, having saved >$100B in not trying to chase after everyone else to try to get there first.
Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ?
I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.
I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.
Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.
Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.
Pre-iPhone and pre-Intel Mac, Apple was experimenting with a lot of things. The iPod wasn't a clear initial win--and the iPhone wasn't either. A lot of the success happened in retrospect.
Companies were still figuring out Linux with servers at the time. Xserve seemed like it might be something of interest to at least academia but Apple never really had their heart in it as I wrote at the time.
How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.
I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".
There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).
According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?
The no one ever got fired for buying IBM wasn’t about quality. It’s always safe to buy the default choice that everyone else uses. Especially when things go wrong.
Many want to be founders here on HN don’t get that. Even if your product is better and cheaper, there is too much of a reputational risk signing a contract for a B2B SaaS product with an unknown vendor.
On a completely unrelated note, for the love of all that is holy don’t try to do B2B SaaS without SSO support.
With Thunderbolt 5 and M5 Ultras, Apple could be building lower cost clusters that could possibly scale enough while keeping a lower power budget. Obviously that can't compete with NVIDIA racks, but for mobile consumer inference maybe that would be enough?
Yeah… there’s this “bro— do you even business?” vibe in the tech world right now pointed at any tech firm not burning oil tankers full of cash (and oil, for that matter,) training a giant model. That money isn’t free — the economic consequences of burning billions to make a product that will be several steps behind, at best, are giant. There’s a very real chance these companies won’t recoup that money if their product isn’t attractive to hoards of users willing to pay more money for AI than anyone currently is. It doesn’t even make them look cool to regular people — their customers hate hearing about AI. Since there are viable third party options available, I think Apple would have to be out of their goddamned minds to try and jump in that race right now. They’re a product company. Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.
Something weird has gone wrong in the psyche of humans.
Why are we even talking about 'AI'? When I heat up food in a microwave, I dont care about the technology - I care about whether it heats up the food or not.
For some bizarre reason people keep talking about the technology (LLMs) - the consumers/buyers in the market for the most part dont give a hoot about it. They want to know how the thing fits in their life and most importantly what are the benefits.
Ive unfortunately been exposed to some Google Ads re. Gemini and let me tell you - their marketing capabilities are god awful.
>Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.
You're right, and this is proven. Apple has fumbled a whole release cycle on AI and severely curbed expectations, and they still sell 200m iPhones a year and lead the market [0]
Easy enough. Most people abhor AI and want nothing to do with it. The only ones who actually love AI (or what's being sold to them under that banner) are clueless and/or greedy executives, propagandists, and a select few legitimate AI artists doing pretty nice remixes of Star Wars, Harry Potter and the likes in a quality not seen before.
Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).
So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.
The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1].
AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2].
If a non-profit and a chip vendor (training for marketing purposes) can do this, it clearly doesn't require "burning 10 years of cash flow" or a Google-scale TPU farm.
No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.
What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a reasonable schedule.
I have no idea what AI involves, but "training" sounds like a one-and-done - but how is the result "stored"? If you have trained up a Gemini, can you "clone" it and if so, what is needed?
I was under the impression that all these GPUs and such were needed to run the AI, not only ingest the data.
Theoretically it would be much less expensive to just continue to run the existing models, but ofc none of the current leaders are going to stop training new ones any time soon.
No, I doesn't beat Gemini in any benchmarks. It beats Gemma, which isn't a SoTA even among open models of that size. That would be Nemotron 3 or GPT-OSS 20B.
Yea, I think it’s smart, too. There are multiple companies who have spent a fortune on training and are going to be increasingly interested in (desperate to?) see a return from it. Apple can choose the best of the bunch, pay less than they would have to to build it themselves, and swap to a new one if someone produces another breakthrough.
100%. It feels like Apple is perfectly happy letting the AI labs fight a race to the bottom on pricing while they keep the high-margin user relationship.
I'm curious if this officially turns the foundation model providers into the new "dumb pipes" of the tech stack?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. The question is, what’s the moat? If all they have is scaling to drive better model performance, then the winner is just whoever has the lowest cost of capital.
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple, thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS space!
I dunno, my take is that Apple isn’t outsourcing intelligence rather it’s outsourcing the most expensive, least defensible layer.
Down the road Apple has an advantage here in a super large training data set that includes messages, mail, photos, calendar, health, app usage, location, purchases, voice, biometrics, and you behaviour over YEARS.
Let's check back in 5 years and see if Apple is still using Gemini or if Apple distills, trains and specializes until they have completed building a model-agnostic intelligence substrate.
> The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
It goes back much further than that - up until 2016, Apple wouldn't let its ML researchers add author names to published research papers. You can't attract world-class talent in research with a culture built around paranoid secrecy.
It is more like Apple have no need to spend billions on training with questionable ROI when it can just rent from one of the commodity foundation model labs.
I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large scale AI and software projects like this.
They did things far more complicated from an engineering perspective. I am far more impressed by what they accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what AI labs do.
In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…
> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.
Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.
You can understand how transformers work from just reading the Attention is All You Need paper, which is 15 pages of pretty accessible DL. That's not the part that is impressive about LLMs.
It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them. I’m sure it’ll be consolidated further in the future and you’re going to be left with a natural monopoly or duopoly.
Apple has no control over the most important change to tech. They have control to Google.
> It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them.
No one can outpace them in improving the SOTA, everyone can catch up to them. Why are open-weight models perpetually 6 months behind the SOTA? Given enough data harvested from SOTA models you can eventually distill them.
The biggest differentiator when training better models are not some new fancy architectural improvements (even the current SOTA transformer architectures are very similar to e.g. the ancient GPT-2), but high quality training data. And if your shiny new SOTA model is hooked into a publicly available API, guess what - you've just exposed a training data generator for everyone to use. (That's one of the reasons why SOTA labs hide their reasoning chains, even though those are genuinely useful for users - they don't want others to distill their models.)
Really, don't believe benchmarks as gospel. Chinese models are pretty much competitive with offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. Meta is currently at a disadvantage, but I believe they will find their mojo and soon be competitive again.
Frankly, a lot of times I prefer using GLM 4.6 running on Cerebras Inference, than having to deal with the performance hiccups from Claude. For most practical purposes, I've seen no big penalty in using it compared to Opus 4.5, even the biggest qwen-coder models are pretty much competitive.
Between me and the company I work for, I spend some serious money with AI. I use it extensively in my main job, on two side projects that I have paying customers for, and for graduate school work. I can tell you that there quite a few more SOTA models around than what the benchmarks tell you.
I always think about this, can someone with more knowledge than me help me understand the fragility of these operations?
It sounds like the value of these very time-consuming, resource-intensive, and large scale operations is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?
Given that we have a lot of other players enabling this in other ways, like Open Sourcing weights (West vs East AI race), and even leaks, this play by Apple sounds really smart and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?
Is it safe to assume that eventually the weights will be out in the open for everyone?
> and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?
A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.
So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty big deal.
But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that even if LLMs did somehow lead to AGI that the same result wouldn't be achieved by everyone currently building "State of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within days/months of each other).
So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and I'm not particularly an Apple fan.
> is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?
Yes, and the knowledge gained along the way. For example, the new TPUv4 that Google uses requires rack and DC aware technologies (like optical switching fabric) for them to even work at all. The weights are important, and there is open weights, but only Google and the like are getting the experience and SOTA tech needed to operate cheaply at scale.
Google says: "Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."
So what does it take? How many actual commitments to privacy does Apple have to make before the HN crowd stops crowing about "theater"?
No, its not misleading it says right there in the private policy.
Apple isnt suddenly private just because they have enough data about you that they dont need to link to 3rd party data. They do exactly what 3rd party sites that are considered privacy invasive do. They serve you ads based on your private data like what you watch, what you read and what things you do on your device.
It doesnt say that they only store all this information on device. Apple is only using a random identifier when its sharing information about your habits and personal data on its ad platform, that info btw is shared with 3rd parties. But dont worry that data suddenly becomes non personal because they used a random identifier.
Apple's goal is likely to run all inference locally. But models aren't good enough yet and there isn't enough RAM in an iPhone. They just need Gemini to buy time until those problems are resolved.
That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.
Apple thinks they can get a best-of-both-worlds approach with Private Cloud Compute. They believe they can secure private servers specialized to specific client devices in a way that the cloud compute effort is still "client-side" from a trust standpoint, but still able to use extra server-side resources (under lock and key).
I don't know how close to that ideal they've achieved, but especially given this announcement is partly baked on an arrangement with Google that they are allowed to run Gemini on-device and in Private Cloud Compute, without using Google's more direct Gemini services/cloud, I'm excited that they are trying and I'm interested in how this plays out.
Apple integrated ChatGPT as an opt-in that made the mainstream users feel like Apple was delivering on some of that marketing. Apple also delivered "high wow" features like auto-stickers and other such silliness. Just as the privacy issues are maybe a bit of an HN specialty, HN is also maybe a bit more prone to "Apple Intelligence" brand cynicism than mainstream belief.
I'm excited about the attempt at privacy because I'm on "Team Keep Siri Dumb". I like dumb Siri. It reliably meets most of my needs, setting timers and managing house lights. I'd rather Siri stay dumb and I would never opt-in to ChatGPT Siri as some of my family has, but if Siri "has to" get smart to survive, I will celebrate whatever privacy wins are still available as my only hope that smarter Siri is not something I need to just disable entirely (and lose my "friend" in charge of my timers and house lights in the process).
I stated that I am not naive and am not entirely convinced by Apple's sales pitch that the Private Cloud Compute containers are encrypted with keys in a way that only your hardware device can read in such a way that the PCC is an extension of your device.
I just think it is useful that Apple is trying something along those lines and wishful the guarantees work half as well as they claim they do, because that's a good goal to have in theory even when it fails in practice against dedicated threat actors.
And yes, to be fair my personal day-to-day threat model currently is much more concerned with the evil advertising company known as Google than it is with government actors. Even if Apple's Private Cloud Compute only means "private from Google" that's still a win for me (and most of the information I was looking for when I saw this headline, because my first fear was that the advertising company Google was involved).
Phones will get upgrades, but then so will servers. The local models will always be behind the state of the art running on big iron. You can’t expect to stand still and keep up with the Red Queen.
Rumor has it that they weren't trained "from scratch" the was US would, i.e. Chinese labs benefitted from government "procured" IP (the US $B models) in order to train their $M models. Also understand there to be real innovation in the many-MoE architecture on top of that. Would love to hear a more technical understanding from someone who does more than repeat rumors, though.
A lot of HN commentators are high on their own supply with regard to the AI bubble... when you realize that this stuff isn't actually that expensive the whole thing begins to quickly unravel.
> Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence.
They have always been a premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence, except that "intelligence" was always IP until now. They have always polished existing (i.e., not theirs) ideas and made them bulletproof and accessible to the masses. Seems like they intend to just do more of the same for AI "intelligence". And good for them, as it is their specialty and it works.
Could you elaborate a bit on why you've judged it as privacy theatre? I'm skeptical but uninformed, and I believe Mullvad are taking a similar approach.
Mullvad is nothing like Apple. For apple devices:
- need real email and real phone number to even boot the device
- cannot disable telemetry
- app store apps only, even though many key privacy preserving apps are not available
- /etc/hosts are not your own, DNS control in general is extremely weak
- VPN apps on idevices have artificial holes
- can't change push notification provider
- can only use webkit for browsers, which lacks many important privacy preserving capabilities
- need to use an app you don't trust but want to sandbox it from your real information? Too bad, no way to do so.
- the source code is closed so Apple can claim X but do Y, you have no proof that you are secure or private
- without control of your OS you are subject to Apple complying with the government and pushing updates to serve them not you, which they are happy to do to make a buck
Mullvad requires nothing but an envelope with cash in it and a hash code and stores nothing. Apple owns you.
Agreed on most points but you can setup a pretty solid device wide DNS provider using configuration profiles. Similar to how iOS can be enrolled in work corporate MDM - but under your control.
Works great for me with NextDNS.
Orion browser - while also based on WebKit - is also awesome and has great built in Adblock and supposedly privacy respecting ideals.
Apple has records that you are installing that, probably putting you on a list.
And it works until it's made illegal in your country and removed from the app store. You have no guarantees that anything that works today will work tomorrow with Apple.
Apple is setting us up to be under a dictator's thumb one conversion at a time.
They transitioned from “nobody can read your data, not even Apple” to “Apple cannot read your data.” Think about what that change means. And even that is not always true.
They also were deceptive about iCloud encryption where they claimed that nobody but you can read your iCloud data. But then it came out after all their fanfare that if you do iCloud backups Apple CAN read your data. But they aren’t in a hurry to retract the lie they promoted.
Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name, email, phone number, and content of the local users, guess what. Since they messaged you, now not only their name and information, but also your name and private information and message content is shared with that country’s government as well. By Apple. Do they tell you? No. Even if your own country respects privacy. Does Apple have a help article explaining this? No.
If you want to turn on full end-to-end encryption you can, if you want to share your pubkey so that people can't fake your identity on iMessage you can, and there's still a higher tier of security than that presumably for journalists and important people.
It's something a smart niece or nephew could handle in terms of managing risk, but the implications could mean getting locked out of your device which you might've been using as the doorway to everything, and Apple cannot help you.
>Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name
I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of governments and service providers, while iMessage gives them some wiggle room.
Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw
Because Apple makes privacy claims all the time, but all their software is closed source and it is very hard or impossible to verify any of their claims. Even if messages sent between iPhones are E2EE encrypted for example, the client apps and the operating system may be backdoored (and likely are).
All user data is E2E encrypted, so the government literally cannot force this. This has been the source of numerous disputes [0, 1] that either result in the device itself being cracked [0] (due to weak passwords or vulnerabilities in device-level protection) or governments attempting to ban E2E encryption altogether [1].
Maybe E2E, but the data eventually has to be decrypted to read it.
Then you learn that every modern CPU has a built-in backdoor, a dedicated processor core, running a closed-source operating system, with direct access to the entire system RAM, and network access. [a][b][c][d].
What you cited is for data on a device that was turned off. Not daily internet connected usage. No one is saying you have no protection at all with Apple, it is just very limited compared to what it should be by modern security best practices, and much worse than what can be achieved on android and linux.
If they didn't want you to think key escrow might be possible, why wouldn't they just leave the wording the way it was? Why go through the effort and thereby draw attention to it? The court system doesn't use sovcit rules where playful interpretation of wording can get a trillion dollar corporation out of a lawsuit or whatever.
It’s also a bet that the capex cost for training future models will be much lower than it is today. Why invest in it today if they already have the moat and dominant edge platform (with a loyal customer base upgrading hardware on 2-3 year cycles) for deploying whatever future commoditized training or inference workloads emerge by the time this Google deal expires?
Personally also think it's very smart move - Google has TPUs and will do it more efficiently than anyone else.
It also lets Apple stand by while the dust settles on who will out innovate in the AI war - they could easily enter the game on a big way much later on.
Seems like the LLM landscape is still evolving, and training your own model provides no technical benefit as you can simply buy/lease one, without the overhead of additional eng staffing/datacenter build-out.
I can see a future where LLM research stalls and stagnates, at which point the ROI on building/maintaining their own commodity LLM might become tolerable. Apple has had Siri as a product/feature and they've proven for the better part of a decade that voice assistants are not something they're willing to build a proficiency in. My wife still has an apple iPhone for at least a decade now, and I've heard her use Siri perhaps twice in that time.
And if you wanted to build your own data center right now there’s only so much GPU and RAM to go around, and even all the power generation and cooling manufacturers are booked solid.
The trouble is this seems to me like a short term fix, longer term, once the models are much better, Google can just lock out apple and take everything for themselves and leave Apple nowhere and even further behind.
Of course there is going to be an abstraction layer - this is like Software Engineering 101.
Google really could care less about Android being good. It is a client for Google search and Google services - just like the iPhone is a client for Google search and apps.
> They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
Why does Apple need to build its own training cluster to train a frontier model, anyway?
Why couldn't the deal we're reading about have been "Apple pays Google $200bn to lease exclusive-use timeslots on Google's AI training cluster"?
Agreed, especially since this is a competitive space with multiple players, with a high price of admission, and where your model is outdated in a year, so its not even capex as much as recurring expenditure. Far better to let someone else do all the hard work, and wait and see where things go. Maybe someday this'll be a core competency you want in-house, but when that day comes you can make that switch, just like with apple silicon.
Apple sells consumer goods first and foremost. They likely don't see a return on investment through increased device or services sales to match the hundreds of billions that these large AI companies are throwing down every year.
Of all the companies to survive a crash in AI unscathed, I would bet on Apple the most.
They are only ones who do not have large debts off(or on) balance sheet or aggressive long term contracts with model providers and their product demand /cash flow is least dependent on the AI industry performance.
They will still be affected by general economic downturn but not be impacted as deeply as AI charged companies in big tech.
They have the largest free cash flow (over $100 billion a year). Meta and Amazon have less than half that a year, and Microsoft/Nvidia are between $60b-70b per year. The statement reflects a poor understanding of their financials.
> To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
Probably not missing the elephant. They certainly have the money to invest and they do like vertical integration but putting massive investment in bubble that can pop or flatline at any point seems pointless if they can just pay to use current best and in future they can just switch to something cheaper or buy some of the smaller AI companies that survive the purge.
Given how much AI capable their hardware is they might just move most of it locally too
Honestly, I'm relieved...it's not really in their DNA and not pivotal to their success; why pivot the company into a U turn into a market that's vague defined and potentially algorithmically limited?
The cash pile is gone, they have been active in share repurchase.
They still generate about ~$100 billion in free cash per year, that is plowed into the buybacks.
They could spend more cash than every other industry competitor. It's ludicrous to say that they would have to burn 10 years of cash flow on trivial (relative) investment in model development and training. That statement reflects a poor understanding of Apple's cash flow.
Apple is flush with cash and other assets, they have always been. They most likely plan to ride out the AI boom with Google's models and buy up scraps for pennies on the dollar once the bubble pops and a bunch of the startups go bust.
It wouldn't be the first time they went for full vertical integration.
calling neural engine the best is pretty silly. the best perhaps of what is uniformly a failed class of ip blocks - mobile inference NPU hardware. edge inference on apple is dominated by cpus and metal, which don't use their NPU.
Apple has seemingly confirmed that the Gemini models will run under their Private Cloud Compute and so presumably Google would not have access to Siri data.
Neither Apple's nor Google's announcement says Siri will use Gemini models. Both announcements say, word for word, "Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models". I don't know what that means, but Apple and Google's marketing teams must have crafted that awkward wording carefully to satisfy some contractual nuance.
Direct quote from their joint statement: "Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year."
> "Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models"
Beyond Siri, Apple Foundation Models are available as API; will Google's technologies thus also be available as API? Will Apple reduce its own investment in building out the Foundation models?
I see what you mean, though I think “these models” refers to Apple’s Foundation Models, which “will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology.” I guess it depends on wrist “based” means.
1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.
2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.
3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.
To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.
Siri is objectively bad though. It isn't some vendetta. I am disabled and there are at least 50 different things that I'd love siri to do that should be dead simple, yet it cannot. My favorite one was when I suffered a small but not serious fall, decided to test whether siri could be alerted to call 9-11 while being less than 6 feet away from me, absolutely could not understand let alone execute my request. It's a lot of stuff like this. Its core functionality often just does not work.
> The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.
For many years, siri requests were sent to an external server. It still sucked.
I don't think the parent said that Siri wasn't bad, on the contrary it sounds like they agree.
Their point is that if Apple totally scraps the current, bad, product called "Siri" and replaces it with an entirely different, much better product that is also named "Siri" but shares nothing but the name, people's perceptions of the current bad Siri will taint their impressions of the new one.
I'm sorry for whatever cynicism leads you to believe this. I don't believe there is an "astroturfer" problem with siri, and that is mostly what I was responding to. Sorry you missed that.
I'd be skeptical about even new LLM siri being able to dial 911.
These models tend to have a "mind of their own", and I can totally, absolutely, see a current SOTA LLM convincing itself it needs to call 911 because you asked it how to disinfect a cut.
Ideally you have a layer before the LLM that filters out stuff the phone can do without an LLM. The LLM probably shouldn't even have the power to call 911, that should be a layer lower. And probably you don't want to send simple queries like "call XYZ" to the cloud, best to just do it locally.
There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to it getting better and being able to use it more often.
Apple and Google have said that Private Cloud Compute will be involved as well, which Apple is trying to build a mystique of "on-device-like" trust. (Which yes, if Private Cloud Compute is involved and is secure in the ways that Apple says it is does presumably imply that the announced deal with Google includes selling Apple the complete model weights.)
Forget Siri, I have a much lower bar — I’ll be happy if they just improve iOS typing corrections/completions, which often don’t make any sense given the rest of the sentence.
It's the same core issue which is basically that their software stacked sort of sucks. They should definitely wipe the slate clean when it comes to anything related to language, and that includes typing, text to speech, speech to text, agents, etc.
They have the time and the money and the customers, so I'm confident they will accomplish great things.
I’ve been debating turning auto-correct off completely. However, the first iPhone had it, so I’m guessing I want some level of it. I just don’t understand on v1 was better than what we have 18 years later.
The biggest NEW thing here is that this isn't white-labeled. Apple is officially acknowledging Google as the model that will be powering Siri. That explicit acknowledgment is a pretty big deal. It will make it harder for Apple to switch to its own models later on.
Yes, Apple is acknowledging that Google's Gemini will be powering Siri and that is a big deal, but are they going to be acknowledging it in the product or is this just an acknowledgment to investors?
Apple doesn't hide where many of their components come from, but that doesn't mean that those brands are credited in the product. There's no "fab by TSMC" or "camera sensors by Sony" or "display by Samsung" on an iPhone box.
It's possible that Apple will credit Gemini within the UI, but that isn't contained in the article or video. If Apple uses a Gemini-based model anonymously, it would be easy to switch away from it in the future - just as Apple had used both Samsung and TSMC fabs, or how Apple has used both Samsung and Japan Display. Heck, we know that Apple has bought cloud services from AWS and Google, but we don't have "iCloud by AWS and GCP."
Yes, this is a more public announcement than Apple's display and camera part suppliers, but those aren't really hidden. Apple's dealings with Qualcomm have been extremely public. Apple's use of TSMC is extremely public. To me, this is Apple saying "hey CNBC/investors, we've settled on using Gemini to get next-gen Siri happening so you all can feel safe that we aren't rudderless on next-gen Siri."
Apple won't take the risk of being blamed for AI answers being incorrect. They will attribute Google/Gemini so users know how to be mad at if it doesn't work as expected.
Apple is already taking the risk of being blamed for their own AI right now, though (an AI that is much more prone to incredibly dumb errors than Gemini), so I don't find it that obvious that they wouldn't just continue taking the blame for Siri as they already do, except with an actually smarter Siri.
This is a double-edged sword. Apple would love any failure to be blamed on Google, but not the branding to go with it.
Apple's brand is so dominant that even if they say Siri is "powered by Google", most users will still perceive it as an Apple service. The only way that changes is if Apple consistently and prominently surfaces the Google name on Siri — which seems unlikely (but who knows when the stakes are so high).
Maybe they'd prefer it for aesthetics, but OTOH in iOS 18.2+ they support off-device ChatGPT and apparently refer to it as "ChatGPT" both in settings and when prompting the user to ask if they want to use it.
If they do refer to it as "Gemini" then this is a huge win for Google, and huge loss for OpenAI, since it really seems that the "ChatGPT" brand is the only real "moat" that OpenAI have, although recently there has been about a 20% shift in traffic from ChatGPT to Gemini, so the moat already seems to be running dry.
I don't see why - iOS originally shipped with Google Maps as standard, for example. Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as standard before Safari existed
The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.
It is pretty much impossible. How are they going to build the data centers on the scale required when all the RAM and GPUs in the world are bought up for the foreseeable future?
Well, yeah, Apple's Maps.app wasn't good enough when it launched (it's solid now though). That feels like a separate thing from white labeling and lock-in. Obviously they would have to switch to something of similar or better quality or users will be upset.
But it's a whole lot easier to switch from Gemini to Claude or Gemini to a hypothetical good proprietary LLM if it's white label instead of "iOS with Gemini"
I prefer Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation and public transit. However, I still keep Google Maps around for business data and points of interest. This is where Apple Maps is still lacking significantly. The fact that Apple still prompts me to download Yelp to view images of a business is insane to me.
Depends on where you are. In my experience here in Sweden Google Maps is still better, Apple maps sent us for a loop in Stockholm (literally {{{(>_<)}}} )
I thought it was Google refusing to provide turn by turn directions?
Apple announced last year they are putting their own ads in Maps so if that was the real problem the corporate leadership has done a complete 180 on user experience.
I think Google was withholding them unless Apple was willing to put the ads in.
Apple is a very VERY different company than they were back then.
Back then they didn’t have all sorts of services that they advertised to you constantly. They didn’t have search ads in the App Store. They weren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer all the time no matter how annoying.
Google Search also has ads in it, but that didn't stop Apple from keeping it as the default, and now Apple is adding ads to Apple Maps. GP is correct. Google withheld turn by turn navigation from the iOS app. There are many deficiencies in the iOS platform, but this one was glaringly visible, forcing Apple's hand.
Apple does ads but they have a very particular taste with it. Not necessarily a better taste, but they do it in their own apple way. They're very much control freaks.
I was in agreement with the parent before I read this, and now I'm in agreement with you. It is a great example, I know so many people who never switched back to Apple Maps because it was so poor initially. Personally I find it a considerably better experience than Google Maps these days, but those lost users still aren't coming back.
Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though. Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still came back to it every so often to see how it was progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.
Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.
I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's something most people are going to have a use for.
As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of these mobile assistants yet.
Apple ultimately developed their own map application specifically because Google was unwilling to remove the Google logo from the Google Maps app, no matter the price.
It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.
As someone who hasn’t used Google Search in several years, I will be upset and less inclined to use the AI if it’s kicking me out to Google search result pages to show results. This is what I fear. Some of this already happens with Siri and Apple Intelligence today. I’m sure Google would love to see even more of it, to serve up ads and take advantage of their new revenue streams in agentic shopping.
The ChatGPT integration was heavily gated by Apple and required explicit opt-in. That won't be the case with the Gemini integration. Apple wants this to just work. The privacy concerns will be mitigated because Apple will be hosting this model themselves in their Private Cloud Compute. This will be a much more tightly integrated solution than ChatGPT was.
An abstraction layer doesn’t prevent Google from seeing the data. Last year the story was that Apple would be running a Google model on their (Apple’s) own server hardware.
This story says the custom model will run on-device and in Apple's Private Cloud Compute. The implication is that Google will not see the data. The "promise" of Private Cloud Compute is that Apple wants it to be trusted like "on-device".
Presumably cutting Google out of getting the data from this is part of why this story first was mentioned last year but is only now sounds close to happening. I think it's the same story/project.
I think they want it to work well with web search. That’s why Google is the obvious choice. Also their ai offering is low risk of getting eliminated where as open ai could fail at any time
It appears to be lack of competence given they lied about the initial features of Apple Intelligence.
First, they touted features that no one actually built and then fired their AI figurehead “leader” who had no coherent execution plan—also, there appears to have been territorial squabbling going on, about who would build what.
How on earth did Apple Senior Management allow this to unravel? Too much focus on Services, yet ignoring their absolute failures with Siri and the bullshit that was Apple Intelligence, when AI spending is in the trillions?
There is just too much money being burned in AI for Apple to keep researchers. Also models have no respect for original art which leads to a branding issue of being a platform for artists.
Apple is competent at timing when to step into a market and I would guess they are waiting for AI to evolve beyond being considered untrustworthy slop.
Don't think that's an especially big deal, they've always included third party data in Siri or the OS which is usually credited (Example: Maps with Foursquare or TomTom, Flight information from FlightAware, Weather data and many more).
Is this another one of those AI deals where no real money changes hands? In this case, doesn't this just offset the fee Google pays Apple for having their search as the default on Apple devices?
I'll wager the accounting for the two contracts is separate. There may be stipulations that connect the two, but the payment from Google to Apple of $20B+/yr is a long-established contract (set of contracts, actually0 that Apple would not jeopardize for the relatively small Google to Apple $1B/yr contract, one still unproven and which may not stand the test of time.
So, yes, practically speaking, the Apple to Google payment offsets a tiny fraction of the Google to Apple payment, but real money will change hands for each and very likely separately.
Yeah, I was really expecting them to just continue the partnership that Apple announced when the iPhone 16/iOS 18 came out, but I suppose it's been pretty much radio silence on both fronts since then. Although the established stability and good enough-ness that Google offers with Gemini are probably more than enough reason for Apple to pivot to them as a model supplier instead.
Models are becoming less like commodities. They're differentiating with strengths and weaknesses. When Chinese labs gain more traction, they will stop releasing their models for free. At that point, everyone who wants SOTA models will have to pay.
Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be reversed.
Most of the differentiation is happening on the application/agent layer. Like Coworker.
The rest of it, is happening on post-training. Incremental changes.
We are not talking about EUV lithography here. There are no substantial moths of years of pure and applied research protected by patents.
SOTA AI models can have different architectures, vastly different compute in training, different ways of inferencing, different input data, different RL, and different systems around the model. Not to mention the significant personal user data that OpenAI is collecting.
What matter are the results. I'd say that Chinese companies are probably getting a better ROI from their projects using models a few months behind western models, because any deficiency in the models is surpassed by better engineering and better market fit of what they are building over those agents.
This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!
> Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?
Is Siri a probability machine? I didn't think it was an LLM at all right now? I thought it was some horrendous tree of switch statements, hence the difficulty of improving it.
Apple search is comically bad, though. Type in some common feature or app, and it will yield the most obscure header file inside the build deps directory of some Xcode project you forgot existed.
Not exactly the same, but kinda: my gen 1 Google Home just got Gemini and it finally delivers on the promise of like 10 years ago! Brought new life to the thing beyond playing music, setting timers, and occasionally asking really basic questions
It remains to be seen what the existing HomePods will support. There’s been a HomePod hardware update in the pipeline for quite some time, and it appears like they are waiting for the new Siri to be ready.
it's not going to help them. For Siri to be really useful it wouldn't need deep system integration and an external model is not going to provide that. People don't believe me when I said it about Apple Intelligence with open AI
I think this is a good move for Apple. It avoids tying them directly to internalised beliefs in their own AI model, it avoids all the capex around building out an AI engine and associated DC, it reduces risk, and it keeps google in a relationship under contract which google will value, and probably value enough to think hard about stupid legal games regarding Playstore and walled gardens.
Apple plainly doesn't believe in the uplift and impending AGI doom. Nor do they believe there's no value in AI services. They just think for NOW at least they can buy in better than they can own.
But based on Apples VLSI longterm vision, on their other behaviours in times past with IPR in any space, they will ultimately take ownership.
When the cost of deployment drops. And, when their own chip designs are profitable, they'll take the capital hit. Until then, as long as the income split for Gemini backed siri isn't terrible they'll stay an outsource. If they persuade Google to deploy Apple chips into the service I'd say an in-house is within sight.
Apple private relay runs in cloudflare and fastly and I believe one other major. They certainly can and do run services for a long time with partners.
This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.
The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.
For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.
It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity.
Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.
Apple has been using ML in their products for years, to the point that they dedicated parts of their custom silicon for it before the LLM craze. They clearly have some in-house ML talent, but I suppose LLM talent may be a different question.
I’m wondering if this is a way to shift blame for issues. It was mentioned in an interview that what they built internally wasn’t good enough, presumably due to hallucinations… but every AI does that. They know customers have a low tolerance for mistakes and any issues will quickly become a meme (see the Apple Maps launch). If the technology is inherently flawed, where it will never live up to their standards, if they outsource it, they can point to Google as the source of the failings. If things get better down the road and they can improve by pivoting away from Google, they’ll look better and it will make Google look bad. This could be the long game.
They may also save a fortune in training their own models, if they don’t plan to directly try to monetize the AI, and simply have it as a value add for existing customers. Not to mention staying out of hot water related to stealing art for training data, as a company heavily used by artists.
I agree that they don't appear poised to do it themselves. But why not work with Meta or OpenAI (maybe a bit more questionable with MS) or some other player, rather than Google?
The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter. Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.
With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now, without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.
So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.
I didn't see you 41 day old reply to me until it was too late to comment on it. So here's a sarcastic "thanks for ignoring what I wrote" and telling me that exactly what I was complaining about is the solution to the problem I was complaining about.
1) I told you my household can't use Target or Amazon for unscented products, without costly remediation measures, BECAUSE EVEN SCENT-FREE ITEMS COME SMELLING FROM PERFUME CROSS-CONTAMINATION THANKS TO CLEANING, STORAGE, AND TRANSPORTATION CONDITIONS. SOMETIMES REALLY BADLY.
FFS. If you are going to respond, first read.
I also mentioned something other than "government intervention to dictate how products are made" as a solution to this issue, namely adequate segregation between perfumed and non-perfumed products.
And I care less about my wallet than I do about my time and actual ability to acquire products that are either truly scent free, or like yesteryear, don't have everlasting fragrance fixatives.
For people in my position, which make up a small percentage of the population (that still numbers in the millions), the free market has failed. We are a specialized niche that trades tips on how to make things tolerable.
For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.
Web search is a core part of browsing and Apple is Google's biggest competitor in browsers. Google is paying Apple about 25x for integrating Google Search in Safari as Apple will be paying Google to integrate Google's LLMs into Siri. If you think depending on your competitor is a problem, you should really look into web search where all the real money is today.
Personally for me, who is bought into the Apple ecosystem this is worrying. I am aware how PCC is supposed to work (which is the likely target platform) but the deal with Google of all the companies sends bad signal to consumers who are privacy focussed. If such a feature will be baked in without a way to switch it off, the next device will not be iphone or macbook or ipad.
What happens to on-device intelligence? Does it stay a massive part of the Apple Intelligence offer? Or can we expect everything to be offloaded to the cloud?
Apple seems positioning this announcement as "on-device intelligence", with the caveat that Apple is promoting their Private Cloud Compute as "on-device" or at least "on-device-like". I'd be curious if they do a breakdown of what they expect to do on-device versus what happens in Private Cloud Compute for this Siri project. I'm a little on the fence if Private Cloud Compute counts as "on-device" as well, but I'm hopeful it is a good idea and is as well built/considered as its documentation says it is.
Google's strategy is as unreadable as ever. It feels like two companies fighting each other in one.
On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.
On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.
It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.
My experience with Gemini (3 Flash) has been pretty funny, not awful (but worse than Kimi K2 or GPT 5.2 Mini), but it's just so much worse at (or rather hyper focused on) following my custom instructions, I keep getting responses like:
The idiomatic "British" way of doing this ...
Alternatively, for an Imperial-style approach, ...
As a professional software engineer you really should ...
in response to programming/Linux/etc. questions!
(Because I just have a short blurb about my educational background, career, and geography in there, which with every other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how to mkdir etc.)
It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting old now.
Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone.
Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.
I thought it was interesting that a Google flack stressed that the model would run on Apple's compute, and seemed to imply it might even run on-device. Allegedly this was said to allay the (expected) privacy concerns of Apple users who wouldn't want their Siri convos shared with Google.
But I saw something else in that statement. Is there going to be some quantized version of Gemini tailored to run on-device on an M4? If so, that would catapult Apple into an entirely new category merging consumer hardware with frontier models.
You can already run quantized models without much friction, people also have dedicated apps for that. It changes very little for people because they everyone who wanted to do it already solved it and those who do not they dont care. It is marginal gain from consumer, a feature to brag about for apple, big gain for google. Users also would need to change existing habits which is undoubtedly hard to do.
Really, Siri is an agent. Agents thrive when the subjacent model capabilities are higher, as it unlocks a series of other use cases that are hard to accomplish when the basic Natural Language Processing layer is weak.
The better the basic NLP tasks like named entity recognition, PoS tagging, Dependency Parsing, Semantic Role Labelling, Event Extraction, Constituency parsing, Classification/Categorization, Question Answering, etc, are implemented by the model layer, the farther you can go on implementing meaningful use-cases in your agent.
Apple can now concentrate on making Siri a really useful and powerful agent.
This is good for Siri, in many ways. But I was kind of hoping we would see a time soon when phone hardware became good enough to do nearly 100% of the Siri-level tasks locally rather than needing Internet access.
I suspect we'll see that; but Siri is in such a bad state of disrepair that Apple really needs something now while they continue to look for micro-scale LLM models that can run well-enough locally. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
The biggest thing Apple has to do is get a generic pipeline up and running, that can support both cloud and non-cloud models down the road, and integrate with a bunch of local tools for agent-style workloads (e.g. "restart", "audio volume", "take screenshot" as tools that agents via different cloud/local models can call on-device).
I don’t think there’s a clear boundary of “Siri-level” tasks. In particular, properly determining whether a task is “Siri-level” or not is likely to require off-device AI.
I'd hope it could be the other way around. Some stuff should be relatively straightforward -- summarizing notifications, emails, setting timers, things like that should be obviously on-device. But aside from that, I would hope that the on-device AI can make the determination on whether it is necessary to go to a datacenter AI for a better answer.
But you may be right, maybe on-device won't be smart enough to decide it isn't smart enough. Though it does seem like the local LLMs have gotten awfully good.
I can see them going that route, but it would cause similarly annoying breaks in the flow as current Siri offering to delegate to ChatGPT, or on-device Siri deciding it can do the task but actually failing or doing it wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be an “it just works” experience.
The actual transactions around this deal will be interesting - will Google simply withold $1B from their search deal, will they pay it then Applepay it back (or a split). I doubt we’ll even know.
Can someone explain to me how this was allowed to happen? Wasn't Siri supposed to be the leading AI agent not ten years ago? How was there such a large disconnect at Apple between what Siri could do and what "real" AI was soon to be capable of?
Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn't there be talk within the industry that this form of AI assistant would soon be looked at as useless?
Source: while I don’t have any experience with the inner workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa).
Siri was never an “AI agent”, with intent based systems, you give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an intent, all of the “slots” have to be fulfilled. For instance “I want to go from $source to $destination” and then the system calls an API.
There is no AI understanding - it’s a “1000 monkeys implementation”, you just start giving the system a bunch of variations and templates you want to match on in every single language you care about and match the intents to an API. That’s how Google and Alexa also worked pre LLM. They just had more monkeys dedicated to creating matching sentences.
Post LLM, you tell the LLM what the underlying system is capable of, the parameters the API requires to fulfill an action and the LLM can figure out the users intentions and ask follow up questions until it had enough info to call the API. You can specify the prompt in English and it works in all of the languages that the LLM has been trained on.
I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer my question.
I want to know why the executive leadership at Apple failed to see LLMs as the future of AI. ChatGPT and Gemini are what Siri should be at this point. Siri was one of the leading voice-automated assistants of the past decade, and now Apple's only options are to strap on an existing solution to the name of their product or let it go defunct. So now Siri is just an added layer to access Gemini? Perhaps with a few hard-coded solutions to automate specific tasks on the iPhone, and that's their killer app into the world of AI? That's pathetic.
Is Apple already such a bloated corporation that it can no longer innovate fast enough to keep up with modern trends? It seems like only a few years ago they were super lean and able to innovate better than any major tech company around. LLMs were being researched in 2017. I guess three years was too short of a window to change the direction of Siri. They should have seen the writing on the wall here.
According to everything that has been reported, both the Google Assistant and Alexa are less reliable now that they are LLM based.
I don’t know why, in my much smaller scale experience, converting to an LLM “tools” based approached from the Intent based approach is much more reliable.
Siri was behind pre LLM because Apple didn’t throw enough monkeys at the problem.
Everything that an assistant can do is “hardcoded” even when it is LLM based.
Old way: voice -> text -> pattern matching -> APIs to back end functionality.
New Way: voice -> text -> LLM -> APIs to back end functionality.
How often have you come across a case where Siri understood something and said “I can’t do that”? That’s not an AI problem. That’s Apple not putting people on the intent -> API mapping. An LLM won’t solve the issue of exposing the APIs to Siri.
I don't really want to continue on with this discussion, as AI in general can be absolutely infuriating. It's one of those buzzwords that's just being thrown around without a care in the world at this point, but do you have any links to those reports? I'd be willing to bet that if Google Assistant and Alexa were being run properly, then they shouldn't be less reliable when working with an LLM.
I don't think Apple didn't have enough people working on Siri, I think they had too many people working on the wrong problems. If they had any eye on the industry like they did in their heyday when Jobs was at the helm they would've been all over LLMs like Sam Altman was with his OpenAI startup. This report of SIRI using Gemini going forward is one of the biggest signs that Apple is failing to innovate, let alone the constant rehashing of Iphone and IOS. They haven't been innovative in years.
And yes that's the point I was trying to make, AI assistants shouldn't be hardcoded to do certain things, that's not AI - but with Apple's marketing, they'd have you believe that SIRI is what AI should be, except now everyone's wiser, everyone and their grandmother has used ChatGPT which is really what SIRI should have been. Changes to the IOS API should roll out and an LLM backed AI assistant should be able to pick up on those changes automatically, SIRI should be an LLM trained on Apple Data, its APIS, your personal data (emails, documents,etc.), and a whole host of publicly available data. This would actually make SIRI useful going into the future.
Again, if Apple's marketing team were to be believed, SIRI would be the most advanced LLM on the planet, but from a technical standpoint, they haven't even started training an LLM at all. It's nonsense.
AI assistants can’t magically “do stuff” without “tools” exposed. A tool is always an API that someone has to write an expose to the orchestrator whether it’s AI or just a dumb intent system.
And ChatGPT can’t really “do anything” without access to tools.
You don’t want an LLM to have access to your total system without deterministic guardrails and limiting the permissions of what the tools can do just like you wouldn’t expose your entire database with admin privileges to the web.
You also don’t want to expose too many tools to the system. Every tool you expose you also have to have a description of what the tool does, the parameters it needs etc. Ot will both blow up your context window and start hallucinating. I suspect that’s why Alexa and Google Assistant got worse when they became LLM based and my narrow use cases don’t suffer those problems when I started implementing LLM based solutions.
And I am purposefully yada yada yadaing some of the technical complexities and I hate the entire “appeal to authority” thing. But I worked at AWS for 3.5 years until 2 years ago and I was at one point the second highest contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that almost everyone in the niche had heard of dealing with voice automation. I really do know about this space.
yeah, there's just really nothing left to discuss. Apple could have been a real leader in the AI space had they hired the right researchers to implement LLMs and beaten OpenAI to the punch.
I understand that AI assitants need access to tools in order to do anything on a computer, I've been working with AI augmented development for a few months now and everytime I need a prompt to run a tool it asks for permission first, or just straight up gives me the command to paste into a terminal.
ideally this would have been abstracted away if siri were an LLM, with Apple controlling which apis siri has access to and bipassing user confirmation all together.
It would have been neat if I were able to say, "Hey, Siri: send a text to John Smith with a playfully angry prose thanking him for not inviting me to the party". which would have the LLM automatically craft the message and send upon confirmation, perhaps with a disclaimer "made with ai" at the bottom of the text or something along those lines.
"Hey, Siri: What's the weather in Los Angeles, California" would fallback to a web api endpoint.
"Hey, Siri: How do I compile my C# application without Visual Studio" would provide step-by-step instructions on working with MSBUILD.
different prompts would fallback on different apis that only Apple would expose. Obviously not allowing the user to gain root access to the system, which is what you would expect from Apple.
I guess from a purely technical standpoint, you'd train two models, one as "Safe" and the other as "Unsafe". "Safe" is what would be used by the end-user, allowing them to access safe data, apis, messaging, web.. you name it. "Unsafe" would be used internally at Apple and would have system-wide access, access to unlimited user data, root privileges, perhaps unsafe image generation and web search... basically no limit to what an LLM could achieve.
That's my point, Apple has invested so much into Siri that there's no reason why it's not the most advanced LLM in the world. They missed the mark completely. Why? If Jobs were still in charge, the entire team would have been gone years ago.
How soon does elon sue them for not choosing xai? He's gonna cry some nonsense about antitrust just like he did last year when apple partnered with openai for apple intelligence opt-in.
Google release hints at this being more than just Siri:
> Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
This is actually the most important part of this announcement, and excellent news. I was pretty disappointed that they were going with an existing player rather than building their own models. But this implies that they will continue to build their own base models, just using Gemini as a starting point, which is a pretty good solution.
To me, Apple's ML business was all about federated learning. I know this concept was pre-transformer era, I conjectured one of the reasons Apple didn't adopt LLM right away was that Apple couldn't find a reasonable way to do federated learning with LLMs. I wonder Apple will give up this idea. And I would like to see how it could be done with current AI systems.
This is the sad state of Apple right now. It is ridiculous that they basically had unlimited access to TSMC and achieved nothing in AI. Management is a joke.
I was not aware HN is now an investment discussion board. Even if you were to argue that point, what’s his incremental value comped to but-for world? I mean one where Steve Jobs is still alive and running Apple. I am sure Jobs would’ve sat on his behind milking iPhones and just let Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia take the entire AI TAM. I am sure that’s the Steve Jobs we all knew.
There are many dimensions one could assess a management team, but it is obviously ridiculous to call them “a joke” when they achieve their principal goal at such astonishing scale.
I am certain Apple will do just fine in the AI revolution, in large part because such a massive distribution and brand advantage is extremely hard to overcome.
Does anyone know what Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" servers actually are? I recall murmurings about racked M chips or some custom datacenter-only variant?
I'm really curious how Apple is bridging the gap between consumer silicon and the datacenter scale stack they must have to run a customized Gemini model for millions of users.
RDMA over Thunderbolt is cool for small lab clusters but they must be using something else in the datacenter, right?
I don't understand why Apple cannot implement their own LLM at the user phone level for easy pickings? like settings control? or app-specific shortcuts? or local data searching?
I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia information, etc require external data sets, and transferring over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.
All signs are that they are doing exactly that. They already have an on-device LLM which powers certain features, and I expect they will have a better-trained version of that on-device model that comes out with the "new Siri" update.
In the original announcement of the Siri revamped a couple of years ago, they specifically talked about having the on-device model handle everything it can, and only using the cloud models for the harder or more open ended questions.
Feel like this is a huge whiff. At best your implementation is as good as what you can get with Google's own offerings and Pixel. Most likely Apple's offerings will always be just a bit behind. Im probably a bit biased as Ive preferred Anthropic but it seems like those two companies also align more with other outward policies like privacy.
This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
Makes sense given the search alliance already in place.
Amazon/AWS was trying to push its partnership with Apple hard once that was revealed, including vague references to doing AI things, but AWS is just way to far behind at this point so looks like they lost out here to Google/GCP.
I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.
Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.
This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.
What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.
Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?
I didn't realize that Apple could possibly be more stupid in their strategy with AI, but now they've given the game to their biggest competitor in every arena in which they compete.
I’m a long time Android user and almost switched to iPhone last year. Mostly because I use macOS and wanted better integration and also wanted to try it. Another big factor was the AI assistant. I stayed with Android because I think Google will win here. Apple will probably avoid losing users to their biggest competitor by reaching rough parity using the same models
I’m hopeful this means Apple will finally ship an updated (i.e. actually useful) Siri this calendar year. I have to assume they’ve been integrating Gemini into their OSes for some time now and that this is just the announcement that makes it official.
So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with Google.
I wouldn't expect this to happen, as Apple's resistance against this would be too strong. The data of Google's paying [enterprise] customers stays private as well, so the safeguards are in place already.
"Google already pays Apple billions each year to be the default search engine on iPhones. But that lucrative partnership briefly came into question after Google was found to hold an illegal internet search monopoly.
In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business.
The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such as the one with Apple."
How much is Google paying Apple now
If these anti-competitive agreements^1 were public,^2 headlines could be something like,
(A) "Apple agrees to use Google's Gemini for AI-powered Siri for $[payment amount]"
Instead, headlines are something like,
(B) "Apple picks Google's Gemini to run Ai-powered Siri"
1. In other words, they are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects
2. Neither CNBC nor I are suggesting that there is any requirement for the parties to make these agreements public. I am presenting a hypothetical relating to headlilnes, (A) versus (B), as indicated by the words "If" and "could"
It's probably anti-competitive, but I'm not sure about your argument which is that Apple and Google must disclose details of their business relationships just because they are Apple and Google. You could maybe argue something like this should be a requirement of publicly traded companies, but the long-term effect there would be fewer publicly traded companies so they don't have to disclose every deal they make.
I used Gemini heavily in 2025. It was very bad and frustrating to use. Shame on Google for shipping it in the condition they did. No quality control. No pride in craft.
Why is Apple's self-developed AI progressing so slowly that they still need to collaborate with Google? What's going on with their AI team? In this era of AI, it seems like Apple has already fallen behind.
Why is Apple's self-developed AI progressing so slowly that they need to collaborate with Google? What's going on with their AI team? In this era of AI, it seems like Apple has already fallen behind.
I hope Apple will make it a smooth integration. The chatgpt integration in Apple Intelligence is not smooth. Constantly wants user input („confirm you are 13+“ at every request)
Apple is buying time for another shot, right now they are in over their heads on AI and they need a fresh start. Eventually they will own the tech from bottom up, that’s the goal at least
Because their focus on user privacy makes it difficult for them to train at scale on users' data in the way that their competitors can. Ironically, this focus on privacy initially stemmed from fumbling the ball on Siri: recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google's equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming "we keep your data private so we can't train on it the way Google can." The result was a vicious cycle: initially botch AI rollout -> justify that failure with a novel marketing strategy around privacy that only makes it harder to improve their AI capabilities -> botch subsequent AI rollouts as a result -> ...
To be clear, I'd much rather have my personal cloud data private than have good AI integration on my devices. But strictly from an AI-centric perspective, Apple painted themselves into a corner.
Apple's privacy focus started long before the current AI wave. It got major public attention in the fight with the FBI over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter's phone. I don't think Google's equivalent even existed at that point.
This is nonsense. You don't need Apple user data to build a good AI model, plenty of startups building base models have shown that. But even if you did it's nonsense as Apple has long had opt-in for providing data to train their machine learning models, and many of those models, like OCR or voice recognition, are excellent.
It's been a long running thing that Apple can't do software as well as competitors, though in my experience they've beat Google and a few others at devex and UX in their mobile frameworks overtime despite initial roughness. Slow and steady might win this race eventually, too.
They've tried to have an AI assistant before AI was a big thing...it's just pretty bad and Siri never got better.
If it would suddenly get better, like they teased (Some would say, lied about the capabilities) with Apple Intelligence that would fit pretty well. That they delegate that to Gemini now is a defeat.
Siri got substantially worse over time in fact, I swear it used to at least be able to give you answers to basic facts rather than just offering to google things.
Gemini only replaced Google assistant on Android a few weeks ago. I gave up on Google assistant a few years ago, but I'd guess it wasn't a worthwhile upgrade from Siri.
Still using Google assistant after trying Gemini on my pixel about 6 months ago. It was not an assistant replacement, it couldn't even perform basic operations on my phone, it would just say something like, "I'm sorry, I'm just an LLM and I can't send text messages." Has that changed?
See ML research papers from Apple.
Their researchers prefered small models over LLM. So they thought researchers' effort would make up the lack of compute.
Then the scale law hit them hard.
I think that's the thing: Apple is good at very little, but they seem like they're good at "everything else" because they don't do much else. Lots of companies spread themselves really thin trying to get into lots of unrelated competencies and tons of products. Apple doesn't.
Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refining the design. When you're churning out a dozen designs a year, can you optimize the fan as well for each one? You hit a certain point where you say "eh, good enough." Apple's aluminum unibody MacBook Pro was largely the same design 2008-2021. They certainly iterated on it, but it wasn't "look at my flashy new case" every year. PC laptop makers come out with new designs with new materials so frequently.
With iPhones, Apple often keeps a design for 3 years. It looks like Samsung has churned out over 25 phone models over the past year while Apple has 5 (iPhone, iPhone Plus, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, iPhone 16e).
It's easy to look so good at things when you do fewer things. I think this is one of Apple's great strengths - knowing where to concentrate its effort.
This is some magical thinking. Even if Samsung took all their manpower, all their thought process and all their capital, they still couldn’t produce a laptop that competes with the MacBook (just to take one example), because they fundamentally don’t have any taste as a company.
Hell, they can’t even make a TV this year that’s less shit than last years version of it and all that requires is do literally nothing.
There's no reason to think that Apple would have any more skill at making a frontier AI model as they do at making airplanes or growing soybeans. Not much overlap between consumer electronics design and expertise, data, training, and datacenters needed for AI.
I feel like this ignores how big of a part the software is for those "consumer electronics" Apple is so good at making.
Apple definitely has software expertise, maybe it's not as specialized into AI as it is about optimizing video or music editors, but to suggest they'd be at the same starting point as an agriculture endeavor feels dishonest.
Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my HomePods all the time, and it's working great.
In the article they clearly mentioned that Gemini model will be used for the Foundation Model running on device or their own Server. They are not sending Siri request to Google servers.
My exact reaction every time I hear people discuss Siri. I don’t think I used it once in my life and it’s one of the first thing I turn off every time I have a new device. So interesting to see how different people use the same devices in completely different ways.
You can use Siri to call custom Shortcuts which in turn can ask for more details if required. And now that Shortcuts can make use of the LLMs (Apple’s or ChatGPT), there are a lot more ways to make Siri smarter.
For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination and such with as little friction as possible.
Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify, Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop generator.
I have a current case open with Apple with this issue. It does not work. And I don’t believe you. I’m sorry I just don’t believe you because Apple says there is a technical problem preventing this. That does not just affect me. Because I also tried it on three other phones of three other friends of mine and it does not work.
You’re able to disable Siri in iCloud? Not turn off Siri, disable Siri back up in iCloud. And when you go back to it after not turning it on, it’s still off?
Yes. But, I'm not surprised that you're having issues. In my experience managing a large enterprise, iCloud accounts seem to have all kinds of weird, account-specific issues.
That's where people get confused - it's not a chatbot or an LLM - it's a voice command interface. Adding something to the shopping list, setting a timer, turning up the heating in the back room, playing some music, skipping a track, sending a message - it works perfectly well for - and that's what I use it for virtually every day.
This work is to turn it it into something else, more like a chatbot, presumably
Siri is already transitioning from an intent-based NLU system to an LLM.
In iOS 18.1 (on iPhone 15+) Siri is part intent-based, part on-device "Apple Intelligence" small LLM, and in iOS 18.2 it also supports off-device ChatGPT.
This year Siri 2.0 is expected to ditch the legacy intent-based system and instead use just the small on-device Apple Intelligence LLM plus (opt-in) off-device Gemini (running in some private cloud).
Jeez, I only use it for the time and for the calculator, and to ask it to call someone. I am shocked anyone thinks I used it for anything more than that.
Also, I have never turned on Apple "Intelligence".
given that gemini 3 pro is presumably a relatively small model it wouldn't be too surprising to see an even more optimized model fit into latest iphones. I wish we knew the data behind gemini 3 flash because if my estimation that it's <50b is true, holy shit.
It tells you how bad their product management and engineering team is that they haven’t just decided to kill Siri and start from scratch. Siri is utterly awful and that’s an understatement, for at least half a decade.
I always said that Apple does not have the cloud GPU power to deliver a good AI experience to their huge customer base, no matter how good their developers are. They have to find someone with a lot of GPUs that can handle the workload, and that's Google.
This seems like a pretty significant anti-trust issue. One of the two mobile OS makers is using a product from the other for its AI assistance. And that means that basically all mobile devices will be using the same AI technology.
I don't expect the current US government to do anything about it though.
What antitrust rule do you think would be breached?
I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).
Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly.
It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winning AI service is an exclusive deal to use Google while all competing services are disadvantaged, which is probably not the outcome a healthy and competitive playing field would produce.
So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just someones opinion).
The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic abuse.
> So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
No they were already being sued for antitrust violations, it just mirrors what they are accused of doing to exploit their platform.
So if it mirrors something they were already accused of (like you're saying), my questioning should be pretty easy to map onto that issue as well?
It's the line of thinking that I'm trying to dig into more, not the specifics of this case. Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
If that case was prosecuted and Apple was found guilty, I suppose you can point to it as precedent. But again, does it only serve as precedent when it's a deal between Apple and Google? Is it only a precedent when there's a case between two "large" companies?
Again this is all really squishy, if companies aren't allowed to outsource development of another feature once they pass some sense of "large", when does it apply? What about the $1T pharmaceutical company that wants to use AI modeling? They're a large technically component company, if Eli Lily partnered with Gemini would you be sitting here saying that they also are abusing a monopolistic position that prevents competition in the AI model space?
> Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
No it's antitrust because they have a failed product, but purely by virtue of shutting out competitors from their platform they have been able to turn three years of flailing around into a win-by-outsourcing. What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants? Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology? How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly? This is why it's an antitrust issue.
No other thoughts on my actual questions? You're just addressing one-off sentences from my responses.
"it's antitrust because they have a failed product" is objectively hilarious
> What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants?
Probably pretty much the same. What would Gemini's position be like today if they hadn't blocked out default voice assistants? You only get Gemini when you use Gemini, just like you only got Siri when you use Siri (up until this deal takes effect). Also Siri has used ChatGPT already, so I'm not even convinced this is a valid criticism. They already didn't block OpenAI from being part of Siri.
> Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology?
This is relevant how?
> How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly?
How would what measure against other ai models? How would their ability to recover from a lack of investing in a better "homemade" AI model differ if they used OpenAI instead of Gemini? How does that have anything to do with antitrust? That's a business case study type of question. Also, shouldn't they be allowed to recover from their own lack of developing a model by using the best tool available to them?
> it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model
The problem isn't that they used another company's model. It's that they are using a model made by the only company competing with them in the market of mobile OS.
> Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI?
Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".
Apple and Google have a duopoly on Mobile OS. If Apple uses Google's model for Siri, that means Apple and Google are using their duopoly in one market (mobile OS) to enforce a monopoly for Google in another (model for mobile personal assistant AI).
They are in a duopoly on the Mobile OS market, with no other significant player available. Google would be the sole integrated mobile AI, though there are competitors available if customers wanted to switch (customers for such products being the OS companies buying the AI services, not the end-users).
However I don't see the link, how they are "using their duopoly", and why "they" would be using it but only one of them benefits from it. Being a duopoly, or even a monopoly, is not against anti-trust law by itself.
Weird thing is, Gemini didn't crack speech-to-speech yet. They have a product but both Anthropic and Google are visibly suffering in speech-to-speech vs OpenAI voice mode.
How Apple has made some of the greatest phones in history, amazing engineering, and a lot more, but just can't make a simple model to run locally on the phone when many others did?
It's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.
But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine deal, and using Google Cloud infrastructure for iCloud and other services. Their new "private cloud compute" already runs on GCP too, perfect! Buying Gemini just makes sense, for now. Wait a few years until the technology becomes more mature/stable and then replace it with their own for a reasonable price.
No, they couldn't, because all current and future ethe training hardware is already tied up by contracts from the frontier labs. Apple could not simply buy its way in given how constricted the supply is.
But, but, didn’t they say two years ago that they picked OpenAI to power apple intelligence? Where did that go? Wasn’t Scam Altman gay enough for Tim Apple?
Enemies? Google contributes about 20% of Apple's profits annually through their default search engine deal, that's more profitable than just about everything they do or make except selling iPhones.
> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”
The original iPhone came pre-loaded with Google search, Maps, and Youtube. Jobs competed with Google but he also knew Google had best-in-class products too.
If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly diversified revenue stream.
Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks, and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
> Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product
Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.
Yes but they also haven’t generated spicy deep fakes and talked kids into suicide with their products.
It’s just how Apple does things: They still have no folding phone, under-screen finger print scanner, under-screen front-cam, etc.
Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
> but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool
When was this part last true?
“Cool” is subjective, so you can use that to dismiss any example, but you know exactly what is being referenced.
> “Cool” is subjective, so you can use that to dismiss any example
You can't use cool to argue against me. It was in the comment I replied to.
> but you know exactly what is being referenced
No, I don't, which is why I asked. Mind explaining instead of being coy?
Apple is rarely first to the party. They wait until the tech is ready for prime time and until they have an implementation that makes sense and feels inevitable. Then the rest of the industry tends to uses that as the model and shifts to copy them.
Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, but once they made the iPod, everyone wanted an iPod. It was cool. Most other players pivoted to be more iPod-like.
Apple didn’t make the first smart phone. Smart phones were semi-niche devices for businessmen and nerds. Once the iPhone came out, everyone wanted it and the whole market changed.
Apple didn’t make the first smart watch, but once they did, their smart watch was more capable and integrated than the others and went on to outsell Rolex.
Apple didn’t make the first tablet. Microsoft tried to push the idea repeatedly 10 years earlier. Apple waited and came out with the iPad once multitouch was a thing and they could build an OS around touch. 15 years after its launch, it’s still the only tablet anyone actually talks about.
Steve Jobs talked about putting the customer experience first and selecting technologies that will be around for the next 10+ years, rather than chasing the latest bleeding edge tech, just to say you’re using it and trying to find a way to shoehorn it in.
To know what tech is going to stick around and to find how to best implement it takes time for things to mature a little bit. This means sacrificing the bleeding edge for a more thoughtful and stable approach.
Tim Cook doesn’t have the same kind of vision as Jobs, so I think some of this has been lost, but this has been their history for a long time, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful.
Everything you said is so true, but it doesn't negate the fact that Apple has been all-in on LLMs since GPT-3, but they've been struggling to integrate LLMs into Siri while being fully aware of market demand... Going so far as to sell an entire line of new AI iPhones without ever actually shipping core features from the keynote.
In your examples market demand from existing customers of iMacs wasn't pointed at Apple to create the iPod. iPod customers weren't demanding that Apple create the iPhone. And iPhone customers weren't seething over the lack of a first-party watch option. Apple customers are looking across the landscape and can see every other phone manufacturer running circles around Siri, and this integration with Gemini really feels like they're throwing in the towel.
You’re right. This is where Cook lacks the clear vision and stubbornness of Jobs to either keep quiet publicly, or say that the technology simply isn’t up to Apple’s standards yet to release… and tack the lumps in the meantime. Jobs did this a lot.
The thing is, Siri doesn’t need an LLM for Apple customers to use an LLM. The App Store exists and iPhone users can download ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc, etc, etc. They can map their favorite one to the action button if they want quick access.
I don’t see a major need for Apple to rush something out the door that doesn’t live up to their quality standard. From my use of LLMs, I still don’t think it lives up to the standards needed to hand out to a billion people and say “use this, you can trust it”. Even if their internal models were as good as the best ones on the market, I still think the press would treat it as another Apple Maps situation. I’m saying that with LLMs of today, not even the ones from the GPT-3 days.
Cook is too eager to say stuff that will please the stockholders, so he teased the AI stuff and had a big AI phone release before they had a product that was viable to release. That’s a theme with him.
Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
> Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard
Oh yeah, that's been awesome for the consumer.
Consumer wasn't mentioned.
Oh, please. That's clearly the context being discussed.
Indeed, "iPad" is almost a generic term for "tablet," especially for kids.
Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
>You rarely ever saw them in the wild.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
UPS uses what are called DIADS made by Honeywell. I've seen Fedex and Amazon use regular android phones as far as I'm aware.
OK, but the topic is tablets before the introduction of the iPad
USB-C I guess?
Weeeeelllll that was mainstream a long long time before they adopted it. And I'm still annoyed that the only devices with Lightning in our house are my Airpods en iPhone mini 12 and wife's iPhone 14 Pro.
Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.
I think the person you’re replying to meant MacBooks. They were USB-C exclusively way before Windows machines.
It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
Same… I love MagSafe and would prefer to use it. I’m always worried about yanking the computer with the USB-C charger in and breaking the cable or the port.
But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.
The battery life is sufficient that I never feel the need to leave it umbilical-ed to an outlet across the room. I'll leave it docked at my desk, or use it wirelessly, or charge it at a conference room table, or recharge it after the day is done in my hotel room as I sleep.
Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.
There are many magnetic USB C plugs. I am not sure if they are standard compliant but they work fine.
I might as well just use the official magsafe power cable that came with my macbook if I were to do that. The point was more convenience. I have a USB-C charger at my desk, at my bed, at the couch, etc. Anywhere I am I can just plug in without fiddling with other cables (or connectors). Ultimately I'm lazy and just want to simplify my cable management :)
There is not a single port on the Apple Silicon MBP that I wouldn't trade for another thunderbolt (USB-C) port.
Closest would be the SD card slot... if it was SD Express.
If they had released the M1 MBP in the old chassis I would have a real challenge upgrading to the current models.
Fist use of a Macbook Pro and in a sleep addled state I plugged the MagSafe cable into the Mac USB-C end first.
It’s very confusing if you do that and are an idiot.
Mag safe in the age of goof battery life
Ah ok, yeah sure, that was nice (could have added an A and HDMI port in this case, but ok, they were early with that.)
Airpods
> Apple is always behind on industry trends
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
This is very much what apple wants you to believe; they have very good PR.
In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.
> prioritizing BT over wired earphones
Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p
> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.
USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.
The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
It's short term annoyance for a long term greater good. I'm not oblivious - but of course the impact on me is simply negative (and I'm not going to leave the walled garden anyway so what were we ever achieving really)
Oddly, Apple has gotten a lot of criticism for not including chargers be default with their phones for this specific reason.
They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-10-magic-cue-o...
Apple is better though. Hence the only examples being Apple Intelligence and AirPower
Whataboutism doesn’t justify what Apple did. They took billions of dollars from consumers using demos of products those consumers never received.
> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence.
There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Lately, they've arguably been starting from their own priorities (i.e. pushing and protecting their "services" revenue at all cost) and working backwards to an acceptable user experience from there.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats.
Then again, remember millimeterwave? But yes, as a general rule I think your point still stands.
> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology
Since when?
> versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats
I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.
> Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats
I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them?
I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"
Is the iPod your only example? That was a quarter century ago.
What's hot about less ports, no headphone jack, no SD card, a tax when buying apps for your phone, planned obsolescence, antagonistic behavior towards app and software developers, an unchanged aluminum rectangle, thinner devices that look cool at the cost of performance and efficiency, heaviest laptops and phones on the market, phones made out of glass front and back, the touchbar, the notch, etc.?
> There isn't currently a forcing function.
Investors are the forcing function
> There isn't currently a forcing function
Sorry but if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
> if there wasn’t a forcing function then “Apple Picks Gemini to Power Siri” wouldn’t be the headline
A pair four-trillion dollar companies striking a deal in the hottest technology space since the internet getting headline treatment is not evidence of a forcing function.
Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though.
Their naff image generation tool (Playground) is further evidence.
Apple are definitely panicking. And they should be too.
> Them having bolted on ChatGPT in the ugly way they did is evidence though
That's evidence they forced themselves. Not that there was a forcing function. That's the whole point of the top comment. (Mine.) They rushed where they didn't have to. And I still don't think they need to rush.
That’s some politician-grade logic you’ve got there:
A company can be forced into a decision because they’re scared of losing market share, but that doesn’t count as them being forced because they chose they wanted to stay in business.
The crux of the problem is that people use Gemini on Android. In fact Google have been doubling down on the AI features for years. And in a range of guise’s from camera enhancing vision models to smart personal assistants via Gemini.
Just as Apple heavily promoted Siri back when it was pioneering.
But Siri has stagnated for years. It’s basically the Internet Explorer 5 of the assistant domain. And the competition is so far ahead in capabilities that people are going to start questioning the innovation happening at Apple. In fact people already are.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
The fact is, Siri sucks. I almost never use it now. Apple knows this. We know it. Consumers know it. Apple know that they have to urgently fix it.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liquid Glass misfire was a desperate attempt to make their technology feel futuristic again.
Liquid Glass is part of an ongoing strategy to get developers to target all the platforms equally - not to come out with a native iOS version, then poop out an electron app for the Mac and let it run in a zoomed window on iPad.
This is an initiative that started with MacOS 11:
1. Make the Mac feel closer to an iPad; strip away arbitrary differences like app icons.
2. Catalyst to make porting an iOS codebase easier
3. Swift UI to make native targeting of platforms easier with their differing UX/capabilities
4. Create iPad variants of MacOS UX features like mouse pointers, menus, and so on. Create API (typically under Swift UI) to support both variants with the same code
I don't think the designers had a goal with Liquid Glass to make everything feel more like AVP. Instead, I think thats what they had touched last, and they used that recent experience to revamp all the platforms.
But their goal is that everything works like an iPad. An iPhone is a mini iPad (which maybe in the future folds out to have a similar size and aspect ratio to the iPad Mini). AVP is the iPad you strap to your face. And a build targeting Mac now has icons and menus and controls which don't look out of place.
That could be a big differentiator, when for many companies iOS and Android are the _only_ platforms that currently get native experiences and integration, with everything else being web or electron based.
The redesign was part of that strategy. But they didn't have to go with Liquid Glass, as a theme, to achieve that.
The choice of theme is the misstep. Not the strategy.
Apple provides high-value services like iMessage, iCloud, iPhotos, Apple Maps, Apple Health etc. They hold mountains of people’s personal data and interactions. These services provide the personalized experiences that allows Apple’s hardware to be so sticky.
These services are threatened by the emerging competitive landscape. Apple is panicking, and there is a forcing function, because their users are spending more and more time with LLMs having the most personal experiences they’ve ever had with any software, and Apple isn’t getting a piece of that pie. They’re in a very high risk position because this is the heart of their brand and as data is slowly siphoned away into apps and services that are providing the experiences their users are growing to expect, that moat and stickiness is eroding.
That said, this precisely why it’s taken so long. While Apple is desperate, they are completely unwilling to disrespect their users trust and mishandle their personal data or compromise their privacy.
Not enough things are referred to as naff these days, which is funny because there's so much naff shit knocking around.
I mean, maybe if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Or maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises and it was all intentional and part of a well orchestrated plan from the outset? Seems like an odd strategy
> if the headline was “For no particular reason whatsoever, under absolutely no pressure from their millions of customers to deliver on the promises they paid for nearly two years ago, Apple picks Gemini to Power Siri”
Which is not how headlines work.
You may have an argument that Apple is under pressure. But your headline argument is bananas.
> maybe you’re arguing that Apple never did intend to commit to those promises
Where did you get that?
The attitude I called "fucked up" is precisely rushing to make promises and then meet them. Apple's sales don't suggest customers are putting material pressure on Cupertino. Apple's share price doesn't suggest investors are panicking. The promises have already been broken. If Apple is pushing something out, again, because they feel they have to on the basis of those promises, it's–again-a fuckup.
> Which is not how headlines work
That’s the joke. I assure you they are panicking.
> Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door
They don't though, Android is clearly ahead in AI integration (even Samsung are running TV ads mocking iPhones AI capability) yet still iPhones sales are breaking records - the majority of their phone buyers still prefer an iPhone over an AI capable other phone.
They can take their time to develop AI integration that others can't deploy - 'secure/private', deep integration with iCloud, location services, processing on device etc. that will provide the product moat to increase sales.
The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
They're not good enough for that usecase, currently - so almost all interactions make the UX worse, currently.
Might change in the future, I'm just taking about today in January 2026
I think this is the wrong framing. Nobody cares whether there's an LLM in their phone. What people do want is features like improved Siri (still, debatable beyond setting timers) or other improvements, that could potentially come from LLMs.... if they actually work. So far other providers (such as Amazon Alexa) have struggled to deliver a reliable voice assistant powered by LLMs.
I’m almost certain even something as ad-hoc as Opus 4.5 with access to iOS native APIs at the level of Siri exposed via MCP would run circles around Siri in January 2026.
It would, but it would also result in a bunch of users getting hacked through prompt injection attacks.
I strongly agree with this. Frankly even ChatGPT 3.5 could do better. I am baffled that Apple has stuck so stubbornly to whatever insane architecture they have that results in my daily cornucopia of "I'm sorry, I didn't understand" as well as own goals like it forgetting that Apple Music is the only music service I have, or calling a girl I haven't seen in 20 years instead of my wife who has the same first name.
I am also baffled that how common I do something never updates the model. I often use Siri to start a playlist while running but had to rename them because Siri would play some unknown to me public playlist instead of what would seem to me be the highest likelihood target - my own
> The reality is that almost nobody actually wants LLMs in their phones.
I don’t think that’s true. People just use the LLM apps. What people don’t feel like they need right now is deep LLM integration across the whole OS. IMO, that’s more of just not showing people the killer product yet.
Live translation? Circle to search? All the magic reframing and relighting stuff in the camera app? I don't know how good the Apple equivalents are, but those are all deeply integrated into Android and are used pretty heavily as far as I can see.
I don't often use voice assistants myself, but they're fully conversational these days and several billion times more useful than the old-school Alexa-style stuff with a limited set of integrations.
I don’t need a Siri LLM. The current Siri is more than adequate for responding to texts and calling while driving. A lot of the “ai integrations” is marketing material for features nobody will actually use
i dont NEED it, but if Siri could actually do anything you could do on your phone it would be very nice.
What are the top 3 features you’re missing right now?
I'll bite
1. Have a user interface. Sometimes I'll ask a question and Siri actually provides a good enough answer, and while I'm reading it, the Siri response window just disappears. Siri is this modal popup with no history, no App, and no UI at all really. Siri doesn't have a user interface, and it should have one so that I can go back to sessions and resume them or reference them later and interact with Siri in more meaningful ways.
2. Answer questions like a modern LLM does. Siri often responds with very terse web links. I find this useful when I'm sitting with friends and we don't remember if Lliam Neeson is alive or not - for basic fact-checking. This is the only use case where it's useful I've found, when I want to peel my attention away for the shortest period of time. If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case. Otherwise Siri isn't good for long questions because it doesn't have the intelligence, and as mentioned before, has no user interface.
3. Be able to do things conversationally, based on my context. Today, when I "Add to my calendar Games at Dave's house" it creates a calendar entry called "Games" and sets the location to a restaurant called "Dave's House" in a different country. My baseline expectation is that I should be able to work with Siri, build its memory and my context, and over time it becomes smarter about the things I like to do. The day Siri responds with "Do you mean Dave's House the restaurant in another country, or Dave, from your contacts?" I'll be happy.
For 1, I think we are getting farther away from this.
Siri's current architecture now provides context into the prompt, such as the app/window that has focus and the content loaded into it. In that sense, Siri is more like the MacOS menu bar than an app. A consolidated view of Siri history may look disjointed, in that there is a lot of context hidden if all it shows is a query like "when was this building built?".
Even more so, it might not provide the functionality desired if you go look at historic chats and ask "who was the architect?", unless all that context was actually captured. However, that context was never formatted in a way that was intended to be clearly displayed to the user. That in itself creates a lot of challenges around things like user consent since Siri can farm off queries to other (online) tools and world-knowledge AI services.
There is at least a UX paradigm for this - clipboard history. Coincidentally, Tahoe built clipboard history into Spotlight. But clipboard history lends itself to perhaps being more a complete and self contained snapshot. I'm not sure Siri is being built to work this way because of implicit context.
For 2, at a certain point this gets farmed off to other tools or other AI services. The Gemini agreement is for the foundational model, not large "world knowledge" models or backing databases. Today, Siri answers this question by providing bibliographical information inline from Wikipedia, using internal tools. The model itself just isn't able to answer the actual question (e.g. it will just say his birthday).
For 3, the model already has substantial personal context (as much as apps are willing to give it) and does have state in between requests. This is actually one of the issues with Siri today - that context changes the behavior of the command and control engine in interesting ways, phone to phone and sometimes moment to moment.
Unfortunately, I think stopping and asking for clarification is not something generative AI currently excels at.
Thanks for sharing. 1. Could be fixed today. 2./3. need a good enough LLM.
btw: I hope you will visit Dave's House someday in the future.
My wife and I got a kick out of your “Games at Dave's house” example. Thanks for sharing
Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth made a massage appointment with the head of Xbox programming (luckily Siri was not that competent that it said "Mr. Appointment" in the invite)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r499DeN770M
>If ChatGPT could be bound to a power button long-press, then I'd cease to use Siri for this use case
This should be possible, go to Settings->Action Button->Controls and search for ChatGPT
Isn’t its voice the ui? It should respond using the same context of the request. Voice and natural language.
If you ask for a website it should open a browser.
Edit: everything else spot on
> Isn’t its voice the ui? It should respond using the same context of the request. Voice and natural language.
Yeah it’s an interesting idea, but visuals are required sometimes. Even the simple task of “List the highest rated Mexican restaurants near me” works perfectly well enough with old crappy Siri. You’ll get a list of the highest rated Mexican restaurants near you. But as soon as you open the first restaurant, Siri closes and the list is gone. You can’t view the second restaurant. To get the list back you need to ask Siri again.
There’s no world in which that user experience makes a viable product. It’s a completely broken user experience no matter how smart the Gemini model is.
Yes, the lack of context or history has annoyed me in the past too.
Also, Liam Neeson just catching strays over here
I'm sorry, I can't answer that right now.
Would you like to click this button which takes what you said and executes it as a Google search in Safari?
Now playing You're Missing, by Bruce Springsteen on Apple Music
You don't have a subscription for Apple Music. Here is 1 month free trial.
Here is Missing by Everything But The Girl on Apple Music
Siri to function above the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking '95
Fantastic reference. I remember pirating this from microcrap.com in about 1996.
> 1996
I'm chuckling at the idea of pirating software in 1996.
iirc even in 1999, I couldn't figure out why Windows update required me to use internet exploder. It would take forever to download updates over dialup.
Don't remember if it was the 90's, but we got trial versions of Photoshop on some magazine CD and it was then all about searching for cracks / patches to it. These were quite small and bearable to download on dialups. And of course, even otherwise, dialups really taught all of us patience ... our generation thus knows the value of delayed gratification :).
My older brother and I were pirating software from BBSes before the World Wide Web existed.
Talk about being there when the deep magic was written.
Or buying CDs packed with software from markets. In Glasgow you could get copies of loads of high-end software from traders in the Barras market.
Exchanging "emails" over FidoNet was so cool
I definitely pirated Photoshop around 1996 from the macfilez (possibly zelifcam by then) AOL chat room.
BBS existed long before that, and even before that we had "sneakernets" or "copy parties". I assume the term "pirating" is much newer than the concept of copying software, or copyright of said software.
efnet
ANY ability to answer simple questions without telling me to open Safari and read a webpage for myself...?
I should be able to completely control my phone with voice and ask it to do anything it is capable of and it should just work:
"Hi Siri, can you message Katrina on WhatsApp that Judy is staying 11-15th Feb and add it to the shared Calendar, confirm with me the message to Kat and the Calendar start and end times and message."
They will never do this, and the lack of it can be marketed as a security feature.
Well that’s what they sold people in June 2024
Could it just fucking work? "Hey Siri turn on the [room name] room lights" and it gives me a positive chime and ... doesn't turn any lights on? In any of my rooms?
Judging by another comment, it probably turned the lights on in a restaurant in a different country.
Somewhere deep inside your iPhone, an LED is toggling.
Apple’s insistence on not ever displaying error messages is infuriating.
Elementary anti-spam.
> It was nearly two years ago
Just under 16 months since the release of iOS 18. The phones they would have sold this with shipped alongside 18.
Also, the personalized Siri was indicated it would not be available until later and was expected in the spring release (March 2025).
I consider Apple to be practical, Also Apple will be running Gemini on its own hardware. This is better than Buying perplexity and running chinese model on which Perplexity runs. Training Models is a money on game, Its better to rent models than training your own. If everyone is training models they are going to be come commodity, also this is not the final architecture.
I still think Apple should, at least to Apple One customers, offer small, private models, trained on your personal imessage, image and video archives in icloud. With easy-to-use, granular controls for content inclusion/exclusion.
Will make it much easier to find those missing pictures from a few years ago...
The iPhone 16 was released 16 months ago, not “nearly” 24 months.
Well it ain't coming now either if it's just Gemini, is it?
Nothing about OpenAI is clean. Their complete org is controlled by Altmann, who was able to rehire himself after he was fired.
Anthropic doesn't have a single data centre, they rent from AWS/Microsoft/Google.
Also: they've dealt with Google for default search engine deals before even through the early Android/iPhone competition days (and for early iPhone Weather, Stocks, etc.) It's a familiar enough dynamic.
I was more thinking about this being driven by the fact that Google pays Apple $20B a year for being the pre-selected search engine and this way, Apple still gets $19B and a free AI engine on top.
It was 20 billion dollars years ago, 2022. There's little doubt it's closer to $25B now, perhaps more.
Counterpoint: iOS’s biggest competitor is Android. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
Counterpoint: Google is paying Apple $20b/year to keep themselves as the default search engine in iOS. Android's biggest competitor is iOS. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.
Does Apple develop a competing search engine?
It's strategically devastating because no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google and now they have no choice but to have Google AI on-board their machines.
I respect Google's engineering, and I'm aware that fundamental technologies such as Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers are unavoidably integrated into the software fabric, but this is is avoidable.
I'm surprised Google aren't paying Apple for this.
> no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google
Unfortunately, it probably actually is a small number comparatively. Or at least I would need to see some sort of real data to say anything different.
I feel like people who distrust Google probably wouldn't trust Apple enough to give them their data either? Why would you distrust one but not the other?
Google lost multiple antitrust lawsuits in 2025.
Apple still is in the business of selling devices, not customer data - with Google being an external company , I bet there'll be an extensive permissions systems you can limit what the AI can do (or turn it off altogether).
Siri > off is my default. Presumably I could still do this?
Yes but I may want to use Apple intelligence and now I have to use Google intelligence instead. This is not the product I paid thousands of dollars for.
Second I'm developing privacy focused apps that were going to use foundation models. Now I need to seriously reconsider this.
Just don't update your phone, they'll probably switch it on without asking like they do for Apple Intelligence. Or use Carplay, for which Siri is required.
Is android really iOSs competition ? I feel like the competition is less android more vendors who use android. Every android phone feels different. Android doesn’t even compete on performance anymore the chips are quite behind. The target audience of the two feels different lately.
>Is android really iOSs competition ?
It ISN'T in this day and age. People don't switch back and forth between iOS and Android like it's still 2010. They use whatever they got locken in initially since their first smartphone or where Apple's green/blue-bubble issue pushed them to or what their family handed them down or what their close friend groups used to have.
People who've been using iOS for 6+ years will 98% stick to iOS for their next purchase and won't even bother look at Android no matter what features Android were to add.
The Android vs iOS war is as dead as the console war. There's no competition anymore, it's just picking one from a duopoly of vendor lock-ins.
Even if EU were to break some of the lockins, people have familiarity bias and will stick with inertia of what they're used to, so it will not move the market share needle one bit.
Of course android is iOSs competition. android is also 75% of the market that apple surely wants bigger piece of.
Performance? We are many years past the point somebody cared about performance. I am writing this on iphone 11 pro and the experience is almost exactly the same as current iOS.
You know what's not the same? Android became pretty great OS. I recently got older Pixel to see how GrapheneOS works and was surprised about Android (which i havent seen for a decade). iOS on the other hand has recently gone trough with very bad ui redesign for no reason.
Imho the main thing Apple has going for it is that Google is spyware company and Apple is still mainly hardware company. But if Apple decides to pull their users data to gemini… well good luck.
Nothing about OpenAI smells clean.
Yup, Anthropic has constant performance problems (not enough GPU), OpenAI is too messy with their politics and Altman.
True. Also Gemini is the boring model, heavily sanitised for corporate applications. At least it admits this if you press it. It fits Apple here very well.
Personally I wouldn't use it, it still belongs to an advertiser specialised on extracting user information. Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher. But clean smell also means bland smell.
I suspect you're exactly right about it being the most sanitized model.
I don't however like the idea of having Google deeply embedded in my machine and Siri will definitely be turned off when this happens. I only use Siri as an egg timer anyway.
This seems like a odd move for a company that sells privacy.
There is no US company using cloud, that could sell privacy.
Google, as the designer of the original transformer, is designer of the original "mechanism" for inserting ads into a prompt answer in realtime to the highest bidder, so it makes sense from that part too.
Given my stance about AI, I'll definitely not use it, but I understand Apple's choice. Also this choice will give them enough time to develop their infrastructure and replace parts of it with their own, if they are planning to do it.
> Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher.
Breaching privacy and using it for its own benefit is AIs business model. There are no ethical players here. Neither from training nor from respecting their users' privacy perspective. Just next iteration of what social media companies do.
>If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most stable of the AI labs.
I dont think the model is that much different if they thought Siri was half decent enough for so long.
Judging from the past 10 years, I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services. When everything else being roughly equal.
Instead of raising price again Paying Apple even more per user, How about we pay the less but throw in Gemini with it?
Apple has been very good, if not the best at picking one side and allowing the others to fight for its contract. They dont want Microsoft to win the AI race, at the same time Apple is increasing the use of Azure just in case. Basically playing the game of leverage at its best. In hindsight probably too well into it they forgot what the real purpose of all these leverage are for, not cost savings but ultimately better quality product.
> I would say this is more likely driven by part of a bigger package deal with Google Search Placement and Google Cloud Services.
Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
Google shouldn't be able to charge a fee on accessing every registered trademark in the world. They use Apple get get the last 30% of "URL Bars", I mean Google Search middlemen.
Searching Anthropic gets me a bidding war, which I'm sure is bleeding Google's competition dry.
We need a "no bare trademark (plus edit distance) ads or auto suggest" law. It's made Google an unkillable OP monster. Any search monopoly or marketplace monopoly should be subject to not allowing ads to be sold against a registered trademark database.
>Can the DOJ and FTC look into this?
I guess this venture into politics more than anything else. And I am opinionated on the subject.
But other than that, the point worth centred on is Apple no longer care as much as being the best. They care much more about extracting best business deals and money out of their current position. Which is very different to Steve Jobs era, No money can put crap on his plate.
Aren't both of those companies also both at the whims of Microsoft for the actual compute hardware? I'm not good at keeping track of who has actual hardware vs. who runs in one of the big clouds
don’t forget oracle!
Please forget Oracle. I don't even know the name of their cloud service. I haven't heard anyone using their service for AI.
OpenAI aren’t using their cloud directly, but have signed data center partnerships with them that are effectively huge amounts of debt not backed up with revenue. That’s all liability that Google doesn’t really have because they have revenue from other areas.
I agree with your point about Google being more stable company then the rest so the decision probably makes sense. But there was a study done by multiple news companies in Czechia by asking about news topics and Gemini was consistently the worst in citations and straight up being incorrect (76% of its answers had "issues", I don't have exact issues specification).
I've noticed Gemini tends to struggle with current news.
Apple is afraid of Siri succeeding
It has nothing to do with how good Gemini is relative to others. Apple is picking Gemini because they don’t want AI to be the selling point for Android phones. Apple execs do not care about innovations. They only care about keeping their monopoly intact.
With Anthropic or OpenAI they would have had to pay for it, but Google already pay them $20bn+ per year to be the default search engine - so they just knock $1bn off Google's bill for Gemini
What's the difference if Apple gets $20B from Google and spends $1B to another company or just gets $19B from Google and doesn't spend nothing?
I suppose Apple is forcing Google to compete against itself. "Pay us less, or pay us more and we buy someone else’s model."
Also accounting optics means Apple can shows lower revenue but cleaner margins
The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine), but they have effectively zero presence in a training datacenter. They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
It's a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
Setting aside the obligatory HN dig at the end, LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of the intelligence system Apple is building. The hidden-in-plain-sight thing Apple is doing is exposing all app data as context and all app capabilities as skills. (See App Intents, Core Spotlight, Siri Shortcuts, etc.)
Anyone with an understanding of Apple's rabid aversion to being bound by a single supplier understands that they've tested this integration with all foundation models, that they can swap Google out for another vendor at any time, and that they have a long-term plan to eliminate this dependency as well.
> Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own.
I'd be interested in a citation for this (Apple introduced two multilingual, multimodal foundation language models in 2025), but in any case anything you hear from Apple publicly is what they want you to think for the next few quarters, vs. an indicator of what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are.
My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on paper.
Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors that asked for more money (Anthropic)
Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a different provider.
For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual improvement
It's a very low baseline with Siri, so almost anything would be an improvement.
The point is that once Siri is switched to a Gemini-based model, the baseline presumably won't be low anymore.
I’m not so sure. Just think about coding assistants with MCP based tools. I can use multiple different models in GitHub Copilot and get good results with similarly capable models.
Siri’s functionality and OS integration could be exposed in a similar, industry-standard way via tools provided to the model.
Then any other model can be swapped in quite easily. Of course, they may still want to do fine tuning, quantization, performance optimization for Apple’s hardware, etc.
But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.
> But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.
That’s not the issue. The issue is that once Gemini is in place as the intelligence behind Siri, the bar is now much higher than today and so you have to be more careful if you consider replacing Gemini, because you’re as likely as not to make Siri worse. Maybe more likely to make it worse.
Oh well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it? Siri being so good that they don’t want to mess it up.
That gives them plenty of runway to test and optimize new models internally before release and not feel like they need to rush them out because Siri sucks.
Doubt it. Of all the issues I run into with Siri none could be solved by throwing AI slop at it. Case in point: if I ask Siri to play an album and it can't match the album name it just plays some random shit instead of erroring out.
Um if I ask an LLM about a fake band it literally say I couldn't find any songs by the fake band did you type is correctly and it's about a millions times more likely to guess correctly. Why do you say it doesn't solve loads of things? I'm more concerned about the problems it creates (prompt injection, hallucinations in important work, bad logic in code), the actual functionality will be fantastic compared to Siri right now!
Ollama! Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model! They’ve kept the last 10 years with a Siri who doesn’t know any contact named Chronometer only to require the best in class LLM?
The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak to the Google Voice Assistant.
I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it said "I can't help with that right now, please try again later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox and found it for me.
Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the experience with Android Auto becomes more and more garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're going to have 2 google product voice assistants.
Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at this point.
I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.
Siri on my Apple Home will default to turning off all the lights in the kitchen if it misunderstands anything. Much hilarity ensues
Would be worse if it turned off your car.
Share and Enjoy
Same issue with apple car. ‘ hey Siri, please play ‘call your girlfriend’ on Spotify by (artist)’
‘Sorry I don’t know anyone called ‘your girlfriend’’ The kids find it hilarious
I have been getting great results with Gemini 3 Deep Think, though I am not using it as my personal assistant.
I'm genuinely curious about this too. If you really only need the language and common sense parts of an LLM -- not deep factual knowledge of every technical and cultural domain -- then aren't the public models great? Just exactly what you need? Nobody's using Siri for coding.
Are there licensing issues regarding commercial use at scale or something?
Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.
Probably repeatability and privacy guarantees around infrastructure and training too. Google already have very defined splits for their Gemma and in house models with engineers and researchers rarely communicating directly.
> Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model
Same reason they switched to Intel chips in the 2000s. They were better. Then Cupertino watched. And it learned. And it leapfrogged.
If I were Google, my fear would be Apple launching and then cutting the line at TSMC to mass produce custom silicon in the 2030s.
> provided Siri improves meaningfully
Not a high bar…
That said, Apple is likely to end up training their own model, sooner or later. They are already in the process of building out a bunch of data centers, and I think they have even designed in-house servers.
Remember when iPhone maps were Google Maps? Apple Maps have been steadily improving, to the point they are as good as, if not better than, Google Maps, in many areas (like around here. I recently had a friend send me a GM link to a destination, and the phone used GM for directions. It was much worse than Apple Maps. After a few wrong turns, I pulled over, fed the destination into Apple Maps, and completed the journey).
> what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are
Seems like they are waiting for the "slope of enlightenment" on the gartner hype curve to flatten out. Given you can just lease or buy a SOTA model from leading vendors there's no advantage to training your own right now. My guess is that the LLM/AI landscape will look entirely different by 2030 and any 5 year plan won't be in the same zip code, let alone playing field. Leasing an LLM from Google with a support contract seems like a pretty smart short term play as things continue to evolve over the next 2-3 years.
This is the key. The real issue is that you don’t need superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don’t need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a decent job of approximating college grad level human intelligence let’s say 85% of the time which is helpful and cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models. There will come a time when a model capable of college grad level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry that will in the next few years become dominated by open models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up with another product that has more of a moat.
"pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating". The pace is decelerating.
My impression is that solar (and maybe wind?) energy have benefited from learning-by-doing [1][2] that has resulted in lower costs and/or improved performance each year. It seems reasonable to me that a similar process will apply to AI (at least in the long run). The rate of learning could be seen as a "pace" of improvement. I'm curious, do you have a reference for the deceleration of pace that you refer to?
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/new-study-refocuses-learning-curve
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...
Why would a the curve of solar prices be in any way correlated with the curve of AI improvements ?
The deceleration of pace is visible to anyone capable of using Google.
u/ipaddr is probably referring to
(As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve.So there's a tension.
Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling for training.
While the cost of applications using foundation models (implementing inference engines) is decreasing.
Someone smarter than me will have to provide the slopes of the (misc) learning curves.
I was not aware of (or had forgotten) the term "Wright's law" [1], but that indeed is what I was thinking of. It looks like some may use the term "learning curve" to refer to the same idea (efficiency gains that follow investment); the Wikipedia page on "Learning curve" [2] includes references to Wright.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
> It seems reasonable to me that a similar process will apply to AI
If its reasonable, then reason it. Because it is a highly apples to oranges comparison you are making
I don't think anyone really knows, because there's no objective standard for determining progress.
Lots of benchmarks exist where everyone agrees that higher scores are better, but there's no sense in which going from a score of 400 to 500 is the same progress as going from 600 to 700, or less, or more. They only really have directional validity.
I mean, the scores might correspond to real-world productivity rates in some specific domain, but that just begs the question -- productivity rates on a specific task are not intelligence.
$300 college student in your pocket sure sounds like the Singularity to me.
That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're in-media-res watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality software are all theater. We have no altruists defending these principles for us at Apple or Google.
Apple won't switch Google out as a provider for the same reason Google is your default search provider. They don't give a shit about how many advertisements you're shown. You are actually detached from 2026 software trends if you think Apple is going to give users significant backend choices. They're perfectly fine selling your attention to the highest bidder.
There are second-order effects of Google or Apple removing Twitter from their stores.
Guess who's the bestie of Twitter's owner? Any clues? Could that be a vindictive old man with unlimited power and no checks and balances to temper his tantrums?
Of course they both WANT Twitter the fuck out of the store, but there are very very powerful people addicted to the app and what they can do with it.
That further proves my point that they are monopolies that cannot survive without protectionist intervention.
In the current US environment, no one can survive going against Trump, and as recently evidenced, this is meant literally.
The US, for all intents and purposes, is now a kleptocracy. Rule of law, freedom of speech, even court orders, all of that doesn't matter any more in practice. There will always be some way for the federal government to strong-arm anyone into submission.
Not with that attitude they can’t. Let’s see what happens to the first person to call his bull shit. If jpow folds or is actually indicted, you may be right. Let’s see what happens with Exxon though i think they’re gonna bend the knee.
Why would you not bend the key ? There's a reasonnable chance Trump is gone in less than 3 years and MAGA tears itself apart. Better bet on that than try to make a stand now and lose everything.
> Let’s see what happens to the first person to call his bull shit
Well, ICE just executed a woman in broad daylight with multiple cameras filming, and a day later you got Kristi Noem standing on a podium with a slogan referencing to an OG Nazi massacre [1][2] and half the US government gaslighting the country, spreading outright lies [3] without consequences so far.
When they can get away with this level of lies, they can get away with anything. Trump's infamous "I Could ... Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters" quote [4] wasn't a joke - it was a clear prediction of what he intended to enable eventually.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/tom-morello-trump...
[2] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/80-jahre-massaker-lidice-100....
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/what-happened-in-minn...
[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/23/464129029...
I do not usually comment on politics but just this one time, and hopefully I can wordsmith it without taking a political stance.
When Trump started his campaign, circa 2011 with the birth certificate, he did not know he will win or not, but he made it his life's mission.
Countering him will take the same zeal. I know we have a precedence of presidents retiring, but unless Obama (and Hillary and Biden and Kamala) hits the streets as the leader of resistance, the resistance will be quelled easily by constant distracting. Yeah maybe AOC, maybe Bernie, maybe someone else, but no ... Trump is smart and dedicated (despite the useful idiot role he plays), he can not be countered by mid-term and full-term campaigns. We are not in Kansas any more. Been a while. The opposition needs a named resistance leader whose full time job is to engage Trump.
I'm not American, but in my opinion Newsom+AOC might have the zeal and voter base to MAYBE do something.
Newsom (or his PR team) knows how to play the troll game correctly, hitting low blows and not sticking to the fucking high ground.
AOC on the other hand will make the MAGA base _so_ irrationally angry they might do something actually stupid. She's also got Bernie's views, which might make America a place I want to visit some day in the next decade again. I've literally turned down all expenses paid company trips to USA a few times because I just don't want to risk either not getting into the country or not getting back.
Caveat: as long as it doesn’t feel like you’re being sold out.
Which is why privacy theatre was an excellent way to put it
Apple’s various privileged device-level ads and instant-stop-on-cancel trials and special rules for notifications for their paid additional services like Fitness+, Music, Arcade, iCloud+, etc are all proof that they do not care about the user anymore.
Why? Grain is a commodity, but I buy flour at the store rather than grow my own. The “commmodity” argument suggets that new companies should stay away from model training unless they have a cost edge.
Are you not aware that all of the above have all invested billions trying to train a SoTA Foundational model?
An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Invented-Here syndrome/handicap in this case.
Apple might have gotten very lucky here ... the money might be in finding uses, and selling physical products rather than burning piles of cash training models that are SOTA for 5 minutes before being yet another model in a crowded field.
My money is still on Apple and Google to be the winners from LLMs.
And when the cost of training LLMs starts to come down to under $1B/yr, Apple can jump on board, having saved >$100B in not trying to chase after everyone else to try to get there first.
I agree. That’s why I think EU‘s DMA is visionary, even if not perfect. LLM wars will prove EU regulators right I anticipate.
Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ?
I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.
Mostly AWS actually. Apple uses Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips to serve search services. "Fruit Stand" is the internal name for Apple at AWS.
Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.
I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.
Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.
Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.
Pre-iPhone and pre-Intel Mac, Apple was experimenting with a lot of things. The iPod wasn't a clear initial win--and the iPhone wasn't either. A lot of the success happened in retrospect.
Companies were still figuring out Linux with servers at the time. Xserve seemed like it might be something of interest to at least academia but Apple never really had their heart in it as I wrote at the time.
How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.
It’s absolutely a commodity. The exact reason IBM sold their server division to Lenovo in 2014.
By that definition, Apple is absolutely in the commodity products business.
I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".
There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).
According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?
Making a lot of money for the company.
The no one ever got fired for buying IBM wasn’t about quality. It’s always safe to buy the default choice that everyone else uses. Especially when things go wrong.
Many want to be founders here on HN don’t get that. Even if your product is better and cheaper, there is too much of a reputational risk signing a contract for a B2B SaaS product with an unknown vendor.
On a completely unrelated note, for the love of all that is holy don’t try to do B2B SaaS without SSO support.
I imagine a lot of people on this thread see 5% Mac usage as the norm but it's really not the norm overall.
With Thunderbolt 5 and M5 Ultras, Apple could be building lower cost clusters that could possibly scale enough while keeping a lower power budget. Obviously that can't compete with NVIDIA racks, but for mobile consumer inference maybe that would be enough?
Apple just announced it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644
Yeah… there’s this “bro— do you even business?” vibe in the tech world right now pointed at any tech firm not burning oil tankers full of cash (and oil, for that matter,) training a giant model. That money isn’t free — the economic consequences of burning billions to make a product that will be several steps behind, at best, are giant. There’s a very real chance these companies won’t recoup that money if their product isn’t attractive to hoards of users willing to pay more money for AI than anyone currently is. It doesn’t even make them look cool to regular people — their customers hate hearing about AI. Since there are viable third party options available, I think Apple would have to be out of their goddamned minds to try and jump in that race right now. They’re a product company. Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.
Something weird has gone wrong in the psyche of humans.
Why are we even talking about 'AI'? When I heat up food in a microwave, I dont care about the technology - I care about whether it heats up the food or not.
For some bizarre reason people keep talking about the technology (LLMs) - the consumers/buyers in the market for the most part dont give a hoot about it. They want to know how the thing fits in their life and most importantly what are the benefits.
Ive unfortunately been exposed to some Google Ads re. Gemini and let me tell you - their marketing capabilities are god awful.
>Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.
You're right, and this is proven. Apple has fumbled a whole release cycle on AI and severely curbed expectations, and they still sell 200m iPhones a year and lead the market [0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/apple-leads-g...
Easy enough. Most people abhor AI and want nothing to do with it. The only ones who actually love AI (or what's being sold to them under that banner) are clueless and/or greedy executives, propagandists, and a select few legitimate AI artists doing pretty nice remixes of Star Wars, Harry Potter and the likes in a quality not seen before.
Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).
So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.
Why would paying everyone $300M across the board be healthier than using it as a tool to (attempt to) attract the best of the best?
Is the training cost really that high, though?
The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1].
AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2].
If a non-profit and a chip vendor (training for marketing purposes) can do this, it clearly doesn't require "burning 10 years of cash flow" or a Google-scale TPU farm.
[0]: https://allenai.org/blog/molmo2
[1]: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
[2]: https://huggingface.co/amd/AMD-OLMo
No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.
What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a reasonable schedule.
I have no idea what AI involves, but "training" sounds like a one-and-done - but how is the result "stored"? If you have trained up a Gemini, can you "clone" it and if so, what is needed?
I was under the impression that all these GPUs and such were needed to run the AI, not only ingest the data.
> but how is the result "stored"
Like this: https://huggingface.co/docs/safetensors/index
Yes, serving requires infra, too. But you can use infra optimized for serving; nvidia GPUs are not the only game in town.
Theoretically it would be much less expensive to just continue to run the existing models, but ofc none of the current leaders are going to stop training new ones any time soon.
So are we on a hockey stick right now where a new model is so much better than the previous that you have to keep training?
Because almost every example of previous cases of things like this eventually leveled out.
Hiring the right people should also be trivial with that amount of cash.
No, I doesn't beat Gemini in any benchmarks. It beats Gemma, which isn't a SoTA even among open models of that size. That would be Nemotron 3 or GPT-OSS 20B.
my prediction is that they might switch once AI craze will simmer down to some more reasonable level
Yea, I think it’s smart, too. There are multiple companies who have spent a fortune on training and are going to be increasingly interested in (desperate to?) see a return from it. Apple can choose the best of the bunch, pay less than they would have to to build it themselves, and swap to a new one if someone produces another breakthrough.
100%. It feels like Apple is perfectly happy letting the AI labs fight a race to the bottom on pricing while they keep the high-margin user relationship.
I'm curious if this officially turns the foundation model providers into the new "dumb pipes" of the tech stack?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. The question is, what’s the moat? If all they have is scaling to drive better model performance, then the winner is just whoever has the lowest cost of capital.
Google seems to thrive on commodity products. Search, EMail, etc.
It is their strength to take commodity products and scale it well.
This isn’t a mystery - it’s Google
Yea, I think that’s probably right, unless something unexpected changes the game.
As if they really have a choice though. Competing would be a billion dollar Apple Maps scenario.
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.
This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple, thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS space!
I dunno, my take is that Apple isn’t outsourcing intelligence rather it’s outsourcing the most expensive, least defensible layer.
Down the road Apple has an advantage here in a super large training data set that includes messages, mail, photos, calendar, health, app usage, location, purchases, voice, biometrics, and you behaviour over YEARS.
Let's check back in 5 years and see if Apple is still using Gemini or if Apple distills, trains and specializes until they have completed building a model-agnostic intelligence substrate.
> The writing was on the wall the moment Apple stopped trying to buy their way into the server-side training game like what three years ago?
It goes back much further than that - up until 2016, Apple wouldn't let its ML researchers add author names to published research papers. You can't attract world-class talent in research with a culture built around paranoid secrecy.
> You can't attract world-class talent in research with a culture built around paranoid secrecy.
Would giving more money/shares help?
Seems like there is a moat after all.
The moat is talent, culture, and compute. Apple doesn't have any of these 3 for SOTA AI.
It is more like Apple have no need to spend billions on training with questionable ROI when it can just rent from one of the commodity foundation model labs.
I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large scale AI and software projects like this.
Source: I worked there
Well, they stopped.
Culture is overrated. Money talks.
They did things far more complicated from an engineering perspective. I am far more impressed by what they accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what AI labs do.
Is Apple silicon really that impressive compared to LLMs? Take a step back. CPUs have been getting faster and more efficient for decades.
Google invented the transformer architecture, the backbone of modern LLMs.
> Google invented...
"Google" did? Or humans who worked there and one who didn't?
https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...
In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…
> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.
Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.
You can understand how transformers work from just reading the Attention is All You Need paper, which is 15 pages of pretty accessible DL. That's not the part that is impressive about LLMs.
It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them. I’m sure it’ll be consolidated further in the future and you’re going to be left with a natural monopoly or duopoly.
Apple has no control over the most important change to tech. They have control to Google.
> It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them.
No one can outpace them in improving the SOTA, everyone can catch up to them. Why are open-weight models perpetually 6 months behind the SOTA? Given enough data harvested from SOTA models you can eventually distill them.
The biggest differentiator when training better models are not some new fancy architectural improvements (even the current SOTA transformer architectures are very similar to e.g. the ancient GPT-2), but high quality training data. And if your shiny new SOTA model is hooked into a publicly available API, guess what - you've just exposed a training data generator for everyone to use. (That's one of the reasons why SOTA labs hide their reasoning chains, even though those are genuinely useful for users - they don't want others to distill their models.)
Four. You forgot xAI. And that's ignoring the Chinese labs.
Chinese labs aren’t SOTA due to lack of compute.
Yes I forgot xAI. So 4 left. I’m betting that there will be one or two dominant ones in next 10 years. Apple won’t be one of them.
Really, don't believe benchmarks as gospel. Chinese models are pretty much competitive with offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. Meta is currently at a disadvantage, but I believe they will find their mojo and soon be competitive again.
Frankly, a lot of times I prefer using GLM 4.6 running on Cerebras Inference, than having to deal with the performance hiccups from Claude. For most practical purposes, I've seen no big penalty in using it compared to Opus 4.5, even the biggest qwen-coder models are pretty much competitive.
Between me and the company I work for, I spend some serious money with AI. I use it extensively in my main job, on two side projects that I have paying customers for, and for graduate school work. I can tell you that there quite a few more SOTA models around than what the benchmarks tell you.
is it that surprising? they're a hardware company after all.
I always think about this, can someone with more knowledge than me help me understand the fragility of these operations?
It sounds like the value of these very time-consuming, resource-intensive, and large scale operations is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?
Given that we have a lot of other players enabling this in other ways, like Open Sourcing weights (West vs East AI race), and even leaks, this play by Apple sounds really smart and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?
Is it safe to assume that eventually the weights will be out in the open for everyone?
> and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?
A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.
So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty big deal.
But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that even if LLMs did somehow lead to AGI that the same result wouldn't be achieved by everyone currently building "State of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within days/months of each other).
So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and I'm not particularly an Apple fan.
> is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?
Yes, and the knowledge gained along the way. For example, the new TPUv4 that Google uses requires rack and DC aware technologies (like optical switching fabric) for them to even work at all. The weights are important, and there is open weights, but only Google and the like are getting the experience and SOTA tech needed to operate cheaply at scale.
Google says: "Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."
So what does it take? How many actual commitments to privacy does Apple have to make before the HN crowd stops crowing about "theater"?
Apple uses user data to target ads
Do you have a source for this claim?
https://www.apple.com/au/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-adverti...
This very page explains that they use "local, on-device processing" and a "random identifier not tied to your Apple Account."
So while the letter of your claim is technically true, it's also very misleading.
No, its not misleading it says right there in the private policy.
Apple isnt suddenly private just because they have enough data about you that they dont need to link to 3rd party data. They do exactly what 3rd party sites that are considered privacy invasive do. They serve you ads based on your private data like what you watch, what you read and what things you do on your device.
It doesnt say that they only store all this information on device. Apple is only using a random identifier when its sharing information about your habits and personal data on its ad platform, that info btw is shared with 3rd parties. But dont worry that data suddenly becomes non personal because they used a random identifier.
What ads?
https://kagi.com/search?q=apple+ad+network&r=no&sh=6Khbxq4uM...
> Private Cloud Compute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
Apple's goal is likely to run all inference locally. But models aren't good enough yet and there isn't enough RAM in an iPhone. They just need Gemini to buy time until those problems are resolved.
That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.
Apple thinks they can get a best-of-both-worlds approach with Private Cloud Compute. They believe they can secure private servers specialized to specific client devices in a way that the cloud compute effort is still "client-side" from a trust standpoint, but still able to use extra server-side resources (under lock and key).
I don't know how close to that ideal they've achieved, but especially given this announcement is partly baked on an arrangement with Google that they are allowed to run Gemini on-device and in Private Cloud Compute, without using Google's more direct Gemini services/cloud, I'm excited that they are trying and I'm interested in how this plays out.
You're excited together with a handful of other privacy enthusiasts on HackerNews.
I would think for the vast majority of users out there this is not a concern at all.
Apple until now failed to even get the basics done and make Siri smart, despite marketing "Apple Intelligence" as the core feature of 2024's iPhone.
Apple integrated ChatGPT as an opt-in that made the mainstream users feel like Apple was delivering on some of that marketing. Apple also delivered "high wow" features like auto-stickers and other such silliness. Just as the privacy issues are maybe a bit of an HN specialty, HN is also maybe a bit more prone to "Apple Intelligence" brand cynicism than mainstream belief.
I'm excited about the attempt at privacy because I'm on "Team Keep Siri Dumb". I like dumb Siri. It reliably meets most of my needs, setting timers and managing house lights. I'd rather Siri stay dumb and I would never opt-in to ChatGPT Siri as some of my family has, but if Siri "has to" get smart to survive, I will celebrate whatever privacy wins are still available as my only hope that smarter Siri is not something I need to just disable entirely (and lose my "friend" in charge of my timers and house lights in the process).
Given the snowden leaks, i think it’s naive to believe that any data that leaves your phone is NOT ingested by gov data collection.
Maybe private in the sense that it isn’t funneled into your ad profile, but not private in the sense that nobody else can access it.
I stated that I am not naive and am not entirely convinced by Apple's sales pitch that the Private Cloud Compute containers are encrypted with keys in a way that only your hardware device can read in such a way that the PCC is an extension of your device.
I just think it is useful that Apple is trying something along those lines and wishful the guarantees work half as well as they claim they do, because that's a good goal to have in theory even when it fails in practice against dedicated threat actors.
And yes, to be fair my personal day-to-day threat model currently is much more concerned with the evil advertising company known as Google than it is with government actors. Even if Apple's Private Cloud Compute only means "private from Google" that's still a win for me (and most of the information I was looking for when I saw this headline, because my first fear was that the advertising company Google was involved).
Phones will get upgrades, but then so will servers. The local models will always be behind the state of the art running on big iron. You can’t expect to stand still and keep up with the Red Queen.
Well DRAM prices aren't going down soon so I see this as quite the push away from local inference.
10 years worth of cash? So all these Chinese labs that came out and did it for less than $1 billion must have 3 heads per developer, right?
Rumor has it that they weren't trained "from scratch" the was US would, i.e. Chinese labs benefitted from government "procured" IP (the US $B models) in order to train their $M models. Also understand there to be real innovation in the many-MoE architecture on top of that. Would love to hear a more technical understanding from someone who does more than repeat rumors, though.
We don't really know how much it cost them. Plenty of reasons to doubt the numbers passed around and what it wasn't counting.
(And even if you do believe it, they also aren't licensing the IP they're training on, unlike american firms who are now paying quite a lot for it)
A lot of HN commentators are high on their own supply with regard to the AI bubble... when you realize that this stuff isn't actually that expensive the whole thing begins to quickly unravel.
For some context with numbers, in mid-2024 Apple publicly described 3B parameter foundation models. Gemini 3 Pro is about 1T today.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-intelligenc...
That 3B model is a local model that eventually got built into macOS 26. Gemini 3 Pro is a frontier model (cloud). They're very different things.
Sure. And the same paper describes a ‘larger’ cloud-served model.
It also lets them keep a lot of the legal issues regarding LLM development at arms length while still benefiting from them.
> Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence.
They have always been a premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence, except that "intelligence" was always IP until now. They have always polished existing (i.e., not theirs) ideas and made them bulletproof and accessible to the masses. Seems like they intend to just do more of the same for AI "intelligence". And good for them, as it is their specialty and it works.
Could you elaborate a bit on why you've judged it as privacy theatre? I'm skeptical but uninformed, and I believe Mullvad are taking a similar approach.
Mullvad is nothing like Apple. For apple devices: - need real email and real phone number to even boot the device - cannot disable telemetry - app store apps only, even though many key privacy preserving apps are not available - /etc/hosts are not your own, DNS control in general is extremely weak - VPN apps on idevices have artificial holes - can't change push notification provider - can only use webkit for browsers, which lacks many important privacy preserving capabilities - need to use an app you don't trust but want to sandbox it from your real information? Too bad, no way to do so. - the source code is closed so Apple can claim X but do Y, you have no proof that you are secure or private - without control of your OS you are subject to Apple complying with the government and pushing updates to serve them not you, which they are happy to do to make a buck
Mullvad requires nothing but an envelope with cash in it and a hash code and stores nothing. Apple owns you.
Agreed on most points but you can setup a pretty solid device wide DNS provider using configuration profiles. Similar to how iOS can be enrolled in work corporate MDM - but under your control.
Works great for me with NextDNS.
Orion browser - while also based on WebKit - is also awesome and has great built in Adblock and supposedly privacy respecting ideals.
Apple has records that you are installing that, probably putting you on a list.
And it works until it's made illegal in your country and removed from the app store. You have no guarantees that anything that works today will work tomorrow with Apple.
Apple is setting us up to be under a dictator's thumb one conversion at a time.
This comment confuses privacy with anonymity.
Anonymity is an inherent measure to preserve ones individual privacy. What value did you intent to add with your remark?
Anonymity is a critical aspect of privacy. If you cannot prevent your name being associated with your data, you do not have real privacy.
Not for all points. And not being anonymous means your identity is not private...
You do not need an email address to set up an iPhone, and you do not need an email address or phone number to set up an iPad/Mac.
If you want to use the App Store on these devices, you do need to have an email address.
They transitioned from “nobody can read your data, not even Apple” to “Apple cannot read your data.” Think about what that change means. And even that is not always true.
They also were deceptive about iCloud encryption where they claimed that nobody but you can read your iCloud data. But then it came out after all their fanfare that if you do iCloud backups Apple CAN read your data. But they aren’t in a hurry to retract the lie they promoted.
Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name, email, phone number, and content of the local users, guess what. Since they messaged you, now not only their name and information, but also your name and private information and message content is shared with that country’s government as well. By Apple. Do they tell you? No. Even if your own country respects privacy. Does Apple have a help article explaining this? No.
If you want to turn on full end-to-end encryption you can, if you want to share your pubkey so that people can't fake your identity on iMessage you can, and there's still a higher tier of security than that presumably for journalists and important people.
It's something a smart niece or nephew could handle in terms of managing risk, but the implications could mean getting locked out of your device which you might've been using as the doorway to everything, and Apple cannot help you.
>Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name
I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of governments and service providers, while iMessage gives them some wiggle room.
Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw
You people will never be happy until the only messaging that exists is in a dusty basement and Richard Stallman is sleeping on a dirty futon.
[dead]
Because Apple makes privacy claims all the time, but all their software is closed source and it is very hard or impossible to verify any of their claims. Even if messages sent between iPhones are E2EE encrypted for example, the client apps and the operating system may be backdoored (and likely are).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The gov’t can force them to reveal any user’s data and slap them with a gag order so no one will ever know this happened.
All user data is E2E encrypted, so the government literally cannot force this. This has been the source of numerous disputes [0, 1] that either result in the device itself being cracked [0] (due to weak passwords or vulnerabilities in device-level protection) or governments attempting to ban E2E encryption altogether [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
Maybe E2E, but the data eventually has to be decrypted to read it.
Then you learn that every modern CPU has a built-in backdoor, a dedicated processor core, running a closed-source operating system, with direct access to the entire system RAM, and network access. [a][b][c][d].
You can not trust any modern hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Securi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_privacy_of_iOS
Some of those things are not like the others. TrustZone is not a dedicated core. It is a mode of the CPU, akin to x86's SMM
What you cited is for data on a device that was turned off. Not daily internet connected usage. No one is saying you have no protection at all with Apple, it is just very limited compared to what it should be by modern security best practices, and much worse than what can be achieved on android and linux.
> much worse than what can be achieved on android and linux.
* Certain types of Android
E2E encrypted is nothing if key escrow is happening.
Why did they change their wording from:
Nobody can read your data, not even Apple
to:
Apple cannot read your data.
You know why.
When did they change their wording?
It's a warrant canary, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
If they didn't want you to think key escrow might be possible, why wouldn't they just leave the wording the way it was? Why go through the effort and thereby draw attention to it? The court system doesn't use sovcit rules where playful interpretation of wording can get a trillion dollar corporation out of a lawsuit or whatever.
It’s also a bet that the capex cost for training future models will be much lower than it is today. Why invest in it today if they already have the moat and dominant edge platform (with a loyal customer base upgrading hardware on 2-3 year cycles) for deploying whatever future commoditized training or inference workloads emerge by the time this Google deal expires?
Personally also think it's very smart move - Google has TPUs and will do it more efficiently than anyone else.
It also lets Apple stand by while the dust settles on who will out innovate in the AI war - they could easily enter the game on a big way much later on.
absolutely, right now they can avoid any risk but get benefits as they recollect themselves
Seems like the LLM landscape is still evolving, and training your own model provides no technical benefit as you can simply buy/lease one, without the overhead of additional eng staffing/datacenter build-out.
I can see a future where LLM research stalls and stagnates, at which point the ROI on building/maintaining their own commodity LLM might become tolerable. Apple has had Siri as a product/feature and they've proven for the better part of a decade that voice assistants are not something they're willing to build a proficiency in. My wife still has an apple iPhone for at least a decade now, and I've heard her use Siri perhaps twice in that time.
And if you wanted to build your own data center right now there’s only so much GPU and RAM to go around, and even all the power generation and cooling manufacturers are booked solid.
The trouble is this seems to me like a short term fix, longer term, once the models are much better, Google can just lock out apple and take everything for themselves and leave Apple nowhere and even further behind.
Of course there is going to be an abstraction layer - this is like Software Engineering 101.
Google really could care less about Android being good. It is a client for Google search and Google services - just like the iPhone is a client for Google search and apps.
> without burning 10 years of cash flow
AAPL has approximately $35 billion of cash equivalents on hand. What other use may they have for this trove? Buy back more stocks?
> They simply do not have the TPU pods or the H100 clusters to train a frontier model like Gemini 2.5 or 3.0 from scratch without burning 10 years of cash flow.
Why does Apple need to build its own training cluster to train a frontier model, anyway?
Why couldn't the deal we're reading about have been "Apple pays Google $200bn to lease exclusive-use timeslots on Google's AI training cluster"?
That would be more expensive in the long run and Apple is all about long game
Agreed, especially since this is a competitive space with multiple players, with a high price of admission, and where your model is outdated in a year, so its not even capex as much as recurring expenditure. Far better to let someone else do all the hard work, and wait and see where things go. Maybe someday this'll be a core competency you want in-house, but when that day comes you can make that switch, just like with apple silicon.
> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain
I feel like people probably said this when Google became the default search engine for everyone...
Apple sells consumer goods first and foremost. They likely don't see a return on investment through increased device or services sales to match the hundreds of billions that these large AI companies are throwing down every year.
Of all the companies to survive a crash in AI unscathed, I would bet on Apple the most.
They are only ones who do not have large debts off(or on) balance sheet or aggressive long term contracts with model providers and their product demand /cash flow is least dependent on the AI industry performance.
They will still be affected by general economic downturn but not be impacted as deeply as AI charged companies in big tech.
https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aapple%20cuda&type=code
>Am I missing the elephant in the room?
Everyone using Siri is going to have their personality data emulated and simulated as a ”digital twin” in some computing hell-hole.
>Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine),
Can you cite this claim? The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU seems to be superior in the benchmarks I've seen.
> without burning 10 years of cash flow.
Don't they have the highest market cap of any company in existence?
You don't need to join every fight you see, even if you would do well.
They have the largest free cash flow (over $100 billion a year). Meta and Amazon have less than half that a year, and Microsoft/Nvidia are between $60b-70b per year. The statement reflects a poor understanding of their financials.
I believe both Nvidia and Google have higher market caps
this also addresses something else ...
apple to some users "are you leaving for android because of their ai assistant? don’t leave we are bringing it to iphone"
the year is 2026, the top advertising company is in bed with the walled garden device specialists and the decision is celebrated
> To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?
Probably not missing the elephant. They certainly have the money to invest and they do like vertical integration but putting massive investment in bubble that can pop or flatline at any point seems pointless if they can just pay to use current best and in future they can just switch to something cheaper or buy some of the smaller AI companies that survive the purge.
Given how much AI capable their hardware is they might just move most of it locally too
> bill of materials for intelligence
There is no intelligence
Honestly, I'm relieved...it's not really in their DNA and not pivotal to their success; why pivot the company into a U turn into a market that's vague defined and potentially algorithmically limited?
best inference silicon in the world generally or specialized to smaller models/edge?
Not even an Apple fan, but from what I've been testing with for my dev use case (only up to 14b) it absolutely rocks for general models.
That I can absolutely believe but the big competition is in enterprise gpt-5-size models.
> without burning 10 years of cash flow.
Wasn't Apple sitting on a pile of cash and having no good ideas what to spend it on?
That doesn't make lighting it on fire a great option.
Perhaps spending it on inference that will be obsoleted in 6 months by the next model is not a good idea either.
Edit: especially given that Apple doesn’t do b2b so all the spend would be just to make consumer products
Apple of course does an emormous amount of b2b.
The cash pile is gone, they have been active in share repurchase.
They still generate about ~$100 billion in free cash per year, that is plowed into the buybacks.
They could spend more cash than every other industry competitor. It's ludicrous to say that they would have to burn 10 years of cash flow on trivial (relative) investment in model development and training. That statement reflects a poor understanding of Apple's cash flow.
> Am I missing the elephant in the room?
Apple is flush with cash and other assets, they have always been. They most likely plan to ride out the AI boom with Google's models and buy up scraps for pennies on the dollar once the bubble pops and a bunch of the startups go bust.
It wouldn't be the first time they went for full vertical integration.
calling neural engine the best is pretty silly. the best perhaps of what is uniformly a failed class of ip blocks - mobile inference NPU hardware. edge inference on apple is dominated by cpus and metal, which don't use their NPU.
Apple has seemingly confirmed that the Gemini models will run under their Private Cloud Compute and so presumably Google would not have access to Siri data.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...
Neither Apple's nor Google's announcement says Siri will use Gemini models. Both announcements say, word for word, "Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models". I don't know what that means, but Apple and Google's marketing teams must have crafted that awkward wording carefully to satisfy some contractual nuance.
Direct quote from Google themselves:
"Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."
This clarifies nothing?
Direct quote from their joint statement: "Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year."
Source: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
I think Apple would also still like to publicly say it's Apple's model, not Google's.
‘Based on’ implies an LoRA or some fine tuning.
It clarifies exactly what was being questioned.
Apple likely wants to post-train a per-trained model, probably along with some of Google's heavily NDA'ed training techniques too.
> "Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models"
Beyond Siri, Apple Foundation Models are available as API; will Google's technologies thus also be available as API? Will Apple reduce its own investment in building out the Foundation models?
Check again: https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017?s=20
"These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year."
I see what you mean, though I think “these models” refers to Apple’s Foundation Models, which “will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology.” I guess it depends on wrist “based” means.
Mostly likely the wording was crafted by an artificially intelligent entity.
This is a bit of a layer cake:
1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.
2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.
3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.
Siri is objectively bad though. It isn't some vendetta. I am disabled and there are at least 50 different things that I'd love siri to do that should be dead simple, yet it cannot. My favorite one was when I suffered a small but not serious fall, decided to test whether siri could be alerted to call 9-11 while being less than 6 feet away from me, absolutely could not understand let alone execute my request. It's a lot of stuff like this. Its core functionality often just does not work.
> The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.
For many years, siri requests were sent to an external server. It still sucked.
I don't think the parent said that Siri wasn't bad, on the contrary it sounds like they agree.
Their point is that if Apple totally scraps the current, bad, product called "Siri" and replaces it with an entirely different, much better product that is also named "Siri" but shares nothing but the name, people's perceptions of the current bad Siri will taint their impressions of the new one.
It's pretty clear they tried their best to miss or reinterpret the points I made so they could talk about something else.
I'm sorry for whatever cynicism leads you to believe this. I don't believe there is an "astroturfer" problem with siri, and that is mostly what I was responding to. Sorry you missed that.
Oh that riled you up? Too bad. Better get out your alt accounts to address this great injustice.
Huh? Why are you so upset about such a benign reply responding to astroturfing siri of all things? Have a good one.
> Hey Siri, call me an ambulance!
> Alright, from now on I will call you Anne Ambulance.
I'd be skeptical about even new LLM siri being able to dial 911.
These models tend to have a "mind of their own", and I can totally, absolutely, see a current SOTA LLM convincing itself it needs to call 911 because you asked it how to disinfect a cut.
Ideally you have a layer before the LLM that filters out stuff the phone can do without an LLM. The LLM probably shouldn't even have the power to call 911, that should be a layer lower. And probably you don't want to send simple queries like "call XYZ" to the cloud, best to just do it locally.
In the 15 years since I've been an Apple user, Siri has never worked for me when I really needed it.
There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to it getting better and being able to use it more often.
re 3: I doubt Google is going to hand over the weights to Apple to put on device.
They wouldn’t fit.
Not with that attitude.
Apple and Google have said that Private Cloud Compute will be involved as well, which Apple is trying to build a mystique of "on-device-like" trust. (Which yes, if Private Cloud Compute is involved and is secure in the ways that Apple says it is does presumably imply that the announced deal with Google includes selling Apple the complete model weights.)
Nor was such a thing implied. The information in the various news articles about it also don't make that claim.
Forget Siri, I have a much lower bar — I’ll be happy if they just improve iOS typing corrections/completions, which often don’t make any sense given the rest of the sentence.
Not just rest of the sentence. In my opinion, autocorrect desperately needs to take into account the context of the current screen.
There are many times I want to type the same word that is already on the app screen but it autocorrects me to something completely different.
And they could add predictive text to other languages too, it's not rocket science.
The current system suggests words I have never used, will never use and have never heard before instead of the obvious choice.
It's the same core issue which is basically that their software stacked sort of sucks. They should definitely wipe the slate clean when it comes to anything related to language, and that includes typing, text to speech, speech to text, agents, etc.
They have the time and the money and the customers, so I'm confident they will accomplish great things.
I’ve been debating turning auto-correct off completely. However, the first iPhone had it, so I’m guessing I want some level of it. I just don’t understand on v1 was better than what we have 18 years later.
Related: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri (71 points, 2 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826975
The biggest NEW thing here is that this isn't white-labeled. Apple is officially acknowledging Google as the model that will be powering Siri. That explicit acknowledgment is a pretty big deal. It will make it harder for Apple to switch to its own models later on.
Where does it say that it won't be white-labeled?
Yes, Apple is acknowledging that Google's Gemini will be powering Siri and that is a big deal, but are they going to be acknowledging it in the product or is this just an acknowledgment to investors?
Apple doesn't hide where many of their components come from, but that doesn't mean that those brands are credited in the product. There's no "fab by TSMC" or "camera sensors by Sony" or "display by Samsung" on an iPhone box.
It's possible that Apple will credit Gemini within the UI, but that isn't contained in the article or video. If Apple uses a Gemini-based model anonymously, it would be easy to switch away from it in the future - just as Apple had used both Samsung and TSMC fabs, or how Apple has used both Samsung and Japan Display. Heck, we know that Apple has bought cloud services from AWS and Google, but we don't have "iCloud by AWS and GCP."
Yes, this is a more public announcement than Apple's display and camera part suppliers, but those aren't really hidden. Apple's dealings with Qualcomm have been extremely public. Apple's use of TSMC is extremely public. To me, this is Apple saying "hey CNBC/investors, we've settled on using Gemini to get next-gen Siri happening so you all can feel safe that we aren't rudderless on next-gen Siri."
Apple won't take the risk of being blamed for AI answers being incorrect. They will attribute Google/Gemini so users know how to be mad at if it doesn't work as expected.
Apple is already taking the risk of being blamed for their own AI right now, though (an AI that is much more prone to incredibly dumb errors than Gemini), so I don't find it that obvious that they wouldn't just continue taking the blame for Siri as they already do, except with an actually smarter Siri.
This is a double-edged sword. Apple would love any failure to be blamed on Google, but not the branding to go with it.
Apple's brand is so dominant that even if they say Siri is "powered by Google", most users will still perceive it as an Apple service. The only way that changes is if Apple consistently and prominently surfaces the Google name on Siri — which seems unlikely (but who knows when the stakes are so high).
There's zero chance Apple would want to end up with a situation of "buy our iPhone with Gemini" competing with "buy our Android with Gemini".
They will do everything possible to avoid that and so re-brand is the only likely outcome.
If I were Goodle, I'd offer Apple a very significant discount to have visible branding of "powered by Gemini".
I'm sure Apple is more than happy to pay the premium for cleanness.
Maybe they'd prefer it for aesthetics, but OTOH in iOS 18.2+ they support off-device ChatGPT and apparently refer to it as "ChatGPT" both in settings and when prompting the user to ask if they want to use it.
If they do refer to it as "Gemini" then this is a huge win for Google, and huge loss for OpenAI, since it really seems that the "ChatGPT" brand is the only real "moat" that OpenAI have, although recently there has been about a 20% shift in traffic from ChatGPT to Gemini, so the moat already seems to be running dry.
I don't see why - iOS originally shipped with Google Maps as standard, for example. Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as standard before Safari existed
The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.
several years after that they still have their own Maps though, they didn't go back to Google Maps.
That's the point of what the person you replied to is saying.
it's hard but not impossible. Unless Apple didn't learn the Google Maps/Maps lesson.
It is pretty much impossible. How are they going to build the data centers on the scale required when all the RAM and GPUs in the world are bought up for the foreseeable future?
Well, yeah, Apple's Maps.app wasn't good enough when it launched (it's solid now though). That feels like a separate thing from white labeling and lock-in. Obviously they would have to switch to something of similar or better quality or users will be upset.
But it's a whole lot easier to switch from Gemini to Claude or Gemini to a hypothetical good proprietary LLM if it's white label instead of "iOS with Gemini"
I prefer Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation and public transit. However, I still keep Google Maps around for business data and points of interest. This is where Apple Maps is still lacking significantly. The fact that Apple still prompts me to download Yelp to view images of a business is insane to me.
>it's solid now though
Depends on where you are. In my experience here in Sweden Google Maps is still better, Apple maps sent us for a loop in Stockholm (literally {{{(>_<)}}} )
Yep, in my rural area Apple maps is not usable, Google maps works fine. Waze, also Google, is even better.
They switched despite Apple Maps having poor data for a reason:
Google wanted to shove ads in it. Apple refused and to switch.
Their hand was forced by that refusal.
I thought it was Google refusing to provide turn by turn directions?
Apple announced last year they are putting their own ads in Maps so if that was the real problem the corporate leadership has done a complete 180 on user experience.
I think Google was withholding them unless Apple was willing to put the ads in.
Apple is a very VERY different company than they were back then.
Back then they didn’t have all sorts of services that they advertised to you constantly. They didn’t have search ads in the App Store. They weren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer all the time no matter how annoying.
Google Search also has ads in it, but that didn't stop Apple from keeping it as the default, and now Apple is adding ads to Apple Maps. GP is correct. Google withheld turn by turn navigation from the iOS app. There are many deficiencies in the iOS platform, but this one was glaringly visible, forcing Apple's hand.
Apple does ads but they have a very particular taste with it. Not necessarily a better taste, but they do it in their own apple way. They're very much control freaks.
They had better taste.
It’s running away from them fast.
I was in agreement with the parent before I read this, and now I'm in agreement with you. It is a great example, I know so many people who never switched back to Apple Maps because it was so poor initially. Personally I find it a considerably better experience than Google Maps these days, but those lost users still aren't coming back.
Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though. Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still came back to it every so often to see how it was progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.
Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.
I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's something most people are going to have a use for.
As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of these mobile assistants yet.
In this case, though, Siri has already successfully scared off anyone who isn't willing to reevaluate products.
It wouldn't have gone any better if the original mapping solution had been a white-labeled "Apple Maps" secretly powered by Google Map.
The problem with the analogy is that users were asked to change their habits. Apple switching Siri models behind the scenes is much less problematic.
Apple ultimately developed their own map application specifically because Google was unwilling to remove the Google logo from the Google Maps app, no matter the price.
It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.
As someone who hasn’t used Google Search in several years, I will be upset and less inclined to use the AI if it’s kicking me out to Google search result pages to show results. This is what I fear. Some of this already happens with Siri and Apple Intelligence today. I’m sure Google would love to see even more of it, to serve up ads and take advantage of their new revenue streams in agentic shopping.
Why so?
Apple explicitly acknowledged that they were using OpenAI’s GPT models before this, and now they’re quite easily switching to Google’s Gemini
The ChatGPT integration was heavily gated by Apple and required explicit opt-in. That won't be the case with the Gemini integration. Apple wants this to just work. The privacy concerns will be mitigated because Apple will be hosting this model themselves in their Private Cloud Compute. This will be a much more tightly integrated solution than ChatGPT was.
And you don't think they will include an abstraction layer?
An abstraction layer doesn’t prevent Google from seeing the data. Last year the story was that Apple would be running a Google model on their (Apple’s) own server hardware.
This story says the custom model will run on-device and in Apple's Private Cloud Compute. The implication is that Google will not see the data. The "promise" of Private Cloud Compute is that Apple wants it to be trusted like "on-device".
Presumably cutting Google out of getting the data from this is part of why this story first was mentioned last year but is only now sounds close to happening. I think it's the same story/project.
Yes, and that's still the story, as far as I can tell. So an abstraction layer would let them swap out the underlying model
I guess the question is, when are they going to use their own model?
Surely research money is not the problem. Can't be lack of competence either, I think.
I think they want it to work well with web search. That’s why Google is the obvious choice. Also their ai offering is low risk of getting eliminated where as open ai could fail at any time
It appears to be lack of competence given they lied about the initial features of Apple Intelligence.
First, they touted features that no one actually built and then fired their AI figurehead “leader” who had no coherent execution plan—also, there appears to have been territorial squabbling going on, about who would build what.
How on earth did Apple Senior Management allow this to unravel? Too much focus on Services, yet ignoring their absolute failures with Siri and the bullshit that was Apple Intelligence, when AI spending is in the trillions?
There is just too much money being burned in AI for Apple to keep researchers. Also models have no respect for original art which leads to a branding issue of being a platform for artists.
Apple is competent at timing when to step into a market and I would guess they are waiting for AI to evolve beyond being considered untrustworthy slop.
Don't think that's an especially big deal, they've always included third party data in Siri or the OS which is usually credited (Example: Maps with Foursquare or TomTom, Flight information from FlightAware, Weather data and many more).
They can also put "Google" in the forever-necessary disclaimer
Google AI can make mistakes
Is this another one of those AI deals where no real money changes hands? In this case, doesn't this just offset the fee Google pays Apple for having their search as the default on Apple devices?
I'll wager the accounting for the two contracts is separate. There may be stipulations that connect the two, but the payment from Google to Apple of $20B+/yr is a long-established contract (set of contracts, actually0 that Apple would not jeopardize for the relatively small Google to Apple $1B/yr contract, one still unproven and which may not stand the test of time.
So, yes, practically speaking, the Apple to Google payment offsets a tiny fraction of the Google to Apple payment, but real money will change hands for each and very likely separately.
So changing cash flows (fee money) isn't real enough now?
OpenAI had it, they had the foot in the door with their integration last year with Siri. But they dropped that ball and many other balls.
Yeah, I was really expecting them to just continue the partnership that Apple announced when the iPhone 16/iOS 18 came out, but I suppose it's been pretty much radio silence on both fronts since then. Although the established stability and good enough-ness that Google offers with Gemini are probably more than enough reason for Apple to pivot to them as a model supplier instead.
I'm sure hiring Jony Ive to design hardware for them didn't help.
Yeah. Super disappointing. I may end up switching to Gemini entirely at this rate.
Models are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just recognized that.
Models are becoming less like commodities. They're differentiating with strengths and weaknesses. When Chinese labs gain more traction, they will stop releasing their models for free. At that point, everyone who wants SOTA models will have to pay.
Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be reversed.
Most of the differentiation is happening on the application/agent layer. Like Coworker.
The rest of it, is happening on post-training. Incremental changes.
We are not talking about EUV lithography here. There are no substantial moths of years of pure and applied research protected by patents.
Normal software has way less moat than SOTA labs.
SOTA AI models can have different architectures, vastly different compute in training, different ways of inferencing, different input data, different RL, and different systems around the model. Not to mention the significant personal user data that OpenAI is collecting.
Saying SOTA AI models are like sugar is insane.
What matter are the results. I'd say that Chinese companies are probably getting a better ROI from their projects using models a few months behind western models, because any deficiency in the models is surpassed by better engineering and better market fit of what they are building over those agents.
Chinese companies like Alibaba just came out and said they're falling farther behind from American companies due to lack of compute.
Compute is a moat.
Strange considering all the compute in the world is built over there in South East Asia.
This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!
Siri still can't play an Apple Music album when there is a song of the same name.
Even "Play the album XY" leads to Siri only playing the single song. It's hilariously bad.
Or the even more frustrating:
Me: "Hey Siri, play <well known hit song from a studio album that sold 100m copies"
Siri: "OK, here's <correct song but a live version nobody ever listens to, or some equally obscure remix>"
Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?
> Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?
Is Siri a probability machine? I didn't think it was an LLM at all right now? I thought it was some horrendous tree of switch statements, hence the difficulty of improving it.
Apple search is comically bad, though. Type in some common feature or app, and it will yield the most obscure header file inside the build deps directory of some Xcode project you forgot existed.
It’s absolutely insane that you can’t say “Siri, play my audiobook” and it play the last audiobook you listened to. Like, come on.
Or when you are driving, someone sends a yes-no question where the answer is no.
Siri: Would you like to answer?
Me: Yes
Siri: ...
Me: No + more words
Siri: Ok (shuts off)
Not exactly the same, but kinda: my gen 1 Google Home just got Gemini and it finally delivers on the promise of like 10 years ago! Brought new life to the thing beyond playing music, setting timers, and occasionally asking really basic questions
It remains to be seen what the existing HomePods will support. There’s been a HomePod hardware update in the pipeline for quite some time, and it appears like they are waiting for the new Siri to be ready.
it's not going to help them. For Siri to be really useful it wouldn't need deep system integration and an external model is not going to provide that. People don't believe me when I said it about Apple Intelligence with open AI
Thats what you get for buying into one ecosystem and sticking with it. All that stuff has been available on Alexa for a decade.
I think this is a good move for Apple. It avoids tying them directly to internalised beliefs in their own AI model, it avoids all the capex around building out an AI engine and associated DC, it reduces risk, and it keeps google in a relationship under contract which google will value, and probably value enough to think hard about stupid legal games regarding Playstore and walled gardens.
Apple plainly doesn't believe in the uplift and impending AGI doom. Nor do they believe there's no value in AI services. They just think for NOW at least they can buy in better than they can own.
But based on Apples VLSI longterm vision, on their other behaviours in times past with IPR in any space, they will ultimately take ownership.
> they will ultimately take ownership.
How? People have been saying this since CoreML dropped nine years ago. Apple is no closer to revamping Siri or rebuking CUDA than they were back then.
When the cost of deployment drops. And, when their own chip designs are profitable, they'll take the capital hit. Until then, as long as the income split for Gemini backed siri isn't terrible they'll stay an outsource. If they persuade Google to deploy Apple chips into the service I'd say an in-house is within sight.
Apple private relay runs in cloudflare and fastly and I believe one other major. They certainly can and do run services for a long time with partners.
> They certainly can and do run services for a long time with partners.
They certainly can. iCloud has ran on Azure and AWS for decades.
This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.
The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.
For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.
> After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models
Sounds like Apple Foundation Models aren't exactly foundational.
Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.
It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity.
Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.
Apple has been using ML in their products for years, to the point that they dedicated parts of their custom silicon for it before the LLM craze. They clearly have some in-house ML talent, but I suppose LLM talent may be a different question.
I’m wondering if this is a way to shift blame for issues. It was mentioned in an interview that what they built internally wasn’t good enough, presumably due to hallucinations… but every AI does that. They know customers have a low tolerance for mistakes and any issues will quickly become a meme (see the Apple Maps launch). If the technology is inherently flawed, where it will never live up to their standards, if they outsource it, they can point to Google as the source of the failings. If things get better down the road and they can improve by pivoting away from Google, they’ll look better and it will make Google look bad. This could be the long game.
They may also save a fortune in training their own models, if they don’t plan to directly try to monetize the AI, and simply have it as a value add for existing customers. Not to mention staying out of hot water related to stealing art for training data, as a company heavily used by artists.
I agree that they don't appear poised to do it themselves. But why not work with Meta or OpenAI (maybe a bit more questionable with MS) or some other player, rather than Google?
The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter. Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.
With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now, without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.
So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.
SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.
I didn't see you 41 day old reply to me until it was too late to comment on it. So here's a sarcastic "thanks for ignoring what I wrote" and telling me that exactly what I was complaining about is the solution to the problem I was complaining about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114935
1) I told you my household can't use Target or Amazon for unscented products, without costly remediation measures, BECAUSE EVEN SCENT-FREE ITEMS COME SMELLING FROM PERFUME CROSS-CONTAMINATION THANKS TO CLEANING, STORAGE, AND TRANSPORTATION CONDITIONS. SOMETIMES REALLY BADLY.
FFS. If you are going to respond, first read.
I also mentioned something other than "government intervention to dictate how products are made" as a solution to this issue, namely adequate segregation between perfumed and non-perfumed products.
And I care less about my wallet than I do about my time and actual ability to acquire products that are either truly scent free, or like yesteryear, don't have everlasting fragrance fixatives.
For people in my position, which make up a small percentage of the population (that still numbers in the millions), the free market has failed. We are a specialized niche that trades tips on how to make things tolerable.
SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.
Apple has surprisingly good quality AI papers, a lot of work on bridging research and product.
hey Siri, search Apple papers about AI.
> AI is such a core part of the experience
For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.
For the shareholders, the only ones that really matter
They could use it like Google Search, not as the first thing the user sees, but as a fallback
Web search is a core part of browsing and Apple is Google's biggest competitor in browsers. Google is paying Apple about 25x for integrating Google Search in Safari as Apple will be paying Google to integrate Google's LLMs into Siri. If you think depending on your competitor is a problem, you should really look into web search where all the real money is today.
How much of the two revenue streams overlap in reality?
Personally for me, who is bought into the Apple ecosystem this is worrying. I am aware how PCC is supposed to work (which is the likely target platform) but the deal with Google of all the companies sends bad signal to consumers who are privacy focussed. If such a feature will be baked in without a way to switch it off, the next device will not be iphone or macbook or ipad.
You could disable Siri since the very beginning, why would all of a sudden it would not have the toggle to disable.
What happens to on-device intelligence? Does it stay a massive part of the Apple Intelligence offer? Or can we expect everything to be offloaded to the cloud?
Apple seems positioning this announcement as "on-device intelligence", with the caveat that Apple is promoting their Private Cloud Compute as "on-device" or at least "on-device-like". I'd be curious if they do a breakdown of what they expect to do on-device versus what happens in Private Cloud Compute for this Siri project. I'm a little on the fence if Private Cloud Compute counts as "on-device" as well, but I'm hopeful it is a good idea and is as well built/considered as its documentation says it is.
Gemini has the nano models that run on-device as well, right?
Can we switch to it, on the website, to test its capabilities?
Google's strategy is as unreadable as ever. It feels like two companies fighting each other in one.
On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.
On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.
It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.
Apple and Google already have the search relationship. Makes sense for this to happen. Am curious what kind of data Google gets out of the deal.
none, it runs on Apple's cloud privately
And where does Apples cloud run?
GCP
My experience with Gemini (3 Flash) has been pretty funny, not awful (but worse than Kimi K2 or GPT 5.2 Mini), but it's just so much worse at (or rather hyper focused on) following my custom instructions, I keep getting responses like:
in response to programming/Linux/etc. questions!(Because I just have a short blurb about my educational background, career, and geography in there, which with every other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how to mkdir etc.)
It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting old now.
Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone.
Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.
They already use GCP for storage so I guess there is some precedent for big ties between them
I thought it was interesting that a Google flack stressed that the model would run on Apple's compute, and seemed to imply it might even run on-device. Allegedly this was said to allay the (expected) privacy concerns of Apple users who wouldn't want their Siri convos shared with Google.
But I saw something else in that statement. Is there going to be some quantized version of Gemini tailored to run on-device on an M4? If so, that would catapult Apple into an entirely new category merging consumer hardware with frontier models.
You can already run quantized models without much friction, people also have dedicated apps for that. It changes very little for people because they everyone who wanted to do it already solved it and those who do not they dont care. It is marginal gain from consumer, a feature to brag about for apple, big gain for google. Users also would need to change existing habits which is undoubtedly hard to do.
Really, Siri is an agent. Agents thrive when the subjacent model capabilities are higher, as it unlocks a series of other use cases that are hard to accomplish when the basic Natural Language Processing layer is weak.
The better the basic NLP tasks like named entity recognition, PoS tagging, Dependency Parsing, Semantic Role Labelling, Event Extraction, Constituency parsing, Classification/Categorization, Question Answering, etc, are implemented by the model layer, the farther you can go on implementing meaningful use-cases in your agent.
Apple can now concentrate on making Siri a really useful and powerful agent.
This is good for Siri, in many ways. But I was kind of hoping we would see a time soon when phone hardware became good enough to do nearly 100% of the Siri-level tasks locally rather than needing Internet access.
I suspect we'll see that; but Siri is in such a bad state of disrepair that Apple really needs something now while they continue to look for micro-scale LLM models that can run well-enough locally. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
The biggest thing Apple has to do is get a generic pipeline up and running, that can support both cloud and non-cloud models down the road, and integrate with a bunch of local tools for agent-style workloads (e.g. "restart", "audio volume", "take screenshot" as tools that agents via different cloud/local models can call on-device).
I don’t think there’s a clear boundary of “Siri-level” tasks. In particular, properly determining whether a task is “Siri-level” or not is likely to require off-device AI.
I'd hope it could be the other way around. Some stuff should be relatively straightforward -- summarizing notifications, emails, setting timers, things like that should be obviously on-device. But aside from that, I would hope that the on-device AI can make the determination on whether it is necessary to go to a datacenter AI for a better answer.
But you may be right, maybe on-device won't be smart enough to decide it isn't smart enough. Though it does seem like the local LLMs have gotten awfully good.
I can see them going that route, but it would cause similarly annoying breaks in the flow as current Siri offering to delegate to ChatGPT, or on-device Siri deciding it can do the task but actually failing or doing it wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be an “it just works” experience.
The actual transactions around this deal will be interesting - will Google simply withold $1B from their search deal, will they pay it then Applepay it back (or a split). I doubt we’ll even know.
Can someone explain to me how this was allowed to happen? Wasn't Siri supposed to be the leading AI agent not ten years ago? How was there such a large disconnect at Apple between what Siri could do and what "real" AI was soon to be capable of?
Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn't there be talk within the industry that this form of AI assistant would soon be looked at as useless?
Am I missing something?
Source: while I don’t have any experience with the inner workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa).
Siri was never an “AI agent”, with intent based systems, you give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an intent, all of the “slots” have to be fulfilled. For instance “I want to go from $source to $destination” and then the system calls an API.
There is no AI understanding - it’s a “1000 monkeys implementation”, you just start giving the system a bunch of variations and templates you want to match on in every single language you care about and match the intents to an API. That’s how Google and Alexa also worked pre LLM. They just had more monkeys dedicated to creating matching sentences.
Post LLM, you tell the LLM what the underlying system is capable of, the parameters the API requires to fulfill an action and the LLM can figure out the users intentions and ask follow up questions until it had enough info to call the API. You can specify the prompt in English and it works in all of the languages that the LLM has been trained on.
Yes I’ve done both approaches
I appreciate the response, but that doesn't really answer my question.
I want to know why the executive leadership at Apple failed to see LLMs as the future of AI. ChatGPT and Gemini are what Siri should be at this point. Siri was one of the leading voice-automated assistants of the past decade, and now Apple's only options are to strap on an existing solution to the name of their product or let it go defunct. So now Siri is just an added layer to access Gemini? Perhaps with a few hard-coded solutions to automate specific tasks on the iPhone, and that's their killer app into the world of AI? That's pathetic.
Is Apple already such a bloated corporation that it can no longer innovate fast enough to keep up with modern trends? It seems like only a few years ago they were super lean and able to innovate better than any major tech company around. LLMs were being researched in 2017. I guess three years was too short of a window to change the direction of Siri. They should have seen the writing on the wall here.
According to everything that has been reported, both the Google Assistant and Alexa are less reliable now that they are LLM based.
I don’t know why, in my much smaller scale experience, converting to an LLM “tools” based approached from the Intent based approach is much more reliable.
Siri was behind pre LLM because Apple didn’t throw enough monkeys at the problem.
Everything that an assistant can do is “hardcoded” even when it is LLM based.
Old way: voice -> text -> pattern matching -> APIs to back end functionality.
New Way: voice -> text -> LLM -> APIs to back end functionality.
How often have you come across a case where Siri understood something and said “I can’t do that”? That’s not an AI problem. That’s Apple not putting people on the intent -> API mapping. An LLM won’t solve the issue of exposing the APIs to Siri.
I don't really want to continue on with this discussion, as AI in general can be absolutely infuriating. It's one of those buzzwords that's just being thrown around without a care in the world at this point, but do you have any links to those reports? I'd be willing to bet that if Google Assistant and Alexa were being run properly, then they shouldn't be less reliable when working with an LLM.
I don't think Apple didn't have enough people working on Siri, I think they had too many people working on the wrong problems. If they had any eye on the industry like they did in their heyday when Jobs was at the helm they would've been all over LLMs like Sam Altman was with his OpenAI startup. This report of SIRI using Gemini going forward is one of the biggest signs that Apple is failing to innovate, let alone the constant rehashing of Iphone and IOS. They haven't been innovative in years.
And yes that's the point I was trying to make, AI assistants shouldn't be hardcoded to do certain things, that's not AI - but with Apple's marketing, they'd have you believe that SIRI is what AI should be, except now everyone's wiser, everyone and their grandmother has used ChatGPT which is really what SIRI should have been. Changes to the IOS API should roll out and an LLM backed AI assistant should be able to pick up on those changes automatically, SIRI should be an LLM trained on Apple Data, its APIS, your personal data (emails, documents,etc.), and a whole host of publicly available data. This would actually make SIRI useful going into the future.
Again, if Apple's marketing team were to be believed, SIRI would be the most advanced LLM on the planet, but from a technical standpoint, they haven't even started training an LLM at all. It's nonsense.
AI assistants can’t magically “do stuff” without “tools” exposed. A tool is always an API that someone has to write an expose to the orchestrator whether it’s AI or just a dumb intent system.
And ChatGPT can’t really “do anything” without access to tools.
You don’t want an LLM to have access to your total system without deterministic guardrails and limiting the permissions of what the tools can do just like you wouldn’t expose your entire database with admin privileges to the web.
You also don’t want to expose too many tools to the system. Every tool you expose you also have to have a description of what the tool does, the parameters it needs etc. Ot will both blow up your context window and start hallucinating. I suspect that’s why Alexa and Google Assistant got worse when they became LLM based and my narrow use cases don’t suffer those problems when I started implementing LLM based solutions.
And I am purposefully yada yada yadaing some of the technical complexities and I hate the entire “appeal to authority” thing. But I worked at AWS for 3.5 years until 2 years ago and I was at one point the second highest contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” that almost everyone in the niche had heard of dealing with voice automation. I really do know about this space.
yeah, there's just really nothing left to discuss. Apple could have been a real leader in the AI space had they hired the right researchers to implement LLMs and beaten OpenAI to the punch.
I understand that AI assitants need access to tools in order to do anything on a computer, I've been working with AI augmented development for a few months now and everytime I need a prompt to run a tool it asks for permission first, or just straight up gives me the command to paste into a terminal.
ideally this would have been abstracted away if siri were an LLM, with Apple controlling which apis siri has access to and bipassing user confirmation all together.
It would have been neat if I were able to say, "Hey, Siri: send a text to John Smith with a playfully angry prose thanking him for not inviting me to the party". which would have the LLM automatically craft the message and send upon confirmation, perhaps with a disclaimer "made with ai" at the bottom of the text or something along those lines.
"Hey, Siri: What's the weather in Los Angeles, California" would fallback to a web api endpoint.
"Hey, Siri: How do I compile my C# application without Visual Studio" would provide step-by-step instructions on working with MSBUILD.
different prompts would fallback on different apis that only Apple would expose. Obviously not allowing the user to gain root access to the system, which is what you would expect from Apple.
I guess from a purely technical standpoint, you'd train two models, one as "Safe" and the other as "Unsafe". "Safe" is what would be used by the end-user, allowing them to access safe data, apis, messaging, web.. you name it. "Unsafe" would be used internally at Apple and would have system-wide access, access to unlimited user data, root privileges, perhaps unsafe image generation and web search... basically no limit to what an LLM could achieve.
And spend billions and billions of dollars to get - a better Siri?
That's my point, Apple has invested so much into Siri that there's no reason why it's not the most advanced LLM in the world. They missed the mark completely. Why? If Jobs were still in charge, the entire team would have been gone years ago.
How soon does elon sue them for not choosing xai? He's gonna cry some nonsense about antitrust just like he did last year when apple partnered with openai for apple intelligence opt-in.
That was quick: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gem...
What a dick head ...
The question we're all waiting for ... for how many billions?
Google release hints at this being more than just Siri:
> Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
... https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
This is actually the most important part of this announcement, and excellent news. I was pretty disappointed that they were going with an existing player rather than building their own models. But this implies that they will continue to build their own base models, just using Gemini as a starting point, which is a pretty good solution.
To me, Apple's ML business was all about federated learning. I know this concept was pre-transformer era, I conjectured one of the reasons Apple didn't adopt LLM right away was that Apple couldn't find a reasonable way to do federated learning with LLMs. I wonder Apple will give up this idea. And I would like to see how it could be done with current AI systems.
Pity they don't have their own thing at that level. They had a great start introducing Siri then totally missed the train.
Someone inside and up there neglected the "a bicycle for the mind" part of the vision.
" ... and Anthropic’s Clause."
That will be their contract writing AI.
This is the sad state of Apple right now. It is ridiculous that they basically had unlimited access to TSMC and achieved nothing in AI. Management is a joke.
During his tenure as CEO, Tim Cook has added $700 million per day in enterprise value to Apple. Per day! For 14 years!
I was not aware HN is now an investment discussion board. Even if you were to argue that point, what’s his incremental value comped to but-for world? I mean one where Steve Jobs is still alive and running Apple. I am sure Jobs would’ve sat on his behind milking iPhones and just let Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia take the entire AI TAM. I am sure that’s the Steve Jobs we all knew.
There are many dimensions one could assess a management team, but it is obviously ridiculous to call them “a joke” when they achieve their principal goal at such astonishing scale.
I am certain Apple will do just fine in the AI revolution, in large part because such a massive distribution and brand advantage is extremely hard to overcome.
Ask the shareholders if they're a joke
Tim Cook replaced paying customers with Wall St. That's not a win for any of us except Apple shareholders, a number far, far lower than Apple users.
Does anyone know what Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" servers actually are? I recall murmurings about racked M chips or some custom datacenter-only variant?
I'm really curious how Apple is bridging the gap between consumer silicon and the datacenter scale stack they must have to run a customized Gemini model for millions of users.
RDMA over Thunderbolt is cool for small lab clusters but they must be using something else in the datacenter, right?
Apple is one of the largest customers of Google Cloud Platform.
Last I heard most of their e2e storage for iCloud was on GCP.
They also use AWS.
I don't understand why Apple cannot implement their own LLM at the user phone level for easy pickings? like settings control? or app-specific shortcuts? or local data searching?
I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia information, etc require external data sets, and transferring over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.
All signs are that they are doing exactly that. They already have an on-device LLM which powers certain features, and I expect they will have a better-trained version of that on-device model that comes out with the "new Siri" update.
In the original announcement of the Siri revamped a couple of years ago, they specifically talked about having the on-device model handle everything it can, and only using the cloud models for the harder or more open ended questions.
Feel like this is a huge whiff. At best your implementation is as good as what you can get with Google's own offerings and Pixel. Most likely Apple's offerings will always be just a bit behind. Im probably a bit biased as Ive preferred Anthropic but it seems like those two companies also align more with other outward policies like privacy.
This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think OpenAI is a competitor and “new money”. Pairing with Google makes sense especially considering that this is “normie-facing” technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer “Hey Google” in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that effect.
Makes sense given the search alliance already in place.
Amazon/AWS was trying to push its partnership with Apple hard once that was revealed, including vague references to doing AI things, but AWS is just way to far behind at this point so looks like they lost out here to Google/GCP.
I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.
Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.
This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.
What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.
Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?
>Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
They've let a snake in their walled garden.
I didn't realize that Apple could possibly be more stupid in their strategy with AI, but now they've given the game to their biggest competitor in every arena in which they compete.
It's truly amazing how badly they've flubbed it.
I’m a long time Android user and almost switched to iPhone last year. Mostly because I use macOS and wanted better integration and also wanted to try it. Another big factor was the AI assistant. I stayed with Android because I think Google will win here. Apple will probably avoid losing users to their biggest competitor by reaching rough parity using the same models
I think Apple is also more comfortable with Google than say an OpenAI due to the past relationship with the search deal.
Previously only back in June the discussion was barely a mention of Google Gemini, and leaned more towards why weren't they doing it themselves:
Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426643
I’m hopeful this means Apple will finally ship an updated (i.e. actually useful) Siri this calendar year. I have to assume they’ve been integrating Gemini into their OSes for some time now and that this is just the announcement that makes it official.
So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with Google.
I wouldn't expect this to happen, as Apple's resistance against this would be too strong. The data of Google's paying [enterprise] customers stays private as well, so the safeguards are in place already.
So what has Apple done for AI in the last few years? Anything? Such a huge company
"Google already pays Apple billions each year to be the default search engine on iPhones. But that lucrative partnership briefly came into question after Google was found to hold an illegal internet search monopoly.
In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser business.
The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such as the one with Apple."
How much is Google paying Apple now
If these anti-competitive agreements^1 were public,^2 headlines could be something like,
(A) "Apple agrees to use Google's Gemini for AI-powered Siri for $[payment amount]"
Instead, headlines are something like,
(B) "Apple picks Google's Gemini to run Ai-powered Siri"
1. In other words, they are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects
2. Neither CNBC nor I are suggesting that there is any requirement for the parties to make these agreements public. I am presenting a hypothetical relating to headlilnes, (A) versus (B), as indicated by the words "If" and "could"
It's probably anti-competitive, but I'm not sure about your argument which is that Apple and Google must disclose details of their business relationships just because they are Apple and Google. You could maybe argue something like this should be a requirement of publicly traded companies, but the long-term effect there would be fewer publicly traded companies so they don't have to disclose every deal they make.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-to-rep...
Google pays 20 billion to Apple annually for search traffic
Apple allegedly pays Google about 1 billion per year for Gemini
Perhaps Gemini sends more search traffic to Google
The search traffic and data collection is worth far more than Gemini
Looks like Apple is getting paid $1 billion annually to use Gemini for AI-powered Siri
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-01/openai-ta...
I used Gemini heavily in 2025. It was very bad and frustrating to use. Shame on Google for shipping it in the condition they did. No quality control. No pride in craft.
Why is Apple's self-developed AI progressing so slowly that they still need to collaborate with Google? What's going on with their AI team? In this era of AI, it seems like Apple has already fallen behind.
They let others run that costly costly costly race. It's not where Apple is most competitive.
Why is Apple's self-developed AI progressing so slowly that they need to collaborate with Google? What's going on with their AI team? In this era of AI, it seems like Apple has already fallen behind.
I hope Apple will make it a smooth integration. The chatgpt integration in Apple Intelligence is not smooth. Constantly wants user input („confirm you are 13+“ at every request)
Apple is buying time for another shot, right now they are in over their heads on AI and they need a fresh start. Eventually they will own the tech from bottom up, that’s the goal at least
Is the era of Apple exceptionalism over? Has it been over for a while now?
Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?
Because their focus on user privacy makes it difficult for them to train at scale on users' data in the way that their competitors can. Ironically, this focus on privacy initially stemmed from fumbling the ball on Siri: recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google's equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming "we keep your data private so we can't train on it the way Google can." The result was a vicious cycle: initially botch AI rollout -> justify that failure with a novel marketing strategy around privacy that only makes it harder to improve their AI capabilities -> botch subsequent AI rollouts as a result -> ...
To be clear, I'd much rather have my personal cloud data private than have good AI integration on my devices. But strictly from an AI-centric perspective, Apple painted themselves into a corner.
That's a poor justification. There are companies that sell you all kinds of labelled data. OpenAI, Anthropic didn't train on their own user data.
Apple's privacy focus started long before the current AI wave. It got major public attention in the fight with the FBI over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter's phone. I don't think Google's equivalent even existed at that point.
This is nonsense. You don't need Apple user data to build a good AI model, plenty of startups building base models have shown that. But even if you did it's nonsense as Apple has long had opt-in for providing data to train their machine learning models, and many of those models, like OCR or voice recognition, are excellent.
It's been a long running thing that Apple can't do software as well as competitors, though in my experience they've beat Google and a few others at devex and UX in their mobile frameworks overtime despite initial roughness. Slow and steady might win this race eventually, too.
it's pretty Apple-ish to not jump into a frenzy, and wait for turbulence to settle, i believe. delegation to Gemini fits that theory?
They've tried to have an AI assistant before AI was a big thing...it's just pretty bad and Siri never got better.
If it would suddenly get better, like they teased (Some would say, lied about the capabilities) with Apple Intelligence that would fit pretty well. That they delegate that to Gemini now is a defeat.
I mean, Siri has been bad for what, 15 years now? It does seem like a bt of an outlier.
Siri got substantially worse over time in fact, I swear it used to at least be able to give you answers to basic facts rather than just offering to google things.
Gemini only replaced Google assistant on Android a few weeks ago. I gave up on Google assistant a few years ago, but I'd guess it wasn't a worthwhile upgrade from Siri.
Still using Google assistant after trying Gemini on my pixel about 6 months ago. It was not an assistant replacement, it couldn't even perform basic operations on my phone, it would just say something like, "I'm sorry, I'm just an LLM and I can't send text messages." Has that changed?
They aren’t so good at everything else either.
I would not lure so much comments if not say this. Let's fish an answer from that pool of Apple's fanboys.
See ML research papers from Apple. Their researchers prefered small models over LLM. So they thought researchers' effort would make up the lack of compute. Then the scale law hit them hard.
Apple is almost purely customer products, they don't have the resources to compete with the giants in this field.
Their image classification happens on-device, in comparison Google Photos does that server side so they already have ML infra.
have you used iOS 26?
"liquid ass" is how most of my friends describe it
I think that's the thing: Apple is good at very little, but they seem like they're good at "everything else" because they don't do much else. Lots of companies spread themselves really thin trying to get into lots of unrelated competencies and tons of products. Apple doesn't.
Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refining the design. When you're churning out a dozen designs a year, can you optimize the fan as well for each one? You hit a certain point where you say "eh, good enough." Apple's aluminum unibody MacBook Pro was largely the same design 2008-2021. They certainly iterated on it, but it wasn't "look at my flashy new case" every year. PC laptop makers come out with new designs with new materials so frequently.
With iPhones, Apple often keeps a design for 3 years. It looks like Samsung has churned out over 25 phone models over the past year while Apple has 5 (iPhone, iPhone Plus, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, iPhone 16e).
It's easy to look so good at things when you do fewer things. I think this is one of Apple's great strengths - knowing where to concentrate its effort.
This is some magical thinking. Even if Samsung took all their manpower, all their thought process and all their capital, they still couldn’t produce a laptop that competes with the MacBook (just to take one example), because they fundamentally don’t have any taste as a company.
Hell, they can’t even make a TV this year that’s less shit than last years version of it and all that requires is do literally nothing.
I haven’t seen a lot of good taste from Apple in recent years.
There's no reason to think that Apple would have any more skill at making a frontier AI model as they do at making airplanes or growing soybeans. Not much overlap between consumer electronics design and expertise, data, training, and datacenters needed for AI.
I feel like this ignores how big of a part the software is for those "consumer electronics" Apple is so good at making.
Apple definitely has software expertise, maybe it's not as specialized into AI as it is about optimizing video or music editors, but to suggest they'd be at the same starting point as an agriculture endeavor feels dishonest.
> but so good at everything else?
They aren't.
I like it. I like Gemini.
I guess this is just a continuation of the Search deal, and an admission that LLMs are replacing search.
I can't wait for gemini to lecture me why I should throw away my android
That's a shame. I was hoping for an Apple AI independent of advertiser influence.
Oh, well. What could have been great.
I wonder if this will my original homepods interesting to talk to or if they won't provide this on older devices.
Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my HomePods all the time, and it's working great.
How do you do this on a HomePod? I could definitely see Apple limiting this to newer hardware, as a way to bump sales.
Let me get back to you on this, but it'll take me a few days
EDIT: Here you go, it's very barebones, but it's better than nothing (I hope): https://github.com/cockbrand/siri-gemini-shortcut
As you'd expect, the code is vibed by Gemini :)
Guess I am not using Siri anymore…
By the way, have any of you ever tried to delete and disabled Siri’s iCloud backup? You can’t do it.
Why not? Apple's ChatGPT integration has been pretty explicitly anonymizing requests and doesn't require an account. Maybe I'm missing something.
In the article they clearly mentioned that Gemini model will be used for the Foundation Model running on device or their own Server. They are not sending Siri request to Google servers.
You guys use Siri?
My exact reaction every time I hear people discuss Siri. I don’t think I used it once in my life and it’s one of the first thing I turn off every time I have a new device. So interesting to see how different people use the same devices in completely different ways.
Siri is extremely useful. That is, if your use cases are limited to:
- setting a timer
- dictating a title to search on Apple TV
Creating calendar events and reminders too!
A feature set that has remained unchanged since Siri’s launch…
You can use Siri to call custom Shortcuts which in turn can ask for more details if required. And now that Shortcuts can make use of the LLMs (Apple’s or ChatGPT), there are a lot more ways to make Siri smarter.
Makes sense then, considering timers I set them on my watch and I don’t watch tv.
I used it when it launched to figure out it was useless and haven't gone back.
For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination and such with as little friction as possible.
Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify, Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop generator.
Only for opening/closing the garage door, setting timers, and sending texts. What else do people use the digital assistants for?
Hundreds of times a day for HomeKit, though rarely anything else. It’s _mostly_ fine, provided there are no HomePods around.
Only when I wake up in the middle of the night to ask it what is the current time of the dystopia. That and the calculator.
Unless Apple is lying:
On iPhone, Settings → iCloud → Storage → Siri → Disable and Delete
Edit: Tried it. It works for me. Takes a minute though.
I have a current case open with Apple with this issue. It does not work. And I don’t believe you. I’m sorry I just don’t believe you because Apple says there is a technical problem preventing this. That does not just affect me. Because I also tried it on three other phones of three other friends of mine and it does not work.
TRY IT!
I did. It works, as far as I can tell?
You’re able to disable Siri in iCloud? Not turn off Siri, disable Siri back up in iCloud. And when you go back to it after not turning it on, it’s still off?
Yes. But, I'm not surprised that you're having issues. In my experience managing a large enterprise, iCloud accounts seem to have all kinds of weird, account-specific issues.
You're using Siri? lmao
That's the Internet Explorer of chatbots.
That's where people get confused - it's not a chatbot or an LLM - it's a voice command interface. Adding something to the shopping list, setting a timer, turning up the heating in the back room, playing some music, skipping a track, sending a message - it works perfectly well for - and that's what I use it for virtually every day.
This work is to turn it it into something else, more like a chatbot, presumably
Siri is already transitioning from an intent-based NLU system to an LLM.
In iOS 18.1 (on iPhone 15+) Siri is part intent-based, part on-device "Apple Intelligence" small LLM, and in iOS 18.2 it also supports off-device ChatGPT.
This year Siri 2.0 is expected to ditch the legacy intent-based system and instead use just the small on-device Apple Intelligence LLM plus (opt-in) off-device Gemini (running in some private cloud).
Jeez, I only use it for the time and for the calculator, and to ask it to call someone. I am shocked anyone thinks I used it for anything more than that.
Also, I have never turned on Apple "Intelligence".
You’ve used Siri before?! /j
given that gemini 3 pro is presumably a relatively small model it wouldn't be too surprising to see an even more optimized model fit into latest iphones. I wish we knew the data behind gemini 3 flash because if my estimation that it's <50b is true, holy shit.
Google has Gemini Nano for on-device capabilities but basically never uses it and defers to cloud models instead
It tells you how bad their product management and engineering team is that they haven’t just decided to kill Siri and start from scratch. Siri is utterly awful and that’s an understatement, for at least half a decade.
Oh God, please do this tomorrow.
I always said that Apple does not have the cloud GPU power to deliver a good AI experience to their huge customer base, no matter how good their developers are. They have to find someone with a lot of GPUs that can handle the workload, and that's Google.
Total capitulation by Apple.
Gemini still easily goes into loops and produces nonsense.
This seems like a pretty significant anti-trust issue. One of the two mobile OS makers is using a product from the other for its AI assistance. And that means that basically all mobile devices will be using the same AI technology.
I don't expect the current US government to do anything about it though.
What antitrust rule do you think would be breached?
I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).
Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly.
It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winning AI service is an exclusive deal to use Google while all competing services are disadvantaged, which is probably not the outcome a healthy and competitive playing field would produce.
So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just someones opinion).
The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic abuse.
> So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model? And the reason that this is an issue is because both companies are large?
No they were already being sued for antitrust violations, it just mirrors what they are accused of doing to exploit their platform.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...
So if it mirrors something they were already accused of (like you're saying), my questioning should be pretty easy to map onto that issue as well?
It's the line of thinking that I'm trying to dig into more, not the specifics of this case. Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
If that case was prosecuted and Apple was found guilty, I suppose you can point to it as precedent. But again, does it only serve as precedent when it's a deal between Apple and Google? Is it only a precedent when there's a case between two "large" companies?
Again this is all really squishy, if companies aren't allowed to outsource development of another feature once they pass some sense of "large", when does it apply? What about the $1T pharmaceutical company that wants to use AI modeling? They're a large technically component company, if Eli Lily partnered with Gemini would you be sitting here saying that they also are abusing a monopolistic position that prevents competition in the AI model space?
> Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
No it's antitrust because they have a failed product, but purely by virtue of shutting out competitors from their platform they have been able to turn three years of flailing around into a win-by-outsourcing. What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants? Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology? How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly? This is why it's an antitrust issue.
No other thoughts on my actual questions? You're just addressing one-off sentences from my responses.
"it's antitrust because they have a failed product" is objectively hilarious
> What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked default voice assistants?
Probably pretty much the same. What would Gemini's position be like today if they hadn't blocked out default voice assistants? You only get Gemini when you use Gemini, just like you only got Siri when you use Siri (up until this deal takes effect). Also Siri has used ChatGPT already, so I'm not even convinced this is a valid criticism. They already didn't block OpenAI from being part of Siri.
> Would they be able to recover from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology?
This is relevant how?
> How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly?
How would what measure against other ai models? How would their ability to recover from a lack of investing in a better "homemade" AI model differ if they used OpenAI instead of Gemini? How does that have anything to do with antitrust? That's a business case study type of question. Also, shouldn't they be allowed to recover from their own lack of developing a model by using the best tool available to them?
In Japan you can run other voice assistants than Siri (well, at least some of the functionality like calling them up via a button shortcut): https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appintents/launchi...
Why only in Japan? Because Japan forced them to: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-sweeping-app-...
> it must be punished for then choosing to use another companies model
The problem isn't that they used another company's model. It's that they are using a model made by the only company competing with them in the market of mobile OS.
IANAL, but I don't believe either of these things is a recognized concept in US antitrust law.
> Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI?
Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".
Apple and Google have a duopoly on Mobile OS. If Apple uses Google's model for Siri, that means Apple and Google are using their duopoly in one market (mobile OS) to enforce a monopoly for Google in another (model for mobile personal assistant AI).
They are in a duopoly on the Mobile OS market, with no other significant player available. Google would be the sole integrated mobile AI, though there are competitors available if customers wanted to switch (customers for such products being the OS companies buying the AI services, not the end-users).
However I don't see the link, how they are "using their duopoly", and why "they" would be using it but only one of them benefits from it. Being a duopoly, or even a monopoly, is not against anti-trust law by itself.
At what point are they going to just ship iPhones with Android?
I mean never... but what a dream that would be
Weird thing is, Gemini didn't crack speech-to-speech yet. They have a product but both Anthropic and Google are visibly suffering in speech-to-speech vs OpenAI voice mode.
can they ask siri to fix the tahoe catastrophe please
Didn't they make a deal with OpenAI sometime back?
ChatGPT is currently integrated into Apple Intelligence. When I ask Siri something I can choose to use ChatGPT for my answer.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl...
So I'm guessing in a future update it will be Gemini instead. I hope it's going to be more of an option to choose between the 2.
Hopefully it gets more tightly integrated.
Just like that, we have a final AI winner.
How Apple has made some of the greatest phones in history, amazing engineering, and a lot more, but just can't make a simple model to run locally on the phone when many others did?
i think it's good. Google has a record of being stable and working with large partners (govt etc) and avoids the controversial cult of altman.
Apple picks [ad company's] [ai ad server] to power Siri.
It's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.
If they wanted to, they could throw massive amounts of cash on it like Google and Facebook are, with the latter poaching Apple employees with 200$ million pay packages: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/meta-poac...
But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine deal, and using Google Cloud infrastructure for iCloud and other services. Their new "private cloud compute" already runs on GCP too, perfect! Buying Gemini just makes sense, for now. Wait a few years until the technology becomes more mature/stable and then replace it with their own for a reasonable price.
Why did they even have Ruoming Pang on staff? Because they were trying. Failing, and then saying we're waiting is objectively hilarious.
No, they couldn't, because all current and future ethe training hardware is already tied up by contracts from the frontier labs. Apple could not simply buy its way in given how constricted the supply is.
You can rent data centers for this stuff nowadays and Apple can easily outbid any competitor.
Will Apple and Google merge now? That would create a new #1, bigger than NVidia.
It would take US antitrust approval, but under Trump, that's for sale.
In other news Yahoo! picks Bing to become its new search engine... This is that stupid.
But, but, didn’t they say two years ago that they picked OpenAI to power apple intelligence? Where did that go? Wasn’t Scam Altman gay enough for Tim Apple?
Now I have two reasons to not use Siri.
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Why couldn't Apple pull their finger out of their asses and make their own AI nonsense better then Crap GPT?
Steve Jobs rolling in his grave. The mortal enemy. Thermonuclear war.
Enemies? Google contributes about 20% of Apple's profits annually through their default search engine deal, that's more profitable than just about everything they do or make except selling iPhones.
> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...
The original iPhone came pre-loaded with Google search, Maps, and Youtube. Jobs competed with Google but he also knew Google had best-in-class products too.
Jobs brokered a $150M deal with Apple's arch enemy Microsoft in 1997.