9 ms·

Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri

71 points by jbredeche 11mo ago

Noaidi 11mo ago
So now it does not matter what platform you choose for your smartphone, you cannot escape Google AI surveillance. Well you can shut it off on the iPhone I guess, but that means no more privacy focused Apple Intelligence. Next to all the money they poured into Liquid glAss, this will be the worst investment Apple has ever made.
- nomel 11mo ago
  This assumes they'll make the data available to Google. With all their secure "Private Cloud Compute" stuffs they advertised, there's a good chance it will not be shared.
  - whynotmakealt 11mo ago
    Giving credit where its due, I think the private cloud compute stuff of Apple is really interesting architecure wise. I think it included using ARM Cpu's with a special realm ability to prevent certain types of attacks to minimize the amount of trust if I remember correctly.
- flounder3 11mo ago
  OP's 9to5mac article states: Also under the agreement, Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure. Bloomberg states: The model will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring that user data remains walled off from Google’s infrastructure.
- lawn 11mo ago
  GrapheneOS.
  - pcdoodle 11mo ago
    patiently waiting to see which snap dragon will supported. Hopefully something smallish.
- lern_too_spel 11mo ago
  If iOS opened up the ability to implement your own assistant like VoiceInteractionService on Android, you wouldn't have to worry about it. On Android, if you don't like Google providing the service, you can switch to OpenAI, Alexa, or even your own service.
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-plans-to-use-1-2-trillion-parameter-google-gemini-model-to-power-new-siri https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-pla... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826664)
ml-anon 11mo ago
If true this is the deal of the century. Apple pay 1/14th of a Wang per year for a top tier model whereas Meta burn multiple Wangs a year in salary alone and get garbage.
- thorncorona 11mo ago
  When is this not true? It is cheaper to buy GPUs than to develop the capabilities to develop GPUs.
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  For those equally confused: Meta bought 49% of Scale AI for 14.3 billion, purportedly to largely bring Alexandr Wang on board.
- jb1991 11mo ago
  What is a "Wang" ?
  - ml-anon 11mo ago
    A Wang is to AI personnel expenditure as a Mooch is to time in a government role.
    - thebruce87m 11mo ago
      I wonder how many mooches until the wang bubble bursts.
pcdoodle 11mo ago
On device models please. My computer should work for me.
prossercj 11mo ago
This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
- purplecats 11mo ago
  > wound Apple's pride do businesses really "think" in a personified manner as this? isnt it just what the accounting resolves to as the optimal path?
  - Andrex 11mo ago
    The C-levels leading the companies might, and the tech CEOs in question have been at the helm for a long enough while to build up some emotional feelings.
  - lxgr 11mo ago
    Despite decades of efforts to reduce individual accountability in corporations to zero, companies (as social groupings) definitely still have some sense of identity that shines through in decisions.
- antipaul 11mo ago
  I’m not sure. It could be a way to save a ton of money. Look at the investments non-Apple tech companies are making on data centers & compute. Maybe paying Google a billion a year is still a lot cheaper? Apple famously tries to focus on only a few things. Still, they will continue working on their own LLM and plug it in when ready. Edit: compare to another comment about Wang-units of currency
  - mgrandl 11mo ago
    Well they would still be running the google models in Apple DCs. I doubt this is a very cost efficient deal for them.
- 11mo ago
jerojero 11mo ago
I really hope Apple is working hard on improving on-device models for their use case so they can get out of this.
- iAMkenough 11mo ago
  When I first read the headline, I thought they’d licensed a customized Gemma 3n for an on-device model.
- dzhiurgis 11mo ago
  On device models are already so good. It's so insane Siri doesn't just use them. Or why HomePods don't get answers via iPhone.
- Yizahi 11mo ago
  Companies working hard to bring us closer to on-device models are Kingston, Hynix, Micron and the like, not Apple. If they succeed, we will get on-device LLMs sooner. If not, well, it may take a while.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
The question is if Apple will buy TPUs to run it too. $1B for the software and $1B for the hardware, every few years.
bnchrch 11mo ago
Today I asked to my homepod: > "Hey Siri, whens the next Formula 1 race in Montreal" and she responds with the same infuriating answer I typically get > "Hmm, I found some interesting results on the web, I can show them to you if you ask again from your iPhone" I don't care what pride Apple has to swallow, or if they have to layoff 10,000 people. I just want my device ecosystem to be able to do what its competitors have been able to do for a decade, or what Ive been able to build myself for the last 3 years. A working and useful voice assistant. At this point Im convinced Tim Cook could sit at a terminal himself and ship a better version of what Apple has in an afternoon.
ddxv 11mo ago
Mind blowing they couldn't get this to work. It's struck me lately that the models don't seem to matter anymore, they're all equally good. The UX and integration with regular phone features is what makes the tool shine and by now there should be plenty of open source models and know how to create their own. What is Google offering that Apple can't figure out on their own? Maybe people don't personal assitant AI enough to justify the investment? My phone has probably 6 or 7 AI tools that have talking features that I don't ever explore.
- Tostino 11mo ago
  I don't know, Gemini 2.5 has been the only model that's been able to not consistently make fundamental mistakes with my project as I've been working with it over the last year. Claud 3.7, 4.0, and 4.5 are not nearly as good. I gave up on chatgpt a couple years ago so I have no idea how they perform. They were bad when I quit using it.
  - ddxv 11mo ago
    I use all of them about equally, and I don't really want to argue the point, as I've had this conversation with friends, and it really feels like it is becoming more about brand affiliation and preference. At the end of the day, they're random text generators and asking the same question with different seeds gives different results, and they're all mostly good.
  - diogenescynic 11mo ago
    Do you find that Gemini results are slightly different when you ask the same question multiple times? I found it to have the least consistently reproducible results compared to others I was trying to use.
    - Tostino 11mo ago
      Sometimes it will alternate between different design patterns for implementing the same feature on different generations. If it gets the answer wrong and I notice it, often just regenerating will get past it rather than having to reformulate my prompt. So, I'd say yeah...it is consistent in the general direction or understanding, but not so much in the details. Adjusting temp does help with that, but I often just leave it default regardless.
cyrusradfar 11mo ago
Coincidentally, Google pays Apple over a billion dollars a year (est. at 1.5B) to be the default search in iOS. Could be re-titled. Google closes their trade deficit to half a billion dollars per year.
- wilsonnb3 11mo ago
  It’s actually much more than that, $20 billion per year
  - cyrusradfar 11mo ago
    WHAT -- just had to Google and you're absolutely right! Makes sense that time has moved forward. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-search-deal-safari-18-billion https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se... I'm still using numbers from a post I wrote in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/apple-lays-the-groundwork-to-kill-online-advertising/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/apple-lays-the-groundwork-...
AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
Much like they are paying the leaders in other specialties instead of becoming eg. a assembly company (Foxconn) or a search company (Google Search) they are not going to try and be a leader in at least large language models. Am I interpreting that correctly? I can understand that to a degree but that means the future for Apple is as a technology integrator, not a fundamental technology company. As I type that out I guess I’m realizing that has always been true.
- zaphirplane 11mo ago
  Or cpu
diogenescynic 11mo ago
Why Gemini? Just because of the closeness between the two companies already or is there a technical reason? I like Gemini the least because each search results in slightly different hard to reproduce identically results... I find I like LibreChat the best and then just connect it to all the other LLMs like ChatGTP, Claude, Anthropic, etc. from there.
musicale 11mo ago
This isn't good news. It means that Apple's huge, expensive AI team has basically failed. And it presumably means that Apple is willing to accept Google's practices for ML model training and use.
lowlevel 11mo ago
... and has widely been regarded as a bad move.
peatmoss 11mo ago
I think the answer here involves licensing and Apple control of the infrastructure, but my first thought was, "I historically trust Apple with my data a bit more than I trust Google, how is this not just trusting Google with my data?" Apple previously pitched a vision of local-first AI for privacy, but seems to have badly miscalculated the kind of customer experience they could provide. My personal experience is that Siri has suffered greatly. Case in point, I like to listen to music in the car, and Siri now confidently starts playing artists whose names sound nothing like what I requested. Also maddening "Play [x] on Apple Music" "You'll need to authorize me to use Youtube Music" Still I live with / pay for so much that is broken based on a kind of Apple privacy vibes inertia. Siri being wired up to more of my personal information plus Apple maybe shipping that data to Google is going to make me reevaluate that.

71 points by jbredeche 11mo ago

Noaidi 11mo ago

So now it does not matter what platform you choose for your smartphone, you cannot escape Google AI surveillance. Well you can shut it off on the iPhone I guess, but that means no more privacy focused Apple Intelligence. Next to all the money they poured into Liquid glAss, this will be the worst investment Apple has ever made.

nomel 11mo ago
This assumes they'll make the data available to Google. With all their secure "Private Cloud Compute" stuffs they advertised, there's a good chance it will not be shared.
- whynotmakealt 11mo ago
  Giving credit where its due, I think the private cloud compute stuff of Apple is really interesting architecure wise. I think it included using ARM Cpu's with a special realm ability to prevent certain types of attacks to minimize the amount of trust if I remember correctly.
flounder3 11mo ago
OP's 9to5mac article states: Also under the agreement, Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure. Bloomberg states: The model will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring that user data remains walled off from Google’s infrastructure.
lawn 11mo ago
GrapheneOS.
- pcdoodle 11mo ago
  patiently waiting to see which snap dragon will supported. Hopefully something smallish.
lern_too_spel 11mo ago
If iOS opened up the ability to implement your own assistant like VoiceInteractionService on Android, you wouldn't have to worry about it. On Android, if you don't like Google providing the service, you can switch to OpenAI, Alexa, or even your own service.

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-plans-to-use-1-2-trillion-parameter-google-gemini-model-to-power-new-siri https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-pla... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826664)

ml-anon 11mo ago

If true this is the deal of the century. Apple pay 1/14th of a Wang per year for a top tier model whereas Meta burn multiple Wangs a year in salary alone and get garbage.

thorncorona 11mo ago
When is this not true? It is cheaper to buy GPUs than to develop the capabilities to develop GPUs.
zamadatix 11mo ago
For those equally confused: Meta bought 49% of Scale AI for 14.3 billion, purportedly to largely bring Alexandr Wang on board.
jb1991 11mo ago
What is a "Wang" ?
- ml-anon 11mo ago
  A Wang is to AI personnel expenditure as a Mooch is to time in a government role.
  - thebruce87m 11mo ago
    I wonder how many mooches until the wang bubble bursts.

pcdoodle 11mo ago

On device models please. My computer should work for me.

prossercj 11mo ago

This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.

purplecats 11mo ago
> wound Apple's pride do businesses really "think" in a personified manner as this? isnt it just what the accounting resolves to as the optimal path?
- Andrex 11mo ago
  The C-levels leading the companies might, and the tech CEOs in question have been at the helm for a long enough while to build up some emotional feelings.
- lxgr 11mo ago
  Despite decades of efforts to reduce individual accountability in corporations to zero, companies (as social groupings) definitely still have some sense of identity that shines through in decisions.
antipaul 11mo ago
I’m not sure. It could be a way to save a ton of money. Look at the investments non-Apple tech companies are making on data centers & compute. Maybe paying Google a billion a year is still a lot cheaper? Apple famously tries to focus on only a few things. Still, they will continue working on their own LLM and plug it in when ready. Edit: compare to another comment about Wang-units of currency
- mgrandl 11mo ago
  Well they would still be running the google models in Apple DCs. I doubt this is a very cost efficient deal for them.
11mo ago

jerojero 11mo ago

I really hope Apple is working hard on improving on-device models for their use case so they can get out of this.

iAMkenough 11mo ago
When I first read the headline, I thought they’d licensed a customized Gemma 3n for an on-device model.
dzhiurgis 11mo ago
On device models are already so good. It's so insane Siri doesn't just use them. Or why HomePods don't get answers via iPhone.
Yizahi 11mo ago
Companies working hard to bring us closer to on-device models are Kingston, Hynix, Micron and the like, not Apple. If they succeed, we will get on-device LLMs sooner. If not, well, it may take a while.

Workaccount2 11mo ago

The question is if Apple will buy TPUs to run it too. $1B for the software and $1B for the hardware, every few years.

bnchrch 11mo ago

Today I asked to my homepod: > "Hey Siri, whens the next Formula 1 race in Montreal" and she responds with the same infuriating answer I typically get > "Hmm, I found some interesting results on the web, I can show them to you if you ask again from your iPhone" I don't care what pride Apple has to swallow, or if they have to layoff 10,000 people. I just want my device ecosystem to be able to do what its competitors have been able to do for a decade, or what Ive been able to build myself for the last 3 years. A working and useful voice assistant. At this point Im convinced Tim Cook could sit at a terminal himself and ship a better version of what Apple has in an afternoon.

ddxv 11mo ago

Mind blowing they couldn't get this to work. It's struck me lately that the models don't seem to matter anymore, they're all equally good. The UX and integration with regular phone features is what makes the tool shine and by now there should be plenty of open source models and know how to create their own. What is Google offering that Apple can't figure out on their own? Maybe people don't personal assitant AI enough to justify the investment? My phone has probably 6 or 7 AI tools that have talking features that I don't ever explore.

Tostino 11mo ago
I don't know, Gemini 2.5 has been the only model that's been able to not consistently make fundamental mistakes with my project as I've been working with it over the last year. Claud 3.7, 4.0, and 4.5 are not nearly as good. I gave up on chatgpt a couple years ago so I have no idea how they perform. They were bad when I quit using it.
- ddxv 11mo ago
  I use all of them about equally, and I don't really want to argue the point, as I've had this conversation with friends, and it really feels like it is becoming more about brand affiliation and preference. At the end of the day, they're random text generators and asking the same question with different seeds gives different results, and they're all mostly good.
- diogenescynic 11mo ago
  Do you find that Gemini results are slightly different when you ask the same question multiple times? I found it to have the least consistently reproducible results compared to others I was trying to use.
  - Tostino 11mo ago
    Sometimes it will alternate between different design patterns for implementing the same feature on different generations. If it gets the answer wrong and I notice it, often just regenerating will get past it rather than having to reformulate my prompt. So, I'd say yeah...it is consistent in the general direction or understanding, but not so much in the details. Adjusting temp does help with that, but I often just leave it default regardless.

cyrusradfar 11mo ago

Coincidentally, Google pays Apple over a billion dollars a year (est. at 1.5B) to be the default search in iOS. Could be re-titled. Google closes their trade deficit to half a billion dollars per year.

wilsonnb3 11mo ago
It’s actually much more than that, $20 billion per year
- cyrusradfar 11mo ago
  WHAT -- just had to Google and you're absolutely right! Makes sense that time has moved forward. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-search-deal-safari-18-billion https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933206/google-apple-se... I'm still using numbers from a post I wrote in 2016 https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/apple-lays-the-groundwork-to-kill-online-advertising/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/apple-lays-the-groundwork-...

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago

Much like they are paying the leaders in other specialties instead of becoming eg. a assembly company (Foxconn) or a search company (Google Search) they are not going to try and be a leader in at least large language models. Am I interpreting that correctly? I can understand that to a degree but that means the future for Apple is as a technology integrator, not a fundamental technology company. As I type that out I guess I’m realizing that has always been true.

zaphirplane 11mo ago
Or cpu

diogenescynic 11mo ago

Why Gemini? Just because of the closeness between the two companies already or is there a technical reason? I like Gemini the least because each search results in slightly different hard to reproduce identically results... I find I like LibreChat the best and then just connect it to all the other LLMs like ChatGTP, Claude, Anthropic, etc. from there.

musicale 11mo ago

This isn't good news. It means that Apple's huge, expensive AI team has basically failed. And it presumably means that Apple is willing to accept Google's practices for ML model training and use.

lowlevel 11mo ago

... and has widely been regarded as a bad move.

peatmoss 11mo ago

I think the answer here involves licensing and Apple control of the infrastructure, but my first thought was, "I historically trust Apple with my data a bit more than I trust Google, how is this not just trusting Google with my data?" Apple previously pitched a vision of local-first AI for privacy, but seems to have badly miscalculated the kind of customer experience they could provide. My personal experience is that Siri has suffered greatly. Case in point, I like to listen to music in the car, and Siri now confidently starts playing artists whose names sound nothing like what I requested. Also maddening "Play [x] on Apple Music" "You'll need to authorize me to use Youtube Music" Still I live with / pay for so much that is broken based on a kind of Apple privacy vibes inertia. Siri being wired up to more of my personal information plus Apple maybe shipping that data to Google is going to make me reevaluate that.