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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
- gnabgib 9mo agoRelated: 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826975
- johnthuss 9mo agoThe 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.
- insin 9mo agoThey can also put "Google" in the forever-necessary disclaimer Google AI can make mistakes
- charliebwrites 9mo agoWhy 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
- hu3 9mo agoI 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.
- nothercastle 9mo agoI 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
- IOT_Apprentice 9mo agoIt 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?
- LexGray 9mo agoThere 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.
- johnthuss 9mo agoThe 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.
- Angostura 9mo agoAnd you don't think they will include an abstraction layer?
- layer8 9mo agoAn 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.
- Angostura 9mo agoYes, and that's still the story, as far as I can tell. So an abstraction layer would let them swap out the underlying model
- WorldMaker 9mo agoThis 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.
- Angostura 9mo agoI don't see why - iOS originally shipped with Google Maps as standard, for example. Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as standard before Safari existed
- johnthuss 9mo agoThe 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.
- thinkindie 9mo agoseveral years after that they still have their own Maps though, they didn't go back to Google Maps.
- robertlagrant 9mo agoThat's the point of what the person you replied to is saying.
- thinkindie 9mo agoit's hard but not impossible. Unless Apple didn't learn the Google Maps/Maps lesson.
- alt227 9mo agoIt 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?
- drcongo 9mo agoI 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.
- mdasen 9mo agoWhere 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."
- a_paddy 9mo agoApple 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.
- qnpnpmqppnp 9mo agoApple 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.
- freakynit 9mo agoThis 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).
- dewey 9mo agoDon'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).
- dylan604 9mo agoIs 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?
- aoeusnth1 9mo agoSo changing cash flows (fee money) isn't real enough now?
- asadotzler 9mo agoI'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.
- Noaidi 9mo agoGuess 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.
- volemo 9mo agoYou’ve used Siri before?! /j
- hu3 9mo agoYou guys use Siri?
- Noaidi 9mo agoOnly 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.
- manuelmoreale 9mo agoMy 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.
- moi2388 9mo agoSiri is extremely useful. That is, if your use cases are limited to: - setting a timer - dictating a title to search on Apple TV
- spinningarrow 9mo agoCreating calendar events and reminders too! A feature set that has remained unchanged since Siri’s launch…
- manuelmoreale 9mo agoMakes sense then, considering timers I set them on my watch and I don’t watch tv.
- beardyw 9mo ago" ... and Anthropic’s Clause." That will be their contract writing AI.
- eimrine 9mo agoWhy they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?
- jjtheblunt 9mo agoit's pretty Apple-ish to not jump into a frenzy, and wait for turbulence to settle, i believe. delegation to Gemini fits that theory?
- dewey 9mo agoThey'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.
- tibbar 9mo agoI mean, Siri has been bad for what, 15 years now? It does seem like a bt of an outlier.
- raisedbyninjas 9mo agoGemini 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.
- krupan 9mo agoStill 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?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 9mo agoSomewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.
- gregoriol 9mo agoThey could use it like Google Search, not as the first thing the user sees, but as a fallback
- xtoilette 9mo agoHow much of the two revenue streams overlap in reality?
- crazygringo 9mo agoIt'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.
- WithinReason 9mo agoApple has surprisingly good quality AI papers, a lot of work on bridging research and product.
- hu3 9mo agohey Siri, search Apple papers about AI.
- kenjackson 9mo agoI 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?
- crazygringo 9mo ago
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- baal80spam 9mo agoI like it. I like Gemini.
- dhruv3006 9mo agoDidn't they make a deal with OpenAI sometime back?
- flanbiscuit 9mo agoChatGPT 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-apple-intelligence-iph00fd3c8c2/ios 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.
- ntonozzi 9mo agoHopefully it gets more tightly integrated.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoPreviously 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426643
- Fiveplus 9mo agoThe 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.
- haritha-j 9mo agoAgreed, 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.
- ysnp 9mo agoCould 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.
- tempodox 9mo agoThe 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.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
- Workaccount2 9mo agoIf 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.
- mbirth 9mo agoI 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.
- asadotzler 9mo agoIt was 20 billion dollars years ago, 2022. There's little doubt it's closer to $25B now, perhaps more.
- tempodox 9mo agoNothing about OpenAI smells clean.
- knallfrosch 9mo agoNothing 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.
- nxobject 9mo agoAlso: 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.
- oojuliuso 9mo agoSteve Jobs rolling in his grave. The mortal enemy. Thermonuclear war.
- benoau 9mo agoEnemies? 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-google-worked-as-one-company-on-search-deal-u-s-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...
- golfer 9mo agoThe 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.
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- relium 9mo agoJobs brokered a $150M deal with Apple's arch enemy Microsoft in 1997.
- quitit 9mo agoThis 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.
- mucle6 9mo agore 3: I doubt Google is going to hand over the weights to Apple to put on device.
- MaysonL 9mo agoThey wouldn’t fit.
- WorldMaker 9mo agoNot 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.)
- quitit 9mo agoNor was such a thing implied. The information in the various news articles about it also don't make that claim.
- thayne 9mo agoThis 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.
- qnpnpmqppnp 9mo agoWhat 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).
- benoau 9mo agoGatekeeping - 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.
- its_ethan 9mo agoSo 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.
- golfer 9mo agoIs the era of Apple exceptionalism over? Has it been over for a while now?
- seydor 9mo agoI 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
- jmacd 9mo agoThis 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!
- alt227 9mo agoThats what you get for buying into one ecosystem and sticking with it. All that stuff has been available on Alexa for a decade.
- knallfrosch 9mo agoSiri 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.
- billti 9mo agoOr 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?
- troad 9mo ago> 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.
- layer8 9mo ago
- zeras 9mo agoThis 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.
- rootusrootus 9mo agoThis 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.
- Someone1234 9mo agoI 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).
- layer8 9mo agoI 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.
- rootusrootus 9mo agoI'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.
- layer8 9mo agoI 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.
- dubeye 9mo agoOh God, please do this tomorrow.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoGoogle 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-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
- tensor 9mo agoThis 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.
- jm_redwood 9mo agoDoes 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?
- hu3 9mo agoApple 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.
- Havoc 9mo agoThey already use GCP for storage so I guess there is some precedent for big ties between them
- sodafountan 9mo agoCan 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?
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoSource: 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
- sodafountan 9mo agoI 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.
- didntknowyou 9mo agoi 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.
- elzbardico 9mo agoModels are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just recognized that.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- aurareturn 9mo agoModels 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.
- elzbardico 9mo agoHaving 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.
- aurareturn 9mo agoNormal 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.
- 9mo ago
- nashashmi 9mo agoI 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.
- coder543 9mo agoAll 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.
- spwa4 9mo agoThe question we're all waiting for ... for how many billions?
- elzbardico 9mo agoReally, 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.
- TYPE_FASTER 9mo agoApple 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.
- dogmayor 9mo agoHow 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.
- speak_plainly 9mo agoThat was quick: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gemini-siri/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gem...
- LightBug1 9mo agoWhat a dick head ...
- asadm 9mo agoOpenAI 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.
- czscout 9mo agoYeah, 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.
- jquery 9mo agoYeah. Super disappointing. I may end up switching to Gemini entirely at this rate.
- toasterlovin 9mo agoI'm sure hiring Jony Ive to design hardware for them didn't help.
- ProofHouse 9mo agoIt 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.
- runjake 9mo agoApple 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-foundation-models-cnbc https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...
- cpeterso 9mo agoNeither 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.
- Ninjinka 9mo agoCheck again: https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017?s=20 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."
- cpeterso 9mo agoI 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.
- runjake 9mo agoDirect 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."
- throwaway314155 9mo agoThis clarifies nothing?
- locusofself 9mo agoI wonder if this will my original homepods interesting to talk to or if they won't provide this on older devices.
- Cockbrand 9mo agoNot 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.
- apparent 9mo agoHow do you do this on a HomePod? I could definitely see Apple limiting this to newer hardware, as a way to bump sales.
- Cockbrand 9mo agoLet 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 https://github.com/cockbrand/siri-gemini-shortcut As you'd expect, the code is vibed by Gemini :)
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- bflesch 9mo agoSo 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.
- Cockbrand 9mo agoI 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.
- gehsty 9mo agoThe 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.
- kachapopopow 9mo agogiven 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.
- mudkipdev 9mo agoGoogle has Gemini Nano for on-device capabilities but basically never uses it and defers to cloud models instead
- hashta 9mo agoI’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
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago"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"
- ericmay 9mo agoIt'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.
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agoLooks 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-takes-stake-in-thrive-holdings-adding-to-circular-deals?srnd=phx-technology https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-01/openai-ta...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo agohttps://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-to-reportedly-pay-google-1-billion-a-year-for-siris-custom-gemini-ai-model/ 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
- willdotphipps 9mo agoWhy couldn't Apple pull their finger out of their asses and make their own AI nonsense better then Crap GPT?
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- apitman 9mo ago> 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.
- lvl155 9mo agoThis 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.
- throwfaraway4 9mo agoAsk the shareholders if they're a joke
- asadotzler 9mo agoTim 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.
- estearum 9mo agoDuring his tenure as CEO, Tim Cook has added $700 million per day in enterprise value to Apple. Per day! For 14 years!
- lvl155 9mo agoI was not aware HN is now an investment discussion board. Even if you were to argue that point, what’s his incremental value comped to but-for world? I mean one where Steve Jobs is still alive and running Apple. I am sure Jobs would’ve sat on his behind milking iPhones and just let Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia take the entire AI TAM. I am sure that’s the Steve Jobs we all knew.
- estearum 9mo agoThere are many dimensions one could assess a management team, but it is obviously ridiculous to call them “a joke” when they achieve their principal goal at such astonishing scale. I am certain Apple will do just fine in the AI revolution, in large part because such a massive distribution and brand advantage is extremely hard to overcome.
- soperj 9mo agoIt's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.
- pretext-1 9mo agoIf they wanted to, they could throw massive amounts of cash on it like Google and Facebook are, with the latter poaching Apple employees with 200$ million pay packages: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/meta-poached-apple-s-pang-with-pay-package-over-200-million 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.
- soperj 9mo agoWhy did they even have Ruoming Pang on staff? Because they were trying. Failing, and then saying we're waiting is objectively hilarious.
- asadotzler 9mo agoNo, 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.
- pretext-1 9mo agoYou can rent data centers for this stuff nowadays and Apple can easily outbid any competitor.
- lolive 9mo agoWhat 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?
- WorldMaker 9mo agoApple 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.
- madeofpalk 9mo agoGemini has the nano models that run on-device as well, right?
- lolive 9mo agoCan we switch to it, on the website, to test its capabilities?
- tolerance 9mo agoThis 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.
- 34679 9mo agoApple picks [ad company's] [ai ad server] to power Siri.
- mark_l_watson 9mo agoOld 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.
- worldsavior 9mo agoHow 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?
- toroszo 9mo agocan they ask siri to fix the tahoe catastrophe please
- OJFord 9mo agoMy 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.
- Animats 9mo agoWill 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.
- paxys 9mo agoI 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.
- chupchap 9mo agoI think Apple is also more comfortable with Google than say an OpenAI due to the past relationship with the search deal.
- ggm 9mo agoI 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.
- bigyabai 9mo ago> 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.
- ggm 9mo agoWhen 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.
- alt227 9mo ago> 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.
- mberning 9mo agoTotal capitulation by Apple.
- krsna 9mo agoI’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.
- qq540738209 9mo agoWhy 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.
- qq540738209 9mo agoWhy 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.
- plemer 9mo agoThey let others run that costly costly costly race. It's not where Apple is most competitive.
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- d4rkp4ttern 9mo agoForget 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.
- intrasight 9mo agoIt'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.
- aurareturn 9mo agoNot 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.
- theshrike79 9mo agoAnd 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.
- al_borland 9mo agoI’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.
- m3kw9 9mo agoApple 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
- Kristopher1337 9mo agoFeel 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.
- varispeed 9mo agoGemini still easily goes into loops and produces nonsense.
- andy_ppp 9mo agoIn other news Yahoo! picks Bing to become its new search engine... This is that stupid.
- nish__ 9mo agoAt what point are they going to just ship iPhones with Android?
- suddenexample 9mo agoI mean never... but what a dream that would be
- narrator 9mo agoI 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.
- ulfw 9mo agoSo what has Apple done for AI in the last few years? Anything? Such a huge company
- sbinnee 9mo agoTo 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.
- system2 9mo agoJust like that, we have a final AI winner.
- noduerme 9mo agoI 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.
- sublimefire 9mo agoYou 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.
- sublimefire 9mo agoPersonally 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.
- romanovcode 9mo agoYou could disable Siri since the very beginning, why would all of a sudden it would not have the toggle to disable.
- submeta 9mo agoI 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)
- fcksirinckel 9mo agoNow I have two reasons to not use Siri.
- klglrksbjkt 9mo agoBut, 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?
- code51 9mo agoWeird 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.
- sebastianconcpt 9mo agoPity they don't have their own thing at that level. They had a great start introducing Siri then totally missed the train.
- sebastianconcpt 9mo agoSomeone inside and up there neglected the "a bicycle for the mind" part of the vision.
- StopDisinfo910 9mo agoGoogle'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.
- mitchitized 9mo agoWhat 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?
- throwfaraway4 9mo ago>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-announcements/joint-statement-google-apple/ https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
- cmiles8 9mo agoMakes 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.
- ttttristan 9mo ago[dead]
- observationist 9mo agoThey'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.
- andrewdubinsky 9mo agoThat's a shame. I was hoping for an Apple AI independent of advertiser influence. Oh, well. What could have been great.
- syngrog66 9mo agoI 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.