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Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

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Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#11

If Apple uses a third party to provide this what the heck has the Siri team been doing the last five years?

It takes a lot of effort to make the current version of a product much worse than the initial version. They did the same with the podcast app which used to be amazing, the new one I’m constantly fighting against because it keeps thinking I want to relisten to a podcast I just listened too, also the new version is slower and buggy.

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#12

I thought they wanted to do their own thing and focused on efficient inference on device. Disappointed to hear this...

I don't think this excludes doing their own thing. It would be in the Apple playbook to have more than one team working on different approaches internally and still negotiate with Google about a possible partnership.

I can't see how they can delivery 'thoughtful integration' with the Apple services when work is being done on Googles servers, but perhaps the "efficient inference on device" (which could be the biggest product leap for Apple since the iPhone) is taking too long and they need a stop gap to stop the downward pressure on their shareprice.

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#13
> Gemini has captured the imagination of consumers and businesses

Citation needed. I’m fairly certain this is all about scale. OpenAI and Anthropic have obvious capacity issues and Apple obviously doesn’t want to get in bed with Microsoft. It’s a smart bet short term if they get data on what people are actually doing with Gemini.

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#15

If Apple uses a third party to provide this what the heck has the Siri team been doing the last five years?

Apple put themselves in the corner with their privacy-first approach and local computations. To evolve AI you need to get all the data you can. It’s unsurprising that Apple progress was slow. And now they will pay to the Google who doesn’t hesitate to extract data from the users.

That's not the issue. LLMs are not trained on whatever crap you can scrape from users text messages or emails. That is relatively useless for training.

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#16

Neither Google nor OpenAI's infra could handle the potential scale of Apple's userbase, given the scaling issues both companies are having. Even Google doesn't have enough GPUs.

The scale of 30% of world's mobile phone versus Google's 70% Android market share, or the 10% of desktop/laptop market versus 72% from Windows?

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#17

I thought they wanted to do their own thing and focused on efficient inference on device. Disappointed to hear this...

I feel like it will certainly need to be a hybrid approach for the moment. They’ll get a long way running small highly specific and tuned models locally on the neural engine for a lot of stuff. But, at some point, people are going to expect to ask questions and have something in the league of a Mistral/Claude/ChatGPT talk back and that’s just not possible with today’s hardware. Over time I expect more and more of that will get moved locally, and less will hit the “escape hatch” of throwing things to a giant LLM.

If they end up renting rather than building that capability, it says to me that they’re betting on being able to move most of that locally to the phone on a relatively short time horizon, which is interesting.

Re: Apple Is in Talks to Let Google's Gemini Power iPhone Generative AI Features

#19

Imagine a world where every phone gets turned into a useful digital assistant that can order things for us online via APIs. I wonder if Amazon is ready for this.

> Imagine a world where every phone gets turned into a useful digital assistant that can order things for us online via APIs. I wonder if Amazon is ready for this.

Due to its size and infrastructure Amazon has advantages of choice, price, delivery and service. No digital (or human) assistant is going to be able to find a better deals on most items and then negotiate for it to be delivered tomorrow, free or cheaply, with a fairly good, no quibble, return policy.

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