Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 674 posts

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#131

Post by knallfrosch »

jmacd wrote: post #89

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 Si…

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#132

Post by turtlesdown11 »

scotty79 wrote: post #70
Fiveplus wrote: post #42

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 year…

> 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?

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#133

Post by MrDarcy »

greentea23 wrote: post #115
ysnp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment confuses privacy with anonymity.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#134

Post by blitzar »

concinds wrote: post #97
Fiveplus wrote: post #42

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 year…

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-Inven…

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#135

Post by layer8 »

jmacd wrote: post #89

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 Si…

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#136

Post by JohnMakin »

quitit wrote: post #63

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,…

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#137

Post by ChildOfChaos »

Fiveplus wrote: post #42

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 year…

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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#138

Post by heraldgeezer »

eli wrote: post #46
johnthuss wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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"

>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 {{{(>_<)}}} )

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#139

Post by jm_redwood »

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?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#140

Post by CharlesW »

Fiveplus wrote: post #42

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 year…

> 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.

Post reply on HN