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

101–110 of 674 posts

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#101

Post by WithinReason »

crazygringo wrote: post #45
kenjackson wrote: post #15

Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.

It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity. Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.

Apple has surprisingly good quality AI papers, a lot of work on bridging research and product.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#103

Post by rootusrootus »

hu3 wrote: post #9
Noaidi wrote: post #3

Guess I am not using Siri anymore… By the way, have any of you ever tried to delete and disabled Siri’s iCloud backup? You can’t do it.

You guys use Siri?

Only for opening/closing the garage door, setting timers, and sending texts. What else do people use the digital assistants for?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#104

Post by jen20 »

mdasen wrote: post #47
eimrine wrote: post #13

Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?

I think that's the thing: Apple is good at very little, but they seem like they're good at "everything else" because they don't do much else. Lots of companies spread themselves really thin trying to get into lots of unrelated competencies and tons of products. Apple doesn't. Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refini…

This is some magical thinking. Even if Samsung took all their manpower, all their thought process and all their capital, they still couldn’t produce a laptop that competes with the MacBook (just to take one example), because they fundamentally don’t have any taste as a company.

Hell, they can’t even make a TV this year that’s less shit than last years version of it and all that requires is do literally nothing.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#105

Post by kenjackson »

crazygringo wrote: post #45
kenjackson wrote: post #15

Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.

It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity. Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.

I agree that they don't appear poised to do it themselves. But why not work with Meta or OpenAI (maybe a bit more questionable with MS) or some other player, rather than Google?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#106

Post by dabockster »

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…

It also lets them keep a lot of the legal issues regarding LLM development at arms length while still benefiting from them.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#107

Post by wat10000 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35
eimrine wrote: post #13

Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?

Because their focus on user privacy makes it difficult for them to train at scale on users' data in the way that their competitors can. Ironically, this focus on privacy initially stemmed from fumbling the ball on Siri: recall that Apple never made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri was years behind Google's equivalent, which Apple then retroactively tried to justify by claiming "we keep your d…

Apple's privacy focus started long before the current AI wave. It got major public attention in the fight with the FBI over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter's phone. I don't think Google's equivalent even existed at that point.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#108

Post by jen20 »

hu3 wrote: post #9
Noaidi wrote: post #3

Guess I am not using Siri anymore… By the way, have any of you ever tried to delete and disabled Siri’s iCloud backup? You can’t do it.

You guys use Siri?

Hundreds of times a day for HomeKit, though rarely anything else. It’s _mostly_ fine, provided there are no HomePods around.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#109

Post by jayd16 »

_joel wrote: post #72
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. Don't they have the highest market cap of any company in existence?

You don't need to join every fight you see, even if you would do well.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#110

Post by wooger »

tibbar wrote: post #32
jjtheblunt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's pretty Apple-ish to not jump into a frenzy, and wait for turbulence to settle, i believe. delegation to Gemini fits that theory?

I mean, Siri has been bad for what, 15 years now? It does seem like a bt of an outlier.

Siri got substantially worse over time in fact, I swear it used to at least be able to give you answers to basic facts rather than just offering to google things.
Post reply on HN