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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#121

Post by benoau »

qnpnpmqppnp wrote: post #111
thayne wrote: post #65

This 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.

What 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).

Gatekeeping - 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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#122

Post by MBCook »

LexGray wrote: post #82
MBCook wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They switched despite Apple Maps having poor data for a reason: Google wanted to shove ads in it. Apple refused and to switch. Their hand was forced by that refusal.

I thought it was Google refusing to provide turn by turn directions? Apple announced last year they are putting their own ads in Maps so if that was the real problem the corporate leadership has done a complete 180 on user experience.

I think Google was withholding them unless Apple was willing to put the ads in.

Apple is a very VERY different company than they were back then.

Back then they didn’t have all sorts of services that they advertised to you constantly. They didn’t have search ads in the App Store. They weren’t trying to squeeze every penny out of every customer all the time no matter how annoying.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#123

Post by crazygringo »

kenjackson wrote: post #105
crazygringo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter. Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.

With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now, without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.

So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#124

Post by apercu »

ceejayoz wrote: post #114
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. This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple, thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS space!

I dunno, my take is that Apple isn’t outsourcing intelligence rather it’s outsourcing the most expensive, least defensible layer.

Down the road Apple has an advantage here in a super large training data set that includes messages, mail, photos, calendar, health, app usage, location, purchases, voice, biometrics, and you behaviour over YEARS.

Let's check back in 5 years and see if Apple is still using Gemini or if Apple distills, trains and specializes until they have completed building a model-agnostic intelligence substrate.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#125

Post by redwall_hp »

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?

For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination and such with as little friction as possible.

Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify, Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop generator.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#126

Post by greentea23 »

internetter wrote: post #77
scotty79 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Perhaps spending it on inference that will be obsoleted in 6 months by the next model is not a good idea either. Edit: especially given that Apple doesn’t do b2b so all the spend would be just to make consumer products

Apple of course does an emormous amount of b2b.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#127

Post by Someone1234 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #96

This 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.

I 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).

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#128

Post by knallfrosch »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #58

If 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 An…

Nothing 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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#129

Post by layer8 »

Angostura wrote: post #22
johnthuss wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

And you don't think they will include an abstraction layer?

An 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.
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