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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#171

Post by rootusrootus »

layer8 wrote: post #141
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 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.

I'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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#172

Post by elzbardico »

aurareturn wrote: post #150
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…

Seems like there is a moat after all. The moat is talent, culture, and compute. Apple doesn't have any of these 3 for SOTA AI.

It is more like Apple have no need to spend billions on training with questionable ROI when it can just rent from one of the commodity foundation model labs.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#174

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sodafountan wrote: post #158

Can 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…

Source: 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

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#175

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

> Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence.

They have always been a premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence, except that "intelligence" was always IP until now. They have always polished existing (i.e., not theirs) ideas and made them bulletproof and accessible to the masses. Seems like they intend to just do more of the same for AI "intelligence". And good for them, as it is their specialty and it works.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#176

Post by bigyabai »

CharlesW wrote: post #140
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 I…

That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're in-media-res watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality software are all theater. We have no altruists defending these principles for us at Apple or Google.

Apple won't switch Google out as a provider for the same reason Google is your default search provider. They don't give a shit about how many advertisements you're shown. You are actually detached from 2026 software trends if you think Apple is going to give users significant backend choices. They're perfectly fine selling your attention to the highest bidder.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#177

Post by nashashmi »

I 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.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#178

Post by dktp »

CharlesW wrote: post #140
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 I…

My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on paper.

Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors that asked for more money (Anthropic)

Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a different provider.

For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual improvement

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#179

Post by dpoloncsak »

natch wrote: post #155
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.

They transitioned from “nobody can read your data, not even Apple” to “Apple cannot read your data.” Think about what that change means. And even that is not always true. They also were deceptive about iCloud encryption where they claimed that nobody but you can read your iCloud data. But then it came out after all their fanfare that if you do iCloud backups Apple CAN read your data. But they aren’t in a hurry to ret…

>Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name

I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of governments and service providers, while iMessage gives them some wiggle room.

Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#180

Post by whilenot-dev »

MrDarcy wrote: post #133
greentea23 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anonymity is an inherent measure to preserve ones individual privacy. What value did you intent to add with your remark?
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