I wonder if this will my original homepods interesting to talk to or if they won't provide this on older devices.
Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
211–220 of 674 posts
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#212Earlier 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…
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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large scale AI and software projects like this.
Source: I worked there
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#214So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with Google.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#215Apple has seemingly confirmed that the Gemini models will run under their Private Cloud Compute and so presumably Google would not have access to Siri data. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...
Neither Apple's nor Google's announcement says Siri will use Gemini models. Both announcements say, word for word, "Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models". I don't know what that means, but Apple and Google's marketing teams must have crafted that awkward wording carefully to satisfy some contractual nuance.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.
I have no idea what AI involves, but "training" sounds like a one-and-done - but how is the result "stored"? If you have trained up a Gemini, can you "clone" it and if so, what is needed? I was under the impression that all these GPUs and such were needed to run the AI, not only ingest the data.
Theoretically it would be much less expensive to just continue to run the existing models, but ofc none of the current leaders are going to stop training new ones any time soon.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#217OpenAI had it , they had the foot in the door with their integration last year with Siri. But they dropped that ball and many other balls.
Yeah. Super disappointing. I may end up switching to Gemini entirely at this rate.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#218So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with Google.
I wouldn't expect this to happen, as Apple's resistance against this would be too strong. The data of Google's paying [enterprise] customers stays private as well, so the safeguards are in place already.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#219The actual transactions around this deal will be interesting - will Google simply withold $1B from their search deal, will they pay it then Applepay it back (or a split). I doubt we’ll even know.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ? I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.
Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.