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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
241–250 of 674 posts
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.
Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up with server release schedules.
Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history for servers.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#243The 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…
Apple's goal is likely to run all inference locally. But models aren't good enough yet and there isn't enough RAM in an iPhone. They just need Gemini to buy time until those problems are resolved.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#244[deleted]
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ex…
It's a very low baseline with Siri, so almost anything would be an improvement.
Ollama! Why didn’t they just run Ollama and a public model! They’ve kept the last 10 years with a Siri who doesn’t know any contact named Chronometer only to require the best in class LLM?
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
I don't think the parent said that Siri wasn't bad, on the contrary it sounds like they agree. Their point is that if Apple totally scraps the current, bad, product called "Siri" and replaces it with an entirely different, much better product that is also named "Siri" but shares nothing but the name, people's perceptions of the current bad Siri will taint their impressions of the new one.
It's pretty clear they tried their best to miss or reinterpret the points I made so they could talk about something else.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#247Earlier 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…
You do not need an email address to set up an iPhone, and you do not need an email address or phone number to set up an iPad/Mac.
If you want to use the App Store on these devices, you do need to have an email address.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 adver…
Caveat: as long as it doesn’t feel like you’re being sold out.
Which is why privacy theatre was an excellent way to put it
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#249This 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,…
There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to it getting better and being able to use it more often.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#250The 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…
Apple's goal is likely to run all inference locally. But models aren't good enough yet and there isn't enough RAM in an iPhone. They just need Gemini to buy time until those problems are resolved.
That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.