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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#251

Post by greentea23 »

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.

Not for all points. And not being anonymous means your identity is not private...

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#253

Post by IgorPartola »

hadlock wrote: post #170
CharlesW wrote: post #140

Earlier 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…

> what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are Seems like they are waiting for the "slope of enlightenment" on the gartner hype curve to flatten out. Given you can just lease or buy a SOTA model from leading vendors there's no advantage to training your own right now. My guess is that the LLM/AI landscape will look entirely different by 2030 and any 5 year plan won't be in the same zip code, let alone playing fie…

This is the key. The real issue is that you don’t need superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don’t need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a decent job of approximating college grad level human intelligence let’s say 85% of the time which is helpful and cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models. There will come a time when a model capable of college grad level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry that will in the next few years become dominated by open models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up with another product that has more of a moat.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#254

Post by richwater »

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…

You people will never be happy until the only messaging that exists is in a dusty basement and Richard Stallman is sleeping on a dirty futon.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#255

Post by pests »

hmokiguess wrote: post #166
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 always think about this, can someone with more knowledge than me help me understand the fragility of these operations? It sounds like the value of these very time-consuming, resource-intensive, and large scale operations is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right? Given that we have a lot of other players enabling this in other ways, like Open Sourcing weights (West vs East AI race), and e…

> is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?

Yes, and the knowledge gained along the way. For example, the new TPUv4 that Google uses requires rack and DC aware technologies (like optical switching fabric) for them to even work at all. The weights are important, and there is open weights, but only Google and the like are getting the experience and SOTA tech needed to operate cheaply at scale.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#257

Post by yunohn »

bigyabai wrote: post #176
CharlesW wrote: post #140

Earlier 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…

Apple’s various privileged device-level ads and instant-stop-on-cancel trials and special rules for notifications for their paid additional services like Fitness+, Music, Arcade, iCloud+, etc are all proof that they do not care about the user anymore.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#258

Post by greentea23 »

Melatonic wrote: post #205
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…

Agreed on most points but you can setup a pretty solid device wide DNS provider using configuration profiles. Similar to how iOS can be enrolled in work corporate MDM - but under your control. Works great for me with NextDNS. Orion browser - while also based on WebKit - is also awesome and has great built in Adblock and supposedly privacy respecting ideals.

Apple has records that you are installing that, probably putting you on a list.

And it works until it's made illegal in your country and removed from the app store. You have no guarantees that anything that works today will work tomorrow with Apple.

Apple is setting us up to be under a dictator's thumb one conversion at a time.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#259

Post by JohnMakin »

quitit wrote: post #246
margalabargala wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry for whatever cynicism leads you to believe this. I don't believe there is an "astroturfer" problem with siri, and that is mostly what I was responding to. Sorry you missed that.
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