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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

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271–280 of 674 posts

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#271
post #261

This is the sad state of Apple right now. It is ridiculous that they basically had unlimited access to TSMC and achieved nothing in AI. Management is a joke.

During his tenure as CEO, Tim Cook has added $700 million per day in enterprise value to Apple. Per day! For 14 years!

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#272

Google release hints at this being more than just Siri: > Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. ... https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-an…

This is actually the most important part of this announcement, and excellent news. I was pretty disappointed that they were going with an existing player rather than building their own models. But this implies that they will continue to build their own base models, just using Gemini as a starting point, which is a pretty good solution.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#273
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh that riled you up? Too bad. Better get out your alt accounts to address this great injustice.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#274

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…

An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Inven…

Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).

So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak to the Google Voice Assistant.

I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it said "I can't help with that right now, please try again later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox and found it for me.

Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the experience with Android Auto becomes more and more garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're going to have 2 google product voice assistants.

Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at this point.

I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#277

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…

> and the only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to market" right?

A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.

So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty big deal.

But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that even if LLMs did somehow lead to AGI that the same result wouldn't be achieved by everyone currently building "State of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within days/months of each other).

So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and I'm not particularly an Apple fan.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"pace at which the models are getting smart is accelerating". The pace is decelerating.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#280

Apple 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.

Direct quote from Google themselves:

"Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."

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