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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#291

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.

Mostly likely the wording was crafted by an artificially intelligent entity.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.

several years after that they still have their own Maps though, they didn't go back to Google Maps.

That's the point of what the person you replied to is saying.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#293

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.

Apple likely wants to post-train a per-trained model, probably along with some of Google's heavily NDA'ed training techniques too.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#295

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.

is it that surprising? they're a hardware company after all.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#296

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 a critical aspect of privacy. If you cannot prevent your name being associated with your data, you do not have real privacy.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#297
post #63

This 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,…

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'd be skeptical about even new LLM siri being able to dial 911.

These models tend to have a "mind of their own", and I can totally, absolutely, see a current SOTA LLM convincing itself it needs to call 911 because you asked it how to disinfect a cut.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#298
post #270

It's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.

If they wanted to, they could throw massive amounts of cash on it like Google and Facebook are, with the latter poaching Apple employees with 200$ million pay packages: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/meta-poac... But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine deal, a…

Why did they even have Ruoming Pang on staff? Because they were trying. Failing, and then saying we're waiting is objectively hilarious.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#299

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…

10 years worth of cash? So all these Chinese labs that came out and did it for less than $1 billion must have 3 heads per developer, right?

Rumor has it that they weren't trained "from scratch" the was US would, i.e. Chinese labs benefitted from government "procured" IP (the US $B models) in order to train their $M models. Also understand there to be real innovation in the many-MoE architecture on top of that. Would love to hear a more technical understanding from someone who does more than repeat rumors, though.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All user data is E2E encrypted, so the government literally cannot force this. This has been the source of numerous disputes [0, 1] that either result in the device itself being cracked [0] (due to weak passwords or vulnerabilities in device-level protection) or governments attempting to ban E2E encryption altogether [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org…

What you cited is for data on a device that was turned off. Not daily internet connected usage. No one is saying you have no protection at all with Apple, it is just very limited compared to what it should be by modern security best practices, and much worse than what can be achieved on android and linux.

> much worse than what can be achieved on android and linux.

* Certain types of Android

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