This isn't good news.
It means that Apple's huge, expensive AI team has basically failed.
And it presumably means that Apple is willing to accept Google's practices for ML model training and use.
Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#32This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
I’m not sure. It could be a way to save a ton of money. Look at the investments non-Apple tech companies are making on data centers & compute. Maybe paying Google a billion a year is still a lot cheaper? Apple famously tries to focus on only a few things. Still, they will continue working on their own LLM and plug it in when ready. Edit: compare to another comment about Wang-units of currency
Well they would still be running the google models in Apple DCs. I doubt this is a very cost efficient deal for them.
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#33... and has widely been regarded as a bad move.
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#34I really hope Apple is working hard on improving on-device models for their use case so they can get out of this.
On device models are already so good. It's so insane Siri doesn't just use them.
Or why HomePods don't get answers via iPhone.
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#35Much like they are paying the leaders in other specialties instead of becoming eg. a assembly company (Foxconn) or a search company (Google Search) they are not going to try and be a leader in at least large language models. Am I interpreting that correctly? I can understand that to a degree but that means the future for Apple is as a technology integrator, not a fundamental technology company. As I type that out I g…
Or cpu
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#36This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
> tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing
Yet at the same time google have the worst offering of all the major players (all starting up out of thin air) in this space.
It doesnt really matter anyway, the LLM is a commodity piece of tech, the interface is what matters and apple should focus on making that rather than worry about scraping the entire internet for training data and spending a trillion on GPUs
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#37This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
As of its fiscal quarter ending September 2025 Apple had $35.93 billion in cash and cash equivalents.
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#38This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
> tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing Yet at the same time google have the worst offering of all the major players (all starting up out of thin air) in this space. It doesnt really matter anyway, the LLM is a commodity piece of tech, the interface is what matters and apple should focus on making that rather than worry about scraping the entire internet for training data and spending a tri…
> Yet at the same time google have the worst offering of all the major players (all starting up out of thin air) in this space.
Is that so? Gemini Models (including Nano Banana), in my experience, are very good, and are kneecapped only by Google’s patronizing guardrails. (They will regularly refuse all kinds of things that GPT and Claude don’t bat a weight at, and I can often talk them out of the refusal eventually, which makes no sense at all.)
That’s not something Apple necessarily has to replicate in their implementation (although if there’s one company I’d trust to go above and beyond on that, it’s Apple).
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#39This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
> wound Apple's pride do businesses really "think" in a personified manner as this? isnt it just what the accounting resolves to as the optimal path?
Despite decades of efforts to reduce individual accountability in corporations to zero, companies (as social groupings) definitely still have some sense of identity that shines through in decisions.
Re: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, Gemini 2.5 has been the only model that's been able to not consistently make fundamental mistakes with my project as I've been working with it over the last year. Claud 3.7, 4.0, and 4.5 are not nearly as good. I gave up on chatgpt a couple years ago so I have no idea how they perform. They were bad when I quit using it.
Do you find that Gemini results are slightly different when you ask the same question multiple times? I found it to have the least consistently reproducible results compared to others I was trying to use.
Sometimes it will alternate between different design patterns for implementing the same feature on different generations.
If it gets the answer wrong and I notice it, often just regenerating will get past it rather than having to reformulate my prompt.
So, I'd say yeah...it is consistent in the general direction or understanding, but not so much in the details. Adjusting temp does help with that, but I often just leave it default regardless.