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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#311

Post by OJFord »

My experience with Gemini (3 Flash) has been pretty funny, not awful (but worse than Kimi K2 or GPT 5.2 Mini), but it's just so much worse at (or rather hyper focused on) following my custom instructions, I keep getting responses like:

    The idiomatic "British" way of doing this ...

    Alternatively, for an Imperial-style approach, ...

    As a professional software engineer you really should ...
in response to programming/Linux/etc. questions!

(Because I just have a short blurb about my educational background, career, and geography in there, which with every other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how to mkdir etc.)

It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting old now.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#312

Post by ajam1507 »

natch wrote: post #160
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #86

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…

E2E encrypted is nothing if key escrow is happening. Why did they change their wording from: Nobody can read your data, not even Apple to: Apple cannot read your data. You know why.

When did they change their wording?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#313

Post by array_key_first »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #297
JohnMakin wrote: post #136

Earlier 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'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.

Ideally you have a layer before the LLM that filters out stuff the phone can do without an LLM. The LLM probably shouldn't even have the power to call 911, that should be a layer lower. And probably you don't want to send simple queries like "call XYZ" to the cloud, best to just do it locally.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#314

Post by asadotzler »

kenjackson wrote: post #15

Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest competitor.

Web search is a core part of browsing and Apple is Google's biggest competitor in browsers. Google is paying Apple about 25x for integrating Google Search in Safari as Apple will be paying Google to integrate Google's LLMs into Siri. If you think depending on your competitor is a problem, you should really look into web search where all the real money is today.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#316

Post by array_key_first »

LexGray wrote: post #82
MBCook wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They switched despite Apple Maps having poor data for a reason: Google wanted to shove ads in it. Apple refused and to switch. Their hand was forced by that refusal.

I thought it was Google refusing to provide turn by turn directions? Apple announced last year they are putting their own ads in Maps so if that was the real problem the corporate leadership has done a complete 180 on user experience.

Apple does ads but they have a very particular taste with it. Not necessarily a better taste, but they do it in their own apple way. They're very much control freaks.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#317

Post by asadotzler »

pretext-1 wrote: post #287
soperj wrote: 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…

No, they couldn't, because all current and future ethe training hardware is already tied up by contracts from the frontier labs. Apple could not simply buy its way in given how constricted the supply is.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#318

Post by anamexis »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #230
dktp wrote: post #178

Earlier 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.

The point is that once Siri is switched to a Gemini-based model, the baseline presumably won't be low anymore.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#319

Post by woah »

chankstein38 wrote: post #275
eastbound wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Siri on my Apple Home will default to turning off all the lights in the kitchen if it misunderstands anything. Much hilarity ensues

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#320

Post by robotresearcher »

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…

For some context with numbers, in mid-2024 Apple publicly described 3B parameter foundation models. Gemini 3 Pro is about 1T today.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-intelligenc...

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