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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#321

Post by woah »

baxtr wrote: post #289
cush wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gemini is objectively a good model (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently deliver a good (enough) product Definitely. At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door. It was nearly two years ago they sold a phone with features that still haven't shipped and the promise that Apple Intelligence would come in two months.

What are the top 3 features you’re missing right now?

Siri to function above the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking '95

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#322

Post by tech-historian »

elzbardico wrote: post #229
nosman wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large scale AI and software projects like this. Source: I worked there

Well, they stopped. Culture is overrated. Money talks. They did things far more complicated from an engineering perspective. I am far more impressed by what they accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what AI labs do.

Is Apple silicon really that impressive compared to LLMs? Take a step back. CPUs have been getting faster and more efficient for decades.

Google invented the transformer architecture, the backbone of modern LLMs.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#324

Post by qnpnpmqppnp »

thayne wrote: post #202
qnpnpmqppnp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What antitrust rule do you think would be breached? I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).

Apple and Google have a duopoly on Mobile OS. If Apple uses Google's model for Siri, that means Apple and Google are using their duopoly in one market (mobile OS) to enforce a monopoly for Google in another (model for mobile personal assistant AI).

They are in a duopoly on the Mobile OS market, with no other significant player available. Google would be the sole integrated mobile AI, though there are competitors available if customers wanted to switch (customers for such products being the OS companies buying the AI services, not the end-users).

However I don't see the link, how they are "using their duopoly", and why "they" would be using it but only one of them benefits from it. Being a duopoly, or even a monopoly, is not against anti-trust law by itself.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#325

Post by qnpnpmqppnp »

benoau wrote: post #121
qnpnpmqppnp wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What antitrust rule do you think would be breached? I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to select their service providers, and free to dominate a market (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).

Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their allegations that Apple is a monopoly. It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce their own winn…

> Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI?

Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#326

Post by paxys »

I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.

Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web search. And Maps as well for many years.

This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#327

Post by ufmace »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #142
maxloh wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the training cost really that high, though? The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1]. AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2]. If a non-profit and a chip…

No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.

What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a reasonable schedule.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#328

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

> To me, this deal is about the bill of materials for intelligence. Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a capex heavy-lift they don't want to own. Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence. Am I missing the elephant in the room?

Probably not missing the elephant. They certainly have the money to invest and they do like vertical integration but putting massive investment in bubble that can pop or flatline at any point seems pointless if they can just pay to use current best and in future they can just switch to something cheaper or buy some of the smaller AI companies that survive the purge.

Given how much AI capable their hardware is they might just move most of it locally too

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#329

Post by kernal »

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…

>Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural engine),

Can you cite this claim? The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU seems to be superior in the benchmarks I've seen.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#330

Post by PunchyHamster »

maxloh wrote: post #119
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…

Is the training cost really that high, though? The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2 and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in several benchmarks [0] [1]. AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and recipe [2]. If a non-profit and a chip…

my prediction is that they might switch once AI craze will simmer down to some more reasonable level
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