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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#351

Post by VirusNewbie »

Majromax wrote: post #348
VirusNewbie wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of the intelligence system Apple is building If that was even remotely true, Apple, Meta, and Amazon would have SoTA foundational models.

Why? Grain is a commodity, but I buy flour at the store rather than grow my own. The “commmodity” argument suggets that new companies should stay away from model training unless they have a cost edge.

Are you not aware that all of the above have all invested billions trying to train a SoTA Foundational model?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#352

Post by troad »

billti wrote: post #290
knallfrosch wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Siri still can't play an Apple Music album when there is a song of the same name. Even "Play the album XY" leads to Siri only playing the single song. It's hilariously bad.

Or the even more frustrating: Me: "Hey Siri, play Siri: "OK, here's " Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?

> Being these things are at their core probability machines, ... How? Why?

Is Siri a probability machine? I didn't think it was an LLM at all right now? I thought it was some horrendous tree of switch statements, hence the difficulty of improving it.

Apple search is comically bad, though. Type in some common feature or app, and it will yield the most obscure header file inside the build deps directory of some Xcode project you forgot existed.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#353

Post by simondotau »

ghaff wrote: post #220
Melatonic wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ? I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.

Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.

How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#354

Post by caycep »

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…

Honestly, I'm relieved...it's not really in their DNA and not pivotal to their success; why pivot the company into a U turn into a market that's vague defined and potentially algorithmically limited?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#355

Post by JSR_FDED »

simondotau wrote: post #353
ghaff wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity business--which isn't Apple.

How is server hardware more "commodity" than MacBook laptops? Both are quite sophisticated and tailored to their audience in nuanced ways; both are manufactured at scale and face fierce competition. I don't think Xserve was a uniquely commodity business, it was a B2B service business--which isn't Apple.

It’s absolutely a commodity. The exact reason IBM sold their server division to Lenovo in 2014.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#356

Post by crazygringo »

eastbound wrote: post #245
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #230

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?

I'm genuinely curious about this too. If you really only need the language and common sense parts of an LLM -- not deep factual knowledge of every technical and cultural domain -- then aren't the public models great? Just exactly what you need? Nobody's using Siri for coding.

Are there licensing issues regarding commercial use at scale or something?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#357

Post by bigyabai »

theshrike79 wrote: post #332
bigyabai wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're in-media-res watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality software are all theater. We have no altruists defending these principles for us at Apple or Google. Apple won't switch Google out as a provider for the same reason Google is your default search provider. They don't give a shit about how many adver…

There are second-order effects of Google or Apple removing Twitter from their stores. Guess who's the bestie of Twitter's owner? Any clues? Could that be a vindictive old man with unlimited power and no checks and balances to temper his tantrums? Of course they both WANT Twitter the fuck out of the store, but there are very very powerful people addicted to the app and what they can do with it.

That further proves my point that they are monopolies that cannot survive without protectionist intervention.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#358

Post by crazygringo »

ipaddr wrote: post #278
IgorPartola wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think anyone really knows, because there's no objective standard for determining progress.

Lots of benchmarks exist where everyone agrees that higher scores are better, but there's no sense in which going from a score of 400 to 500 is the same progress as going from 600 to 700, or less, or more. They only really have directional validity.

I mean, the scores might correspond to real-world productivity rates in some specific domain, but that just begs the question -- productivity rates on a specific task are not intelligence.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#359

Post by ares623 »

deergomoo wrote: post #223
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.

> AI is such a core part of the experience For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.

For the shareholders, the only ones that really matter

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#360

Post by jnaina »

Melatonic wrote: post #191
blitzar wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple might have gotten very lucky here ... the money might be in finding uses, and selling physical products rather than burning piles of cash training models that are SOTA for 5 minutes before being yet another model in a crowded field. My money is still on Apple and Google to be the winners from LLMs.

Apple has also never been big on the server side equation of both software and hardware - don't they already outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ? I can see them eventually training their own models (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.

Mostly AWS actually. Apple uses Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips to serve search services. "Fruit Stand" is the internal name for Apple at AWS.
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