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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#361

Post by WorldMaker »

kennywinker wrote: post #250
Sevii wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's goal is likely to run all inference locally. But models aren't good enough yet and there isn't enough RAM in an iPhone. They just need Gemini to buy time until those problems are resolved.

That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.

Apple thinks they can get a best-of-both-worlds approach with Private Cloud Compute. They believe they can secure private servers specialized to specific client devices in a way that the cloud compute effort is still "client-side" from a trust standpoint, but still able to use extra server-side resources (under lock and key).

I don't know how close to that ideal they've achieved, but especially given this announcement is partly baked on an arrangement with Google that they are allowed to run Gemini on-device and in Private Cloud Compute, without using Google's more direct Gemini services/cloud, I'm excited that they are trying and I'm interested in how this plays out.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#362

Post by LeoPanthera »

AuthAuth wrote: post #345
LeoPanthera wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google says: "Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards." So what does it take? How many actual commitments to privacy does Apple have to make before the HN crowd stops crowing about "theater"?

Apple uses user data to target ads

Do you have a source for this claim?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#363

Post by manquer »

semiquaver wrote: post #195
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…

> without burning 10 years of cash flow. Sorry to nitpick but Apple’s Free Cash Flow is 100B/yr. Training a model to power Siri would not cost more than a trillion dollars.

Of all the companies to survive a crash in AI unscathed, I would bet on Apple the most.

They are only ones who do not have large debts off(or on) balance sheet or aggressive long term contracts with model providers and their product demand /cash flow is least dependent on the AI industry performance.

They will still be affected by general economic downturn but not be impacted as deeply as AI charged companies in big tech.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#364

Post by Terretta »

tech-historian wrote: post #322
elzbardico wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Google invented...

"Google" did? Or humans who worked there and one who didn't?

https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-...

In any case, see the section on Jakob Uszkoreit, for example, or Noam Shazeer. And then…

> In the higher echelons of Google, however, the work was seen as just another interesting AI project. I asked several of the transformers folks whether their bosses ever summoned them for updates on the project. Not so much. But “we understood that this was potentially quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit.

Worth noting the value of “bosses” who leave people alone to try nutty things in a place where research has patronage. Places like universities, Xerox, or Apple and Google deserve credit for providing the petri dish.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#365

Post by brokencode »

anamexis wrote: post #318
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not so sure. Just think about coding assistants with MCP based tools. I can use multiple different models in GitHub Copilot and get good results with similarly capable models.

Siri’s functionality and OS integration could be exposed in a similar, industry-standard way via tools provided to the model.

Then any other model can be swapped in quite easily. Of course, they may still want to do fine tuning, quantization, performance optimization for Apple’s hardware, etc.

But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#366

Post by EgregiousCube »

microtherion wrote: post #274
concinds wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Inven…

Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off). So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much int…

Why would paying everyone $300M across the board be healthier than using it as a tool to (attempt to) attract the best of the best?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#367

Post by DrewADesign »

blitzar wrote: post #134
concinds wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Inven…

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.

Yeah… there’s this “bro— do you even business?” vibe in the tech world right now pointed at any tech firm not burning oil tankers full of cash (and oil, for that matter,) training a giant model. That money isn’t free — the economic consequences of burning billions to make a product that will be several steps behind, at best, are giant. There’s a very real chance these companies won’t recoup that money if their product isn’t attractive to hoards of users willing to pay more money for AI than anyone currently is. It doesn’t even make them look cool to regular people — their customers hate hearing about AI. Since there are viable third party options available, I think Apple would have to be out of their goddamned minds to try and jump in that race right now. They’re a product company. Nobody is going to not buy an iPhone because they’re using a third-party model.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#368

Post by WorldMaker »

MaysonL wrote: post #194
mucle6 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re 3: I doubt Google is going to hand over the weights to Apple to put on device.

They wouldn’t fit.

Not with that attitude.

Apple and Google have said that Private Cloud Compute will be involved as well, which Apple is trying to build a mystique of "on-device-like" trust. (Which yes, if Private Cloud Compute is involved and is secure in the ways that Apple says it is does presumably imply that the announced deal with Google includes selling Apple the complete model weights.)

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#369

Post by anonzzzies »

heraldgeezer wrote: post #138
eli wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, Apple's Maps.app wasn't good enough when it launched (it's solid now though). That feels like a separate thing from white labeling and lock-in. Obviously they would have to switch to something of similar or better quality or users will be upset. But it's a whole lot easier to switch from Gemini to Claude or Gemini to a hypothetical good proprietary LLM if it's white label instead of "iOS with Gemini"

>it's solid now though Depends on where you are. In my experience here in Sweden Google Maps is still better, Apple maps sent us for a loop in Stockholm (literally {{{(>_<)}}} )

Yep, in my rural area Apple maps is not usable, Google maps works fine. Waze, also Google, is even better.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#370

Post by kennywinker »

WorldMaker wrote: post #361
kennywinker wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.

Apple thinks they can get a best-of-both-worlds approach with Private Cloud Compute. They believe they can secure private servers specialized to specific client devices in a way that the cloud compute effort is still "client-side" from a trust standpoint, but still able to use extra server-side resources (under lock and key). I don't know how close to that ideal they've achieved, but especially given this announcemen…

Given the snowden leaks, i think it’s naive to believe that any data that leaves your phone is NOT ingested by gov data collection.

Maybe private in the sense that it isn’t funneled into your ad profile, but not private in the sense that nobody else can access it.

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