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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#391

Post by mschuster91 »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #355
simondotau wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".

There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).

According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#392

Post by simondotau »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #355
simondotau wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By that definition, Apple is absolutely in the commodity products business.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#393

Post by ohyoutravel »

woah wrote: post #321
baxtr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Siri to function above the level of Dragon NaturallySpeaking '95

Fantastic reference. I remember pirating this from microcrap.com in about 1996.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#394

Post by ghaff »

no_wizard wrote: post #242
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.

I always wondered what they were hoping for with their server products back when they had them. Consumers and end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper, its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary. Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would have never been able to keep up wi…

Companies were still figuring out Linux with servers at the time. Xserve seemed like it might be something of interest to at least academia but Apple never really had their heart in it as I wrote at the time.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#395

Post by ghaff »

mschuster91 wrote: post #391
JSR_FDED wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity". There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything m…

Making a lot of money for the company.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#396

Post by WorldMaker »

kennywinker wrote: post #370
WorldMaker wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I stated that I am not naive and am not entirely convinced by Apple's sales pitch that the Private Cloud Compute containers are encrypted with keys in a way that only your hardware device can read in such a way that the PCC is an extension of your device.

I just think it is useful that Apple is trying something along those lines and wishful the guarantees work half as well as they claim they do, because that's a good goal to have in theory even when it fails in practice against dedicated threat actors.

And yes, to be fair my personal day-to-day threat model currently is much more concerned with the evil advertising company known as Google than it is with government actors. Even if Apple's Private Cloud Compute only means "private from Google" that's still a win for me (and most of the information I was looking for when I saw this headline, because my first fear was that the advertising company Google was involved).

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#397

Post by usef- »

segmondy wrote: post #153
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…

10 years worth of cash? So all these Chinese labs that came out and did it for less than $1 billion must have 3 heads per developer, right?

We don't really know how much it cost them. Plenty of reasons to doubt the numbers passed around and what it wasn't counting.

(And even if you do believe it, they also aren't licensing the IP they're training on, unlike american firms who are now paying quite a lot for it)

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#398

Post by macNchz »

crazygringo wrote: post #356
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?

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?

Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#399

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

dktp wrote: post #178
CharlesW wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater. Setting aside the obligatory HN dig at the end, LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of the intelligence system Apple is building. The hidden-in-plain-sight thing Apple is doing is exposing all app data as context and all app capabilities as skills . (See App I…

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…

> provided Siri improves meaningfully

Not a high bar…

That said, Apple is likely to end up training their own model, sooner or later. They are already in the process of building out a bunch of data centers, and I think they have even designed in-house servers.

Remember when iPhone maps were Google Maps? Apple Maps have been steadily improving, to the point they are as good as, if not better than, Google Maps, in many areas (like around here. I recently had a friend send me a GM link to a destination, and the phone used GM for directions. It was much worse than Apple Maps. After a few wrong turns, I pulled over, fed the destination into Apple Maps, and completed the journey).

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#400

Post by moondev »

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…

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aapple%20cuda&type=code
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