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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#41

Post by 9rx »

drcongo wrote: post #38
johnthuss wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.

I was in agreement with the parent before I read this, and now I'm in agreement with you. It is a great example, I know so many people who never switched back to Apple Maps because it was so poor initially. Personally I find it a considerably better experience than Google Maps these days, but those lost users still aren't coming back.

In this case, though, Siri has already successfully scared off anyone who isn't willing to reevaluate products.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#42

Post by Fiveplus »

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 years of cash flow.

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?

It's a smart move. Let Google burn the gigawatts training the trillion parameter model. Apple will just optimize the quantization and run the distilled version on the private cloud compute nodes. I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's privacy theater.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#43

Post by Noaidi »

runjake wrote: post #27
Noaidi wrote: post #3

Guess I am not using Siri anymore… By the way, have any of you ever tried to delete and disabled Siri’s iCloud backup? You can’t do it.

Unless Apple is lying: On iPhone, Settings → iCloud → Storage → Siri → Disable and Delete Edit: Tried it. It works for me. Takes a minute though.

TRY IT!

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#44

Post by moi2388 »

manuelmoreale wrote: post #25
hu3 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys use Siri?

My exact reaction every time I hear people discuss Siri. I don’t think I used it once in my life and it’s one of the first thing I turn off every time I have a new device. So interesting to see how different people use the same devices in completely different ways.

Siri is extremely useful. That is, if your use cases are limited to:

- setting a timer

- dictating a title to search on Apple TV

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#45

Post by crazygringo »

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.

It's clear they don't have the in-house expertise to do it themselves. They aren't an AI player. So it's not a mistake, just a necessity.

Maybe someday they'll build their own, the way they eventually replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps. But I think they recognize that that will be years away.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#46

Post by eli »

johnthuss wrote: post #23
Angostura wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why - iOS originally shipped with Google Maps as standard, for example. Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as standard before Safari existed

The Google Maps situation is a great example of why this will be hard. When Apple switched to their own maps it was a huge failure resulting in a rare public apology from the company. In order to switch you have to be able to do absolutely everything that the previous solution offered without loss of quality. Given Google's competence in AI development that will be a high bar to meet.

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"

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#47

Post by mdasen »

eimrine wrote: post #13

Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything else?

I think that's the thing: Apple is good at very little, but they seem like they're good at "everything else" because they don't do much else. Lots of companies spread themselves really thin trying to get into lots of unrelated competencies and tons of products. Apple doesn't.

Why does a MacBook seem better than PC laptops? Because Apple makes so few designs. When you make so few things, you can spend more time refining the design. When you're churning out a dozen designs a year, can you optimize the fan as well for each one? You hit a certain point where you say "eh, good enough." Apple's aluminum unibody MacBook Pro was largely the same design 2008-2021. They certainly iterated on it, but it wasn't "look at my flashy new case" every year. PC laptop makers come out with new designs with new materials so frequently.

With iPhones, Apple often keeps a design for 3 years. It looks like Samsung has churned out over 25 phone models over the past year while Apple has 5 (iPhone, iPhone Plus, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, iPhone 16e).

It's easy to look so good at things when you do fewer things. I think this is one of Apple's great strengths - knowing where to concentrate its effort.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#48

Post by ntonozzi »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #36
dhruv3006 wrote: post #29

Didn't they make a deal with OpenAI sometime back?

ChatGPT is currently integrated into Apple Intelligence. When I ask Siri something I can choose to use ChatGPT for my answer. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl... So I'm guessing in a future update it will be Gemini instead. I hope it's going to be more of an option to choose between the 2.

Hopefully it gets more tightly integrated.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#49

Post by haritha-j »

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…

Agreed, especially since this is a competitive space with multiple players, with a high price of admission, and where your model is outdated in a year, so its not even capex as much as recurring expenditure. Far better to let someone else do all the hard work, and wait and see where things go. Maybe someday this'll be a core competency you want in-house, but when that day comes you can make that switch, just like with apple silicon.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#50

Post by a_paddy »

mdasen wrote: post #26
johnthuss wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest NEW thing here is that this isn't white-labeled. Apple is officially acknowledging Google as the model that will be powering Siri. That explicit acknowledgment is a pretty big deal. It will make it harder for Apple to switch to its own models later on.

Where does it say that it won't be white-labeled? Yes, Apple is acknowledging that Google's Gemini will be powering Siri and that is a big deal, but are they going to be acknowledging it in the product or is this just an acknowledgment to investors? Apple doesn't hide where many of their components come from, but that doesn't mean that those brands are credited in the product. There's no "fab by TSMC" or "camera sens…

Apple won't take the risk of being blamed for AI answers being incorrect. They will attribute Google/Gemini so users know how to be mad at if it doesn't work as expected.
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