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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#581

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

Google's strategy is as unreadable as ever. It feels like two companies fighting each other in one.

On the one hand, they apparently want to be a service provider Microsoft-style. They are just signing a partnership with their biggest competitor and giving them access to their main competitive advantage, the most advanced AI available.

On the other hand, they want to be another Apple. They are locking down their phone. Are competing with the manufacturers of the best Android phones. Are limiting the possibility of distributing software on their system. Things that were their main differentiator.

It doesn't make sense. It's also a giant middle finger to the people who bought the Pixel for Gemini. Congrats, you were beta testers for iPhone users who won't have to share their data with Google for training Gemini. I have rarely seen a company as disrespectful to its customer.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#582

Post by al_borland »

crazygringo wrote: post #45
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.

Apple has been using ML in their products for years, to the point that they dedicated parts of their custom silicon for it before the LLM craze. They clearly have some in-house ML talent, but I suppose LLM talent may be a different question.

I’m wondering if this is a way to shift blame for issues. It was mentioned in an interview that what they built internally wasn’t good enough, presumably due to hallucinations… but every AI does that. They know customers have a low tolerance for mistakes and any issues will quickly become a meme (see the Apple Maps launch). If the technology is inherently flawed, where it will never live up to their standards, if they outsource it, they can point to Google as the source of the failings. If things get better down the road and they can improve by pivoting away from Google, they’ll look better and it will make Google look bad. This could be the long game.

They may also save a fortune in training their own models, if they don’t plan to directly try to monetize the AI, and simply have it as a value add for existing customers. Not to mention staying out of hot water related to stealing art for training data, as a company heavily used by artists.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#583

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

alexkundera wrote: post #499
teekert wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but they also haven’t generated spicy deep fakes and talked kids into suicide with their products. It’s just how Apple does things: They still have no folding phone, under-screen finger print scanner, under-screen front-cam, etc.

Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.

> Apple is always behind on industry trends

Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#584

Post by virgil_disgr4ce »

bmitc wrote: post #509
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence. There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and…

> Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology Since when? > versus embracing whatever's hot and trying to shove it down our throats I agree here, to a degree. It's just that Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats.

> Apple tells its customers what's hot and then shoves it down their throats

I don't really understand this. Is it shoving when something is actually popular? The iPod was legitimately extremely popular. Did Apple decide it was hot and then somehow force people to buy 450 million of them?

I mean I'm just curious what products you're thinking of when you say "shoves it down their throats"

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#585

Post by 46493168 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #427
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.

> At at this point, Apple just needs to get anything out the door To the extent Cupertino fucked up, it's in having had this attitude when they rolled out Apple Intelligence. There isn't currently a forcing function. Apple owns the iPhone, and that makes it an emperor among kings. Its wealth is also built on starting with user problems and then working backwards to the technology, versus embracing whatever's hot and…

> There isn't currently a forcing function.

Investors are the forcing function

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#586

Post by brokencode »

andsoitis wrote: post #462
brokencode wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, quantizatio…

> But I don’t see why the actual software integration part needs to be difficult. That’s not the issue. The issue is that once Gemini is in place as the intelligence behind Siri, the bar is now much higher than today and so you have to be more careful if you consider replacing Gemini, because you’re as likely as not to make Siri worse. Maybe more likely to make it worse.

Oh well that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it? Siri being so good that they don’t want to mess it up.

That gives them plenty of runway to test and optimize new models internally before release and not feel like they need to rush them out because Siri sucks.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#587

Post by mitchitized »

What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.

Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#588

Post by torginus »

willtemperley wrote: post #540
espadrine wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: iOS’s biggest competitor is Android. They are now effectively funding their competition on a core product interface. I see this as strategically devastating.

It's strategically devastating because no small number of users choose Apple because they do not trust Google and now they have no choice but to have Google AI on-board their machines. I respect Google's engineering, and I'm aware that fundamental technologies such as Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers are unavoidably integrated into the software fabric, but this is is avoidable. I'm surprised Google aren't paying Appl…

Apple still is in the business of selling devices, not customer data - with Google being an external company , I bet there'll be an extensive permissions systems you can limit what the AI can do (or turn it off altogether).

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#589

Post by elzbardico »

aurareturn wrote: post #409
elzbardico wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more like Apple have no need to spend billions on training with questionable ROI when it can just rent from one of the commodity foundation model labs.

It’s such a commodity that there are only 3 SOTA labs left and no one can catch them. I’m sure it’ll be consolidated further in the future and you’re going to be left with a natural monopoly or duopoly. Apple has no control over the most important change to tech. They have control to Google.

Really, don't believe benchmarks as gospel. Chinese models are pretty much competitive with offerings from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. Meta is currently at a disadvantage, but I believe they will find their mojo and soon be competitive again.

Frankly, a lot of times I prefer using GLM 4.6 running on Cerebras Inference, than having to deal with the performance hiccups from Claude. For most practical purposes, I've seen no big penalty in using it compared to Opus 4.5, even the biggest qwen-coder models are pretty much competitive.

Between me and the company I work for, I spend some serious money with AI. I use it extensively in my main job, on two side projects that I have paying customers for, and for graduate school work. I can tell you that there quite a few more SOTA models around than what the benchmarks tell you.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#590

Post by throwfaraway4 »

mitchitized wrote: post #587

What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going. Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?

>Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards.

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...

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