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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

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Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#61
post #2

Related: Apple nears $1B Google deal for custom Gemini model to power Siri (71 points, 2 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826975

Is this another one of those AI deals where no real money changes hands? In this case, doesn't this just offset the fee Google pays Apple for having their search as the default on Apple devices?

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#62

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…

calling neural engine the best is pretty silly. the best perhaps of what is uniformly a failed class of ip blocks - mobile inference NPU hardware. edge inference on apple is dominated by cpus and metal, which don't use their NPU.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#63
This is a bit of a layer cake:

1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.

2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.

3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#64
post #13

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

Apple is almost purely customer products, they don't have the resources to compete with the giants in this field.

Their image classification happens on-device, in comparison Google Photos does that server side so they already have ML infra.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#65
This seems like a pretty significant anti-trust issue. One of the two mobile OS makers is using a product from the other for its AI assistance. And that means that basically all mobile devices will be using the same AI technology.

I don't expect the current US government to do anything about it though.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#66

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…

best inference silicon in the world generally or specialized to smaller models/edge?

Not even an Apple fan, but from what I've been testing with for my dev use case (only up to 14b) it absolutely rocks for general models.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#68

Steve Jobs rolling in his grave. The mortal enemy. Thermonuclear war.

Enemies? Google contributes about 20% of Apple's profits annually through their default search engine deal, that's more profitable than just about everything they do or make except selling iPhones.

> The U.S. government said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai met in 2018 to discuss the deal. After that, an unidentified senior Apple employee wrote to a Google counterpart that “our vision is that we work as if we are one company.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-20/apple-goo...

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#70

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.

Wasn't Apple sitting on a pile of cash and having no good ideas what to spend it on?

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