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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

cnbc.com

631–640 of 674 posts

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#631
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was Google refusing to provide turn by turn directions? Apple announced last year they are putting their own ads in Maps so if that was the real problem the corporate leadership has done a complete 180 on user experience.

Apple does ads but they have a very particular taste with it. Not necessarily a better taste, but they do it in their own apple way. They're very much control freaks.

They had better taste.

It’s running away from them fast.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct quote from Google themselves: "Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute , while maintaining Apple's industry-leading privacy standards."

This clarifies nothing?

It clarifies exactly what was being questioned.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Also Gemini is the boring model, heavily sanitised for corporate applications. At least it admits this if you press it. It fits Apple here very well. Personally I wouldn't use it, it still belongs to an advertiser specialised on extracting user information. Not that I expect that other AI companies value privacy much higher. But clean smell also means bland smell.

I suspect you're exactly right about it being the most sanitized model. I don't however like the idea of having Google deeply embedded in my machine and Siri will definitely be turned off when this happens. I only use Siri as an egg timer anyway. This seems like a odd move for a company that sells privacy.

There is no US company using cloud, that could sell privacy.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#634

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…

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"?

> Private Cloud Compute

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#635

How soon does elon sue them for not choosing xai? He's gonna cry some nonsense about antitrust just like he did last year when apple partnered with openai for apple intelligence opt-in.

That was quick: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-reacts-to-gem...

What a dick head ...

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#636

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really want to continue on with this discussion, as AI in general can be absolutely infuriating. It's one of those buzzwords that's just being thrown around without a care in the world at this point, but do you have any links to those reports? I'd be willing to bet that if Google Assistant and Alexa were being run properly, then they shouldn't be less reliable when working with an LLM. I don't think Apple did…

AI assistants can’t magically “do stuff” without “tools” exposed. A tool is always an API that someone has to write an expose to the orchestrator whether it’s AI or just a dumb intent system. And ChatGPT can’t really “do anything” without access to tools. You don’t want an LLM to have access to your total system without deterministic guardrails and limiting the permissions of what the tools can do just like you would…

yeah, there's just really nothing left to discuss. Apple could have been a real leader in the AI space had they hired the right researchers to implement LLMs and beaten OpenAI to the punch.

I understand that AI assitants need access to tools in order to do anything on a computer, I've been working with AI augmented development for a few months now and everytime I need a prompt to run a tool it asks for permission first, or just straight up gives me the command to paste into a terminal.

ideally this would have been abstracted away if siri were an LLM, with Apple controlling which apis siri has access to and bipassing user confirmation all together.

It would have been neat if I were able to say, "Hey, Siri: send a text to John Smith with a playfully angry prose thanking him for not inviting me to the party". which would have the LLM automatically craft the message and send upon confirmation, perhaps with a disclaimer "made with ai" at the bottom of the text or something along those lines.

"Hey, Siri: What's the weather in Los Angeles, California" would fallback to a web api endpoint.

"Hey, Siri: How do I compile my C# application without Visual Studio" would provide step-by-step instructions on working with MSBUILD.

different prompts would fallback on different apis that only Apple would expose. Obviously not allowing the user to gain root access to the system, which is what you would expect from Apple.

I guess from a purely technical standpoint, you'd train two models, one as "Safe" and the other as "Unsafe". "Safe" is what would be used by the end-user, allowing them to access safe data, apis, messaging, web.. you name it. "Unsafe" would be used internally at Apple and would have system-wide access, access to unlimited user data, root privileges, perhaps unsafe image generation and web search... basically no limit to what an LLM could achieve.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> prioritizing BT over wired earphones Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p > I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken. Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.

other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.

although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#639
post #243

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…

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.

Phones will get upgrades, but then so will servers. The local models will always be behind the state of the art running on big iron. You can’t expect to stand still and keep up with the Red Queen.

Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI assistants can’t magically “do stuff” without “tools” exposed. A tool is always an API that someone has to write an expose to the orchestrator whether it’s AI or just a dumb intent system. And ChatGPT can’t really “do anything” without access to tools. You don’t want an LLM to have access to your total system without deterministic guardrails and limiting the permissions of what the tools can do just like you would…

yeah, there's just really nothing left to discuss. Apple could have been a real leader in the AI space had they hired the right researchers to implement LLMs and beaten OpenAI to the punch. I understand that AI assitants need access to tools in order to do anything on a computer, I've been working with AI augmented development for a few months now and everytime I need a prompt to run a tool it asks for permission fir…

And spend billions and billions of dollars to get - a better Siri?
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