Steve Jobs rolling in his grave. The mortal enemy. Thermonuclear war.
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Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
91–100 of 674 posts
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#92The 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…
Could you elaborate a bit on why you've judged it as privacy theatre? I'm skeptical but uninformed, and I believe Mullvad are taking a similar approach.
Because Apple makes privacy claims all the time, but all their software is closed source and it is very hard or impossible to verify any of their claims. Even if messages sent between iPhones are E2EE encrypted for example, the client apps and the operating system may be backdoored (and likely are).
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#93Related: 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?
So changing cash flows (fee money) isn't real enough now?
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
100%. It feels like Apple is perfectly happy letting the AI labs fight a race to the bottom on pricing while they keep the high-margin user relationship. I'm curious if this officially turns the foundation model providers into the new "dumb pipes" of the tech stack?
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. The question is, what’s the moat? If all they have is scaling to drive better model performance, then the winner is just whoever has the lowest cost of capital.
Google seems to thrive on commodity products. Search, EMail, etc.
It is their strength to take commodity products and scale it well.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#95This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.
The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.
For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#96This is good for Siri, in many ways. But I was kind of hoping we would see a time soon when phone hardware became good enough to do nearly 100% of the Siri-level tasks locally rather than needing Internet access.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#97The 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…
An Apple-developed LLM would likely be worse than SOTA, even if they dumped billions on compute. They'll never attract as much talent as the others, especially given how poorly their AI org was run (reportedly). The weird secrecy will be a turnoff. The culture is worse and more bureaucratic. The past decade has shown that Apple is unwilling to fix these things. So I'm glad Apple was forced to overcome their Not-Invented-Here syndrome/handicap in this case.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why so? Apple explicitly acknowledged that they were using OpenAI’s GPT models before this, and now they’re quite easily switching to Google’s Gemini
I guess the question is, when are they going to use their own model? Surely research money is not the problem. Can't be lack of competence either, I think.
There is just too much money being burned in AI for Apple to keep researchers. Also models have no respect for original art which leads to a branding issue of being a platform for artists.
Apple is competent at timing when to step into a market and I would guess they are waiting for AI to evolve beyond being considered untrustworthy slop.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#99Earlier 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.
It wouldn't have gone any better if the original mapping solution had been a white-labeled "Apple Maps" secretly powered by Google Map.
Re: Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple is already taking the risk of being blamed for their own AI right now, though (an AI that is much more prone to incredibly dumb errors than Gemini), so I don't find it that obvious that they wouldn't just continue taking the blame for Siri as they already do, except with an actually smarter Siri.