[HN Gopher] Apple picks Google's Gemini to power Siri
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Apple picks Google's Gemini to power Siri
Author : stygiansonic
Score : 561 points
Date : 2026-01-12 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| 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
| johnthuss wrote:
| 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.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| 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
| hu3 wrote:
| 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.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I think they want it to work well with web search. That's
| why Google is the obvious choice. Also their ai offering
| is low risk of getting eliminated where as open ai could
| fail at any time
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| It appears to be lack of competence given they lied about
| the initial features of Apple Intelligence.
|
| First, they touted features that no one actually built
| and then fired their AI figurehead "leader" who had no
| coherent execution plan--also, there appears to have been
| territorial squabbling going on, about who would build
| what.
|
| How on earth did Apple Senior Management allow this to
| unravel? Too much focus on Services, yet ignoring their
| absolute failures with Siri and the bullshit that was
| Apple Intelligence, when AI spending is in the trillions?
| LexGray wrote:
| 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.
| johnthuss wrote:
| The ChatGPT integration was heavily gated by Apple and
| required explicit opt-in. That won't be the case with the
| Gemini integration. Apple wants this to just work. The
| privacy concerns will be mitigated because Apple will be
| hosting this model themselves in their Private Cloud
| Compute. This will be a much more tightly integrated
| solution than ChatGPT was.
| Angostura wrote:
| And you don't think they will include an abstraction
| layer?
| layer8 wrote:
| An abstraction layer doesn't prevent Google from seeing
| the data. Last year the story was that Apple would be
| running a Google model on their (Apple's) own server
| hardware.
| Angostura wrote:
| Yes, and that's still the story, as far as I can tell. So
| an abstraction layer would let them swap out the
| underlying model
| Angostura wrote:
| 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
| johnthuss wrote:
| 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.
| thinkindie wrote:
| several years after that they still have their own Maps
| though, they didn't go back to Google Maps.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's the point of what the person you replied to is
| saying.
| thinkindie wrote:
| it's hard but not impossible. Unless Apple didn't learn
| the Google Maps/Maps lesson.
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| In this case, though, Siri has already successfully
| scared off anyone who isn't willing to reevaluate
| products.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Mobile digital mapping was already a useful thing though.
| Even though Apple Maps was initially a failure I still
| came back to it every so often to see how it was
| progressing and eventually it ended up pretty good.
|
| Maybe I'm weird but mobile assistants have never been
| useful for me. I tried Siri a couple of times and it
| didn't work. I haven't tried it since because even if it
| worked perfectly I'm not sure I'd have any use for it.
|
| I see it more like the Vision Pro. Doesn't matter how
| good the product ends up being, I just don't think it's
| something most people are going to have a use for.
|
| As far as I'm concerned no one has proved the utility of
| these mobile assistants yet.
| eli wrote:
| 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"
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >it's solid now though
|
| Depends on where you are. In my experience here in Sweden
| Google Maps is still better, Apple maps sent us for a
| loop in Stockholm (literally {{{(>_<)}}} )
| burnte wrote:
| The problem with the analogy is that users were asked to
| change their habits. Apple switching Siri models behind
| the scenes is much less problematic.
| MBCook wrote:
| They switched despite Apple Maps having poor data for a
| reason:
|
| Google wanted to shove ads in it. Apple refused and to
| switch.
|
| Their hand was forced by that refusal.
| LexGray wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| I think Google was withholding them unless Apple was
| willing to put the ads in.
|
| Apple is a very VERY different company than they were
| back then.
|
| Back then they didn't have all sorts of services that
| they advertised to you constantly. They didn't have
| search ads in the App Store. They weren't trying to
| squeeze every penny out of every customer all the time no
| matter how annoying.
| array_key_first wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| It wouldn't have gone any better if the original mapping
| solution had been a white-labeled "Apple Maps" secretly
| powered by Google Map.
| mdasen wrote:
| 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 sensors by Sony"
| or "display by Samsung" on an iPhone box.
|
| It's possible that Apple will credit Gemini within the UI,
| but that isn't contained in the article or video. If Apple
| uses a Gemini-based model anonymously, it would be easy to
| switch away from it in the future - just as Apple had used
| both Samsung and TSMC fabs, or how Apple has used both
| Samsung and Japan Display. Heck, we know that Apple has
| bought cloud services from AWS and Google, but we don't have
| "iCloud by AWS and GCP."
|
| Yes, this is a more public announcement than Apple's display
| and camera part suppliers, but those aren't really hidden.
| Apple's dealings with Qualcomm have been extremely public.
| Apple's use of TSMC is extremely public. To me, this is Apple
| saying "hey CNBC/investors, we've settled on using Gemini to
| get next-gen Siri happening so you all can feel safe that we
| aren't rudderless on next-gen Siri."
| a_paddy wrote:
| 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.
| qnpnpmqppnp wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| If I were Goodle, I'd offer Apple a very significant
| discount to have visible branding of "powered by Gemini".
| gallerdude wrote:
| I'm sure Apple is more than happy to pay the premium for
| cleanness.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Maybe they'd prefer it for aesthetics, but OTOH in iOS
| 18.2+ they support off-device ChatGPT and apparently
| refer to it as "ChatGPT" both in settings and when
| prompting the user to ask if they want to use it.
|
| If they do refer to it as "Gemini" then this is a huge
| win for Google, and huge loss for OpenAI, since it really
| seems that the "ChatGPT" brand is the only real "moat"
| that OpenAI have, although recently there has been about
| a 20% shift in traffic from ChatGPT to Gemini, so the
| moat already seems to be running dry.
| dewey wrote:
| Don't think that's an especially big deal, they've always
| included third party data in Siri or the OS which is usually
| credited (Example: Maps with Foursquare or TomTom, Flight
| information from FlightAware, Weather data and many more).
| insin wrote:
| They can also put "Google" in the forever-necessary
| disclaimer
|
| Google AI can make mistakes
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| So changing cash flows (fee money) isn't real enough now?
| asadotzler wrote:
| I'll wager the accounting for the two contracts is separate.
| There may be stipulations that connect the two, but the
| payment from Google to Apple of $20B+/yr is a long-
| established contract (set of contracts, actually0 that Apple
| would not jeopardize for the relatively small Google to Apple
| $1B/yr contract, one still unproven and which may not stand
| the test of time.
|
| So, yes, practically speaking, the Apple to Google payment
| offsets a tiny fraction of the Google to Apple payment, but
| real money will change hands for each and very likely
| separately.
| Noaidi wrote:
| 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.
| volemo wrote:
| You've used Siri before?! /j
| hu3 wrote:
| You guys use Siri?
| Noaidi wrote:
| Only when I wake up in the middle of the night to ask it what
| is the current time of the dystopia. That and the calculator.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| 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.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Siri is extremely useful. That is, if your use cases are
| limited to:
|
| - setting a timer
|
| - dictating a title to search on Apple TV
| spinningarrow wrote:
| Creating calendar events and reminders too!
|
| A feature set that has remained unchanged since Siri's
| launch...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Makes sense then, considering timers I set them on my
| watch and I don't watch tv.
| mbirth wrote:
| You can use Siri to call custom Shortcuts which in turn
| can ask for more details if required. And now that
| Shortcuts can make use of the LLMs (Apple's or ChatGPT),
| there are a lot more ways to make Siri smarter.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I used it when it launched to figure out it was useless and
| haven't gone back.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Only for opening/closing the garage door, setting timers, and
| sending texts. What else do people use the digital assistants
| for?
| jen20 wrote:
| Hundreds of times a day for HomeKit, though rarely anything
| else. It's _mostly_ fine, provided there are no HomePods
| around.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do
| things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to
| send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination
| and such with as little friction as possible.
|
| Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify,
| Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop
| generator.
| jjice wrote:
| Why not? Apple's ChatGPT integration has been pretty explicitly
| anonymizing requests and doesn't require an account. Maybe I'm
| missing something.
| rvz wrote:
| You're using Siri? lmao
|
| That's the Internet Explorer of chatbots.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Jeez, I only use it for the time and for the calculator, and
| to ask it to call someone. I am shocked anyone thinks I used
| it for anything more than that.
|
| Also, I have never turned on Apple "Intelligence".
| Angostura wrote:
| That's where people get confused - it's not a chatbot or an
| LLM - it's a voice command interface. Adding something to the
| shopping list, setting a timer, turning up the heating in the
| back room, playing some music, skipping a track, sending a
| message - it works perfectly well for - and that's what I use
| it for virtually every day.
|
| This work is to _turn_ it it into something else, more like a
| chatbot, presumably
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Siri is already transitioning from an intent-based NLU
| system to an LLM.
|
| In iOS 18.1 (on iPhone 15+) Siri is part intent-based, part
| on-device "Apple Intelligence" small LLM, and in iOS 18.2
| it also supports off-device ChatGPT.
|
| This year Siri 2.0 is expected to ditch the legacy intent-
| based system and instead use just the small on-device Apple
| Intelligence LLM plus (opt-in) off-device Gemini (running
| in some private cloud).
| runjake wrote:
| Unless Apple is lying:
|
| On iPhone, Settings - iCloud - Storage - Siri - Disable and
| Delete
|
| Edit: Tried it. It works for me. Takes a minute though.
| Noaidi wrote:
| TRY IT!
| runjake wrote:
| I did. It works, as far as I can tell?
| Noaidi wrote:
| You're able to disable Siri in iCloud? Not turn off Siri,
| disable Siri back up in iCloud. And when you go back to
| it after not turning it on, it's still off?
| runjake wrote:
| Yes. But, I'm not surprised that you're having issues. In
| my experience managing a large enterprise, iCloud
| accounts seem to have all kinds of weird, account-
| specific issues.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I have a current case open with Apple with this issue. It
| does not work. And I don't believe you. I'm sorry I just
| don't believe you because Apple says there is a technical
| problem preventing this. That does not just affect me.
| Because I also tried it on three other phones of three other
| friends of mine and it does not work.
| yohannparis wrote:
| In the article they clearly mentioned that Gemini model will be
| used for the Foundation Model running on device or their own
| Server. They are not sending Siri request to Google servers.
| beardyw wrote:
| " ... and Anthropic's Clause."
|
| That will be their contract writing AI.
| eimrine wrote:
| Why they are constantly so bad at AI but so good at everything
| else?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it's pretty Apple-ish to not jump into a frenzy, and wait for
| turbulence to settle, i believe. delegation to Gemini fits that
| theory?
| dewey wrote:
| They've tried to have an AI assistant before AI was a big
| thing...it's just pretty bad and Siri never got better.
|
| If it would suddenly get better, like they teased (Some would
| say, lied about the capabilities) with Apple Intelligence
| that would fit pretty well. That they delegate that to Gemini
| now is a defeat.
| tibbar wrote:
| I mean, Siri has been bad for what, 15 years now? It does
| seem like a bt of an outlier.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Gemini only replaced Google assistant on Android a few
| weeks ago. I gave up on Google assistant a few years ago,
| but I'd guess it wasn't a worthwhile upgrade from Siri.
| krupan wrote:
| Still using Google assistant after trying Gemini on my
| pixel about 6 months ago. It was not an assistant
| replacement, it couldn't even perform basic operations on
| my phone, it would just say something like, "I'm sorry,
| I'm just an LLM and I can't send text messages." Has that
| changed?
| wooger wrote:
| Siri got substantially worse over time in fact, I swear it
| used to at least be able to give you answers to basic facts
| rather than just offering to google things.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| It's been a long running thing that Apple can't do software as
| well as competitors, though in my experience they've beat
| Google and a few others at devex and UX in their mobile
| frameworks overtime despite initial roughness. Slow and steady
| might win this race eventually, too.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Because their focus on user privacy makes it difficult for them
| to train at scale on users' data in the way that their
| competitors can. Ironically, this focus on privacy initially
| stemmed from fumbling the ball on Siri: recall that Apple never
| made privacy a core selling point until it was clear that Siri
| was years behind Google's equivalent, which Apple then
| retroactively tried to justify by claiming "we keep your data
| private so we can't train on it the way Google can." The result
| was a vicious cycle: initially botch AI rollout -> justify that
| failure with a novel marketing strategy around privacy that
| only makes it harder to improve their AI capabilities -> botch
| subsequent AI rollouts as a result -> ...
|
| To be clear, I'd much rather have my personal cloud data
| private than have good AI integration on my devices. But
| strictly from an AI-centric perspective, Apple painted
| themselves into a corner.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Apple's privacy focus started long before the current AI
| wave. It got major public attention in the fight with the FBI
| over unlocking the San Bernardino shooter's phone. I don't
| think Google's equivalent even existed at that point.
| potamic wrote:
| That's a poor justification. There are companies that sell
| you all kinds of labelled data. OpenAI, Anthropic didn't
| train on their own user data.
| tensor wrote:
| This is nonsense. You don't need Apple user data to build a
| good AI model, plenty of startups building base models have
| shown that. But even if you did it's nonsense as Apple has
| long had opt-in for providing data to train their machine
| learning models, and many of those models, like OCR or voice
| recognition, are excellent.
| mdasen wrote:
| 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.
| jen20 wrote:
| This is some magical thinking. Even if Samsung took all their
| manpower, all their thought process and all their capital,
| they still couldn't produce a laptop that competes with the
| MacBook (just to take one example), because they
| fundamentally don't have any taste as a company.
|
| Hell, they can't even make a TV this year that's less shit
| than last years version of it and all that requires is do
| literally nothing.
| layer8 wrote:
| I haven't seen a lot of good taste from Apple in recent
| years.
| lunar_rover wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| There's no reason to think that Apple would have any more skill
| at making a frontier AI model as they do at making airplanes or
| growing soybeans. Not much overlap between consumer electronics
| design and expertise, data, training, and datacenters needed
| for AI.
| its_ethan wrote:
| I feel like this ignores how big of a part the software is
| for those "consumer electronics" Apple is so good at making.
|
| Apple definitely has software expertise, maybe it's not as
| specialized into AI as it is about optimizing video or music
| editors, but to suggest they'd be at the same starting point
| as an agriculture endeavor feels dishonest.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| > but so good at everything else?
|
| They aren't.
| blibble wrote:
| have you used iOS 26?
|
| "liquid ass" is how most of my friends describe it
| layer8 wrote:
| They aren't so good at everything else either.
| eimrine wrote:
| I would not lure so much comments if not say this. Let's fish
| an answer from that pool of Apple's fanboys.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Somewhat surprising. AI is such a core part of the experience. It
| feels like a mistake to outsource it to arguably your biggest
| competitor.
| gregoriol wrote:
| They could use it like Google Search, not as the first thing
| the user sees, but as a fallback
| xtoilette wrote:
| How much of the two revenue streams overlap in reality?
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Apple has surprisingly good quality AI papers, a lot of work
| on bridging research and product.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I agree that they don't appear poised to do it themselves.
| But why not work with Meta or OpenAI (maybe a bit more
| questionable with MS) or some other player, rather than
| Google?
| crazygringo wrote:
| The optics of working with Meta make it a non-starter.
| Apple symbolizes privacy, Meta the opposite.
|
| With OpenAI, will it even be around 3 years from now,
| without going bankrupt? What will its ownership structure
| look like? Plus, as you say, the MS aspect.
|
| So why not Google? It's very common for large corporations
| to compete in some areas and cooperate in others.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.
|
| I didn't see you 41 day old reply to me until it was too
| late to comment on it. So here's a sarcastic "thanks for
| ignoring what I wrote" and telling me that exactly what I
| was complaining about is the solution to the problem I
| was complaining about.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114935
|
| 1) I told you my household can't use Target or Amazon for
| unscented products, without costly remediation measures,
| BECAUSE EVEN SCENT-FREE ITEMS COME SMELLING FROM PERFUME
| _CROSS-CONTAMINATION_ THANKS TO CLEANING, STORAGE, AND
| TRANSPORTATION CONDITIONS. SOMETIMES REALLY BADLY.
|
| FFS. If you are going to respond, first read.
|
| I also mentioned something other than "government
| intervention to dictate how products are made" as a
| solution to this issue, namely adequate segregation
| between perfumed and non-perfumed products.
|
| And I care less about my wallet than I do about my time
| and actual ability to acquire products that are either
| truly scent free, or like yesteryear, don't have
| everlasting fragrance fixatives.
|
| For people in my position, which make up a small
| percentage of the population (that still numbers in the
| millions), the free market has failed. We are a
| specialized niche that trades tips on how to make things
| tolerable.
|
| SORRY TO EVERYONE ELSE FOR GOING OFF TOPIC.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > AI is such a core part of the experience
|
| For who? Regular people are quite famously not clamouring for
| more AI features in software. A Siri that is not so
| stupendously dumb would be nice, but I doubt it would even be a
| consideration for the vast majority of people choosing a phone.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Web search is a core part of browsing and Apple is Google's
| biggest competitor in browsers. Google is paying Apple about
| 25x for integrating Google Search in Safari as Apple will be
| paying Google to integrate Google's LLMs into Siri. If you
| think depending on your competitor is a problem, you should
| really look into web search where all the real money is today.
| baal80spam wrote:
| I like it. I like Gemini.
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| Didn't they make a deal with OpenAI sometime back?
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| 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.
| ntonozzi wrote:
| Hopefully it gets more tightly integrated.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously only back in June the discussion was barely a mention
| of Google Gemini, and leaned more towards why weren't they doing
| it themselves:
|
| _Apple weighs using Anthropic or OpenAI to power Siri_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426643
| Fiveplus wrote:
| 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.
| haritha-j wrote:
| 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.
| ysnp wrote:
| 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.
| tempodox wrote:
| The gov't can force them to reveal any user's data and slap
| them with a gag order so no one will ever know this happened.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| All user data is E2E encrypted, so the government literally
| cannot force this. This has been the source of numerous
| disputes [0, 1] that either result in the device itself
| being cracked [0] (due to weak passwords or vulnerabilities
| in device-level protection) or governments attempting to
| ban E2E encryption altogether [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encrypt
| ion_d...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
| greentea23 wrote:
| What you cited is for data on a device that was turned
| off. Not daily internet connected usage. No one is saying
| you have no protection at all with Apple, it is just very
| limited compared to what it should be by modern security
| best practices, and much worse than what can be achieved
| on android and linux.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _much worse than what can be achieved on android and
| linux._
|
| * Certain types of Android
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Maybe E2E, but the data eventually has to be decrypted to
| read it.
|
| Then you learn that every modern CPU has a built-in
| backdoor, a dedicated processor core, running a closed-
| source operating system, with direct access to the entire
| system RAM, and network access. [a][b][c][d].
|
| You can not trust any modern hardware.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Proce
| sso...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family#Sec
| uri...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_privacy_of_iOS
| natch wrote:
| E2E encrypted is nothing if key escrow is happening.
|
| Why did they change their wording from:
|
| Nobody can read your data, not even Apple
|
| to:
|
| Apple cannot read your data.
|
| You know why.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| If they didn't want you to think key escrow might be
| possible, why wouldn't they just leave the wording the
| way it was? Why go through the effort and thereby draw
| attention to it? The court system doesn't use sovcit
| rules where playful interpretation of wording can get a
| trillion dollar corporation out of a lawsuit or whatever.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| When did they change their wording?
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
| greentea23 wrote:
| Mullvad is nothing like Apple. For apple devices: - need real
| email and real phone number to even boot the device - cannot
| disable telemetry - app store apps only, even though many key
| privacy preserving apps are not available - /etc/hosts are
| not your own, DNS control in general is extremely weak - VPN
| apps on idevices have artificial holes - can't change push
| notification provider - can only use webkit for browsers,
| which lacks many important privacy preserving capabilities -
| need to use an app you don't trust but want to sandbox it
| from your real information? Too bad, no way to do so. - the
| source code is closed so Apple can claim X but do Y, you have
| no proof that you are secure or private - without control of
| your OS you are subject to Apple complying with the
| government and pushing updates to serve them not you, which
| they are happy to do to make a buck
|
| Mullvad requires nothing but an envelope with cash in it and
| a hash code and stores nothing. Apple owns you.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| This comment confuses privacy with anonymity.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Anonymity is an inherent measure to preserve ones
| individual privacy. What value did you intent to add with
| your remark?
| greentea23 wrote:
| Not for all points. And not being anonymous means your
| identity is not private...
| asadotzler wrote:
| Anonymity is a critical aspect of privacy. If you cannot
| prevent your name being associated with your data, you do
| not have real privacy.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Agreed on most points but you can setup a pretty solid
| device wide DNS provider using configuration profiles.
| Similar to how iOS can be enrolled in work corporate MDM -
| but under your control.
|
| Works great for me with NextDNS.
|
| Orion browser - while also based on WebKit - is also
| awesome and has great built in Adblock and supposedly
| privacy respecting ideals.
| greentea23 wrote:
| Apple has records that you are installing that, probably
| putting you on a list.
|
| And it works until it's made illegal in your country and
| removed from the app store. You have no guarantees that
| anything that works today will work tomorrow with Apple.
|
| Apple is setting us up to be under a dictator's thumb one
| conversion at a time.
| apparent wrote:
| You do not need an email address to set up an iPhone, and
| you do not need an email address or phone number to set up
| an iPad/Mac.
|
| If you want to use the App Store on these devices, you do
| need to have an email address.
| natch wrote:
| They transitioned from "nobody can read your data, not even
| Apple" to "Apple cannot read your data." Think about what
| that change means. And even that is not always true.
|
| They also were deceptive about iCloud encryption where they
| claimed that nobody but you can read your iCloud data. But
| then it came out after all their fanfare that if you do
| iCloud backups Apple CAN read your data. But they aren't in a
| hurry to retract the lie they promoted.
|
| Also if someone in another country messages you, if that
| country's laws require that Apple provide the name, email,
| phone number, and content of the local users, guess what.
| Since they messaged you, now not only their name and
| information, but also your name and private information and
| message content is shared with that country's government as
| well. By Apple. Do they tell you? No. Even if your own
| country respects privacy. Does Apple have a help article
| explaining this? No.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| >Also if someone in another country messages you, if that
| country's laws require that Apple provide the name
|
| I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this
| true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my
| understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of
| governments and service providers, while iMessage gives
| them some wiggle room.
|
| Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was
| only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw
| threatofrain wrote:
| If you want to turn on full end-to-end encryption you can,
| if you want to share your pubkey so that people can't fake
| your identity on iMessage you can, and there's still a
| higher tier of security than that presumably for
| journalists and important people.
|
| It's something a smart niece or nephew could handle in
| terms of managing risk, but the implications could mean
| getting locked out of your device which you might've been
| using as the doorway to everything, and Apple cannot help
| you.
| richwater wrote:
| You people will never be happy until the only messaging
| that exists is in a dusty basement and Richard Stallman is
| sleeping on a dirty futon.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yea, I think it's smart, too. There are multiple companies who
| have spent a fortune on training and are going to be
| increasingly interested in (desperate to?) see a return from
| it. Apple can choose the best of the bunch, pay less than they
| would have to to build it themselves, and swap to a new one if
| someone produces another breakthrough.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| 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?
| drob518 wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| This isn't a mystery - it's Google
| drob518 wrote:
| Yea, I think that's probably right, unless something
| unexpected changes the game.
| ivell wrote:
| Google seems to thrive on commodity products. Search,
| EMail, etc.
|
| It is their strength to take commodity products and scale
| it well.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| As if they really have a choice though. Competing would be
| a billion dollar Apple Maps scenario.
| whereismyacc wrote:
| best inference silicon in the world generally or specialized to
| smaller models/edge?
| properbrew wrote:
| 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.
| whereismyacc wrote:
| That I can absolutely believe but the big competition is in
| enterprise gpt-5-size models.
| fooblaster wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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?
| internetter wrote:
| Perhaps spending it on inference that will be obsoleted in 6
| months by the next model is not a good idea either.
|
| Edit: especially given that Apple doesn't do b2b so all the
| spend would be just to make consumer products
| greentea23 wrote:
| Apple of course does an emormous amount of b2b.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That doesn't make lighting it on fire a great option.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| The cash pile is gone, they have been active in share
| repurchase.
|
| They still generate about ~$100 billion in free cash per
| year, that is plowed into the buybacks.
|
| They could spend more cash than every other industry
| competitor. It's ludicrous to say that they would have to
| burn 10 years of cash flow on trivial (relative) investment
| in model development and training. That statement reflects a
| poor understanding of Apple's cash flow.
| _joel wrote:
| > without burning 10 years of cash flow.
|
| Don't they have the highest market cap of any company in
| existence?
| fumblebee wrote:
| I believe both Nvidia and Google have higher market caps
| jayd16 wrote:
| You don't need to join every fight you see, even if you would
| do well.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| They have the largest free cash flow (over $100 billion a
| year). Meta and Amazon have less than half that a year, and
| Microsoft/Nvidia are between $60b-70b per year. The statement
| reflects a poor understanding of their financials.
| concinds wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| Apple might have gotten very lucky here ... the money might
| be in finding uses, and selling physical products rather than
| burning piles of cash training models that are SOTA for 5
| minutes before being yet another model in a crowded field.
|
| My money is still on Apple and Google to be the winners from
| LLMs.
| lamontcg wrote:
| And when the cost of training LLMs starts to come down to
| under $1B/yr, Apple can jump on board, having saved >$100B
| in not trying to chase after everyone else to try to get
| there first.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Apple has also never been big on the server side equation
| of both software and hardware - don't they already
| outsource most of their cloud stack to Google via GCP ?
|
| I can see them eventually training their own models
| (especially smaller and more targeted / niche ones) but at
| their scale they can probably negotiate a pretty damn good
| deal renting Google TPUs and expertise.
| ghaff wrote:
| Xserve was always kind of a loss. Wrote a piece about it
| a number of years back. It became pretty much a commodity
| business--which isn't Apple.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I always wondered what they were hoping for with their
| server products back when they had them. Consumers and
| end users benefit greatly from the vertical integration
| that Apple is good at. This doesn't translate with
| servers. Commodity hardware + linux is not only cheaper,
| its often easier, and was definitely less proprietary.
|
| Its also a race to the bottom type scenario. Apple would
| have never been able to keep up with server release
| schedules.
|
| Was an interesting but ultimately odd moment of history
| for servers.
| pstuart wrote:
| With Thunderbolt 5 and M5 Ultras, Apple could be building
| lower cost clusters that could possibly scale enough
| while keeping a lower power budget. Obviously that can't
| compete with NVIDIA racks, but for mobile consumer
| inference maybe that would be enough?
| microtherion wrote:
| Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4
| year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers
| well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are
| across the board for the company, which they are of course
| not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony
| Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only
| to rip them off).
|
| So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a
| bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its
| issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product),
| while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.
| dabockster wrote:
| It also lets them keep a lot of the legal issues regarding LLM
| development at arms length while still benefiting from them.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone
| into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's
| privacy theater.
|
| This sort of thing didn't work out great for Mozilla. Apple,
| thankfully, has other business bringing in the revenue, but
| it's still a bit wild to put a core bit of the product in the
| hands of the only other major competitor in the smartphone OS
| space!
| apercu wrote:
| I dunno, my take is that Apple isn't outsourcing intelligence
| rather it's outsourcing the most expensive, least defensible
| layer.
|
| Down the road Apple has an advantage here in a super large
| training data set that includes messages, mail, photos,
| calendar, health, app usage, location, purchases, voice,
| biometrics, and you behaviour over YEARS.
|
| Let's check back in 5 years and see if Apple is still using
| Gemini or if Apple distills, trains and specializes until
| they have completed building a model-agnostic intelligence
| substrate.
| maxloh wrote:
| Is the training cost really that high, though?
|
| The Allen Institute (a non-profit) just released the Molmo 2
| and Olmo 3 models. They trained these from scratch using public
| datasets, and they are performance-competitive with Gemini in
| several benchmarks [0] [1].
|
| AMD was also able to successfully train an older version of
| OLMo on their hardware using the published code, data, and
| recipe [2].
|
| If a non-profit and a chip vendor (training for marketing
| purposes) can do this, it clearly doesn't require "burning 10
| years of cash flow" or a Google-scale TPU farm.
|
| [0]: https://allenai.org/blog/molmo2
|
| [1]: https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
|
| [2]: https://huggingface.co/amd/AMD-OLMo
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| No, of course the training costs aren't that high. Apple's
| ten years of future free cash flow is greater than a trillion
| dollars (they are above $100b per year). Obviously, the
| training costs are a trivial amount compared to that figure.
| bombcar wrote:
| I have no idea what AI involves, but "training" sounds like
| a one-and-done - but how is the result "stored"? If you
| have trained up a Gemini, can you "clone" it and if so,
| what is needed?
|
| I was under the impression that all these GPUs and such
| were needed to _run_ the AI, not only ingest the data.
| esafak wrote:
| Yes, serving requires infra, too. But you can use infra
| optimized for serving; nvidia GPUs are not the only game
| in town.
| tefkah wrote:
| Theoretically it would be much less expensive to just
| continue to run the existing models, but ofc none of the
| current leaders are going to stop training new ones any
| time soon.
| bombcar wrote:
| So are we on a hockey stick right now where a new model
| is _so much better_ than the previous that you have to
| keep training?
|
| Because almost every example of previous cases of things
| like this eventually leveled out.
| DougBTX wrote:
| > but how is the result "stored"
|
| Like this: https://huggingface.co/docs/safetensors/index
| amelius wrote:
| Hiring the right people should also be trivial with that
| amount of cash.
| ufmace wrote:
| What I'm wondering - their future cash flow may be massive
| compared to any conceivable rational task, but the market
| for servers and datacenters seems to be pretty saturated
| right now. Maybe, for all their available capital, they
| just can't get sufficient compute and storage on a
| reasonable schedule.
| lostmsu wrote:
| No, I doesn't beat Gemini in any benchmarks. It beats Gemma,
| which isn't a SoTA even among open models of that size. That
| would be Nemotron 3 or GPT-OSS 20B.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| my prediction is that they might switch once AI craze will
| simmer down to some more reasonable level
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| The trouble is this seems to me like a short term fix, longer
| term, once the models are much better, Google can just lock out
| apple and take everything for themselves and leave Apple
| nowhere and even further behind.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Of course there is going to be an abstraction layer - this is
| like Software Engineering 101.
|
| Google really could care less about Android being good. It is
| a client for Google search and Google services - just like
| the iPhone is a client for Google search and apps.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I 'm oversimplifying but this effectively turns the iPhone
| into a dumb terminal for Google's brain, wrapped in Apple's
| privacy theater._
|
| Setting aside the obligatory HN dig at the end, LLMs are now
| commodities and the least important component of the
| intelligence system Apple is building. The hidden-in-plain-
| sight thing Apple is doing is exposing _all app data as
| context_ and _all app capabilities as skills_. (See App
| Intents, Core Spotlight, Siri Shortcuts, etc.)
|
| Anyone with an understanding of Apple's rabid aversion to being
| bound by a single supplier understands that they've tested this
| integration with all foundation models, that they can swap
| Google out for another vendor at any time, and that they have a
| long-term plan to eliminate this dependency as well.
|
| > _Apple admitted that the cost of training SOTA models is a
| capex heavy-lift they don 't want to own._
|
| I'd be interested in a citation for this (Apple introduced two
| multilingual, multimodal foundation language models in 2025),
| but in any case anything you hear from Apple publicly is what
| they want you to think for the next few quarters, vs. an
| indicator of what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are.
| hadlock wrote:
| > what their actual 5-, 10-, and 20-year plans are
|
| Seems like they are waiting for the "slope of enlightenment"
| on the gartner hype curve to flatten out. Given you can just
| lease or buy a SOTA model from leading vendors there's no
| advantage to training your own right now. My guess is that
| the LLM/AI landscape will look entirely different by 2030 and
| any 5 year plan won't be in the same zip code, let alone
| playing field. Leasing an LLM from Google with a support
| contract seems like a pretty smart short term play as things
| continue to evolve over the next 2-3 years.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| This is the key. The real issue is that you don't need
| superhuman intelligence in a phone AI assistant. You don't
| need it most of the time in fact. Current SOTA models do a
| decent job of approximating college grad level human
| intelligence let's say 85% of the time which is helpful and
| cool but clearly could be better. But the pace at which the
| models are getting smart is accelerating AND they are
| getting more energy efficient and memory efficient. So if
| something like DeepSeek is roughly 2 years behind SOTA
| models from Google and others who have SOTA models then in
| 2030 you can expect 2028 level performance out open models.
| There will come a time when a model capable of college grad
| level intelligence 99.999% of the time will be able to run
| on a $300 device. If you are Apple you do not need to lead
| the charge on a SOTA model, you can just wait until one is
| available for much cheaper. Your product is the devices and
| services consumers buy. If you are OpenAI you have no other
| products. You must become THE AI to have in an industry
| that will in the next few years become dominated by open
| models that are good enough or to close up shop or come up
| with another product that has more of a moat.
| ipaddr wrote:
| "pace at which the models are getting smart is
| accelerating". The pace is decelerating.
| bigyabai wrote:
| That's not an "obligatory HN dig" though, you're _in-media-
| res_ watching X escape removal from the App Store and Play
| Store. Concepts like privacy, legality and high-quality
| software are all theater. We have no altruists defending
| these principles for us at Apple or Google.
|
| Apple _won 't_ switch Google out as a provider for the same
| reason Google is your default search provider. They don't
| give a shit about how many advertisements you're shown. You
| are actually detached from 2026 software trends if you think
| _Apple_ is going to give users significant backend choices.
| They 're perfectly fine selling your attention to the highest
| bidder.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Caveat: as long as it doesn't _feel_ like you're being sold
| out.
|
| Which is why privacy theatre was an excellent way to put it
| yunohn wrote:
| Apple's various privileged device-level ads and instant-
| stop-on-cancel trials and special rules for notifications
| for their paid additional services like Fitness+, Music,
| Arcade, iCloud+, etc are all proof that they do not care
| about the user anymore.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| There are second-order effects of Google or Apple removing
| Twitter from their stores.
|
| Guess who's the bestie of Twitter's owner? Any clues? Could
| that be a vindictive old man with unlimited power and no
| checks and balances to temper his tantrums?
|
| Of course they both WANT Twitter the fuck out of the store,
| but there are very very powerful people addicted to the app
| and what they can do with it.
| dktp wrote:
| My guess is that this is bigger lock-in than it might seem on
| paper.
|
| Google and Apple together will posttrain Gemini to Apple's
| specification. Google has the know-how as well as infra and
| will happily do this (for free ish) to continue the mutually
| beneficial relationship - as well as lock out competitors
| that asked for more money (Anthropic)
|
| Once this goes live, provided Siri improves meaningfully, it
| is quite an expensive experiment to then switch to a
| different provider.
|
| For any single user, the switching costs to a different LLM
| are next to nothing. But at Apple's scale they need to be
| extremely careful and confident that the switch is an actual
| improvement
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a very low baseline with Siri, so almost anything
| would be an improvement.
| eastbound wrote:
| Ollama! Why didn't they just run Ollama and a public
| model! They've kept the last 10 years with a Siri who
| _doesn't know any contact named Chronometer_ only to
| require the best in class LLM?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| The other day I was trying to navigate to a Costco in my
| car. So I opened google maps on Android Auto on the
| screen in my car and pressed the search box. My car won't
| allow me to type even while parked... so I have to speak
| to the Google Voice Assistant.
|
| I was in the map search, so I just said "Costco" and it
| said "I can't help with that right now, please try again
| later" or something of the sort. I tried a couple more
| times until I changed up to saying "Navigate me to
| Costco" where it finally did the search in the textbox
| and found it for me.
|
| Obviously this isn't the same thing as Gemini but the
| experience with Android Auto becomes more and more
| garbage as time passes and I'm concerned that now we're
| going to have 2 google product voice assistants.
|
| Also, tbh, Gemini was great a month ago but since then
| it's become total garbage. Maybe it passes benchmarks or
| whatever but interacting with it is awful. It takes more
| time to interact with than to just do stuff yourself at
| this point.
|
| I tried Google Maps AI last night and, wow. The
| experience was about as garbage as you can imagine.
| woah wrote:
| Siri on my Apple Home will default to turning off all the
| lights in the kitchen if it misunderstands anything. Much
| hilarity ensues
| anamexis wrote:
| The point is that once Siri is switched to a Gemini-based
| model, the baseline presumably won't be low anymore.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| LLMs are now commodities and the least important component of
| the intelligence system Apple is building
|
| If that was even remotely true, Apple, Meta, and Amazon would
| have SoTA foundational models.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Seems like there is a moat after all.
|
| The moat is talent, culture, and compute. Apple doesn't have
| any of these 3 for SOTA AI.
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| nosman wrote:
| I don't know why people automatically jump to Apple's
| defense on this.... They absolutely did spend a lot of
| money and hired people to try this. They 100% do NOT have
| the open and bottom-up culture needed to pull off large
| scale AI and software projects like this.
|
| Source: I worked there
| elzbardico wrote:
| Well, they stopped.
|
| Culture is overrated. Money talks.
|
| They did things far more complicated from an engineering
| perspective. I am far more impressed by what they
| accomplished along TSMC with Apple Silicon than by what
| AI labs do.
| tech-historian wrote:
| Is Apple silicon really that impressive compared to LLMs?
| Take a step back. CPUs have been getting faster and more
| efficient for decades.
|
| Google invented the transformer architecture, the
| backbone of modern LLMs.
| jpfromlondon wrote:
| is it that surprising? they're a hardware company after all.
| segmondy wrote:
| 10 years worth of cash? So all these Chinese labs that came out
| and did it for less than $1 billion must have 3 heads per
| developer, right?
| andreyf wrote:
| Rumor has it that they weren't trained "from scratch" the was
| US would, i.e. Chinese labs benefitted from government
| "procured" IP (the US $B models) in order to train their $M
| models. Also understand there to be real innovation in the
| many-MoE architecture on top of that. Would love to hear a
| more technical understanding from someone who does more than
| repeat rumors, though.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| A lot of HN commentators are high on their own supply with
| regard to the AI bubble... when you realize that this stuff
| isn't actually that expensive the whole thing begins to
| quickly unravel.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| I always think about this, can someone with more knowledge than
| me help me understand the fragility of these operations?
|
| It sounds like the value of these very time-consuming,
| resource-intensive, and large scale operations is entirely
| self-contained in the weights produced at the end, right?
|
| Given that we have a lot of other players enabling this in
| other ways, like Open Sourcing weights (West vs East AI race),
| and even leaks, this play by Apple sounds really smart and the
| only opportunity window they are giving away here is "first to
| market" right?
|
| Is it safe to assume that eventually the weights will be out in
| the open for everyone?
| pests wrote:
| > is entirely self-contained in the weights produced at the
| end, right?
|
| Yes, and the knowledge gained along the way. For example, the
| new TPUv4 that Google uses requires rack and DC aware
| technologies (like optical switching fabric) for them to even
| work at all. The weights are important, and there is open
| weights, but only Google and the like are getting the
| experience and SOTA tech needed to operate cheaply at scale.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > and the only opportunity window they are giving away here
| is "first to market" right?
|
| A lot of the hype in LLM economics is driven by speculation
| that eventually training these LLMs is going to lead to AGI
| and the first to get there will reap huge benefits.
|
| So if you believe that, being "first to market" is a pretty
| big deal.
|
| But in the real world there's no reason to believe LLMs lead
| to AGI, and given the fairly lock-step nature of the
| competition, there's also not really a reason to believe that
| even if LLMs _did_ somehow lead to AGI that the same result
| wouldn 't be achieved by everyone currently building "State
| of the Art" models at roughly the same time (like within
| days/months of each other).
|
| So... yeah, what Apple is doing is actually pretty smart, and
| I'm not particularly an Apple fan.
| hadlock wrote:
| Seems like the LLM landscape is still evolving, and training
| your own model provides no technical benefit as you can simply
| buy/lease one, without the overhead of additional eng
| staffing/datacenter build-out.
|
| I can see a future where LLM research stalls and stagnates, at
| which point the ROI on building/maintaining their own commodity
| LLM might become tolerable. Apple has had Siri as a
| product/feature and they've proven for the better part of a
| decade that voice assistants are not something they're willing
| to build a proficiency in. My wife still has an apple iPhone
| for at least a decade now, and I've heard her use Siri perhaps
| twice in that time.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Seems like they are pivoting to becoming the premium "last
| mile" delivery network for someone else's intelligence.
|
| They have always been a premium "last mile" delivery network
| for someone else's intelligence, except that "intelligence" was
| always IP until now. They have always polished existing (i.e.,
| not theirs) ideas and made them bulletproof and accessible to
| the masses. Seems like they intend to just do more of the same
| for AI "intelligence". And good for them, as it is their
| specialty and it works.
| overfeed wrote:
| > 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?
|
| It goes back much further than that - up until 2016, Apple
| wouldn't let its ML researchers add author names to published
| research papers. You can't attract world-class talent in
| research with a culture built around paranoid secrecy.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Personally also think it's very smart move - Google has TPUs
| and will do it more efficiently than anyone else.
|
| It also lets Apple stand by while the dust settles on who will
| out innovate in the AI war - they could easily enter the game
| on a big way much later on.
| semiquaver wrote:
| > without burning 10 years of cash flow.
|
| Sorry to nitpick but Apple's Free Cash Flow is 100B/yr.
| Training a model to power Siri would not cost more than a
| trillion dollars.
| baxuz wrote:
| > bill of materials for intelligence
|
| There is no intelligence
| Sevii wrote:
| 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.
| kennywinker wrote:
| That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem
| to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that
| go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client
| only... because as client side ai gets better so does server
| side, and people's expectations scale up with server side.
| And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room
| already.
| chatmasta wrote:
| It's also a bet that the capex cost for training future models
| will be much lower than it is today. Why invest in it today if
| they already have the moat and dominant edge platform (with a
| loyal customer base upgrading hardware on 2-3 year cycles) for
| deploying whatever future commoditized training or inference
| workloads emerge by the time this Google deal expires?
| hashta wrote:
| this also addresses something else ...
|
| apple to some users "are you leaving for android because of
| their ai assistant? don't leave we are bringing it to iphone"
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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"?
| robotresearcher wrote:
| For some context with numbers, in mid-2024 Apple publicly
| described 3B parameter foundation models. Gemini 3 Pro is about
| 1T today.
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-intelligenc...
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Probably not missing the elephant. They certainly have the
| money to invest and they do like vertical integration but
| putting massive investment in bubble that can pop or flatline
| at any point seems pointless if they can just pay to use
| current best and in future they can just switch to something
| cheaper or buy some of the smaller AI companies that survive
| the purge.
|
| Given how much AI capable their hardware is they might just
| move most of it locally too
| kernal wrote:
| >Apple has the best edge inference silicon in the world (neural
| engine),
|
| Can you cite this claim? The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU seems to be
| superior in the benchmarks I've seen.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If nothing else, this was likely driven by Google being the most
| stable of the AI labs. Gemini is objectively a good model
| (whether it's #1 or #5 in ranking aside) so Apple can confidently
| deliver a good (enough) product. Also for Apple, they know their
| provider has ridiculously deep pockets, a good understanding and
| infrastructure in place for large enterprises, and a fairly
| diversified revenue stream.
|
| Going with Anthropic or OpenAI, despite on the surface having
| that clean Apple smell and feel, carries a lot of risk Apple's
| part. Both companies are far underwater, liable to take risks,
| and liable to drown if they even fall a bit behind.
| mbirth wrote:
| I was more thinking about this being driven by the fact that
| Google pays Apple $20B a year for being the pre-selected search
| engine and this way, Apple still gets $19B and a free AI engine
| on top.
| asadotzler wrote:
| It was 20 billion dollars years ago, 2022. There's little
| doubt it's closer to $25B now, perhaps more.
| tempodox wrote:
| Nothing about OpenAI smells clean.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Nothing about OpenAI is clean. Their complete org is controlled
| by Altmann, who was able to rehire himself after he was fired.
|
| Anthropic doesn't have a single data centre, they rent from
| AWS/Microsoft/Google.
| segmondy wrote:
| Yup, Anthropic has constant performance problems (not enough
| GPU), OpenAI is too messy with their politics and Altman.
| cush wrote:
| > 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| What are the top 3 features you're missing right now?
| woah wrote:
| Siri to function above the level of Dragon
| NaturallySpeaking '95
| oojuliuso wrote:
| Steve Jobs rolling in his grave. The mortal enemy. Thermonuclear
| war.
| benoau wrote:
| 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...
| golfer wrote:
| The original iPhone came pre-loaded with Google search, Maps,
| and Youtube. Jobs competed with Google but he also knew Google
| had best-in-class products too.
| relium wrote:
| Jobs brokered a $150M deal with Apple's arch enemy Microsoft in
| 1997.
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| mucle6 wrote:
| re 3: I doubt Google is going to hand over the weights to Apple
| to put on device.
| MaysonL wrote:
| They wouldn't fit.
| quitit wrote:
| Nor was such a thing implied. The information in the various
| news articles about it also don't make that claim.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Siri is objectively bad though. It isn't some vendetta. I am
| disabled and there are at least 50 different things that I'd
| love siri to do that should be _dead simple_ , yet it cannot.
| My favorite one was when I suffered a small but not serious
| fall, decided to test whether siri could be alerted to call
| 9-11 while being less than 6 feet away from me, absolutely
| could not understand let alone execute my request. It's a lot
| of stuff like this. Its _core functionality_ often just does
| not work.
|
| > 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.
|
| For many years, siri requests were sent to an external server.
| It still sucked.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I don't think the parent said that Siri wasn't bad, on the
| contrary it sounds like they agree.
|
| Their point is that if Apple totally scraps the current, bad,
| product called "Siri" and replaces it with an entirely
| different, much better product that is also named "Siri" but
| shares nothing but the name, people's perceptions of the
| current bad Siri will taint their impressions of the new one.
| quitit wrote:
| It's pretty clear they tried their best to miss or
| reinterpret the points I made so they could talk about
| something else.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm sorry for whatever cynicism leads you to believe
| this. I don't believe there is an "astroturfer" problem
| with siri, and that is mostly what I was responding to.
| Sorry you missed that.
| quitit wrote:
| Oh that riled you up? Too bad. Better get out your alt
| accounts to address this great injustice.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I'd be skeptical about even new LLM siri being able to dial
| 911.
|
| These models tend to have a "mind of their own", and I can
| totally, absolutely, see a current SOTA LLM convincing itself
| it needs to call 911 because you asked it how to disinfect a
| cut.
| array_key_first wrote:
| Ideally you have a layer before the LLM that filters out
| stuff the phone can do without an LLM. The LLM probably
| shouldn't even have the power to call 911, that should be a
| layer lower. And probably you don't want to send simple
| queries like "call XYZ" to the cloud, best to just do it
| locally.
| apparent wrote:
| There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be
| happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super
| shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never
| called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I
| will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to
| it getting better and being able to use it more often.
| thayne wrote:
| 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.
| qnpnpmqppnp wrote:
| What antitrust rule do you think would be breached?
|
| I admit I don't see the issue here. Companies are free to
| select their service providers, and free to dominate a market
| (as long as they don't abuse such dominant position).
| benoau wrote:
| Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice assistant
| or power Siri, so where does this leave eg OpenAI? The reason
| this is important is their DOJ antitrust case, about to start
| trial, has made this kind of conduct a cornerstone of their
| allegations that Apple is a monopoly.
|
| It also lends credence to the DOJ's allegation that Apple is
| insulated from competition - the result of failing to produce
| their own winning AI service is an exclusive deal to use
| Google while all competing services are disadvantaged, which
| is _probably not_ the outcome a healthy and competitive
| playing field would produce.
| its_ethan wrote:
| So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop it's
| own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use
| another companies model? And the reason that this is an
| issue is because both companies are large?
|
| This feels a little squishy... At what size of each company
| does this stop being an antitrust issue? It always just
| feels like a vibe check, people cite market cap or
| marketshare numbers but there's no hard criteria (at least
| that I've seen) that actually defines it (legally, not just
| someones opinion).
|
| The result of that is that it's sort of just up to whoever
| happens to be in charge of the governing body overseeing
| the case, and that's just a bad system for anyone (or any
| company) to be subjected to. It's bad when actual
| monopolistic abuse is happening and the governing body
| decides to let it slide, and it's bad when the governing
| body has a vendetta or directive to just hinder certain
| companies/industries regardless of actual monopolistic
| abuse.
| benoau wrote:
| > So because Apple chose not to spend money to develop
| it's own AI, it must be punished for then choosing to use
| another companies model? And the reason that this is an
| issue is because both companies are large?
|
| No they were already being sued for antitrust violations,
| it just mirrors what they are accused of doing to exploit
| their platform.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.
| 544...
| its_ethan wrote:
| So if it mirrors something they were already accused of
| (like you're saying), my questioning should be pretty
| easy to map onto that issue as well?
|
| It's the line of thinking that I'm trying to dig into
| more, not the specifics of this case. Now it feels like
| you're saying "this is anti-trust because someone accused
| them of anti-trust before".
|
| If that case was prosecuted and Apple was found guilty, I
| suppose you can point to it as precedent. But again, does
| it only serve as precedent when it's a deal between Apple
| and Google? Is it only a precedent when there's a case
| between two "large" companies?
|
| Again this is all really squishy, if companies aren't
| allowed to outsource development of another feature once
| they pass some sense of "large", when does it apply? What
| about the $1T pharmaceutical company that wants to use AI
| modeling? They're a large technically component company,
| if Eli Lily partnered with Gemini would you be sitting
| here saying that they also are abusing a monopolistic
| position that prevents competition in the AI model space?
| benoau wrote:
| > Now it feels like you're saying "this is anti-trust
| because someone accused them of anti-trust before".
|
| No it's antitrust because they have a failed product, but
| purely by virtue of shutting out competitors from their
| platform they have been able to turn three years of
| flailing around into a win-by-outsourcing. What would
| Siri's position be like today if they hadn't blocked
| default voice assistants? Would they be able to recover
| from their plight to dominate the market just by adopting
| Google's technology? How would that measure against
| OpenAI, Anthropic or just using Google directly? This is
| why it's an antitrust issue.
| its_ethan wrote:
| No other thoughts on my actual questions? You're just
| addressing one-off sentences from my responses.
|
| "it's antitrust because they have a failed product" is
| objectively hilarious
|
| > What would Siri's position be like today if they hadn't
| blocked default voice assistants?
|
| Probably pretty much the same. What would Gemini's
| position be like today if they hadn't blocked out default
| voice assistants? You only get Gemini when you use
| Gemini, just like you only got Siri when you use Siri (up
| until this deal takes effect). Also Siri _has used
| ChatGPT already_ , so I'm not even convinced this is a
| valid criticism. They _already_ didn 't block OpenAI from
| being part of Siri.
|
| > Would they be able to recover from their plight to
| dominate the market just by adopting Google's technology?
|
| This is relevant how?
|
| > How would that measure against OpenAI, Anthropic or
| just using Google directly?
|
| How would _what_ measure against other ai models? How
| would their ability to recover from a lack of investing
| in a better "homemade" AI model differ if they used
| OpenAI instead of Gemini? How does that have anything to
| do with antitrust? That's a business case study type of
| question. Also, shouldn't they be allowed to recover from
| their own lack of developing a model by using the best
| tool available to them?
| troupo wrote:
| In Japan you can run other voice assistants than Siri
| (well, at least _some_ of the functionality like calling
| them up via a button shortcut): https://developer.apple.c
| om/documentation/appintents/launchi...
|
| Why only in Japan? Because Japan forced them to:
| https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-sweeping-
| app-...
| thayne wrote:
| > it must be punished for then choosing to use another
| companies model
|
| The problem isn't that they used another company's model.
| It's that they are using a model made by _the only
| company competing with them_ in the market of mobile OS.
| qnpnpmqppnp wrote:
| > Gatekeeping - nobody else can be the default voice
| assistant or power Siri, so where does this leave eg
| OpenAI?
|
| Sorry if I'm missing the point but if Apple had picked
| OpenAI, couldn't you have made the same comment? "nobody
| else can be the default voice assistant or power Siri, so
| where does this leave eg Gemini/Claude?".
| KerrAvon wrote:
| IANAL, but I don't believe either of these things is a
| recognized concept in US antitrust law.
| thayne wrote:
| Apple and Google have a duopoly on Mobile OS. If Apple uses
| Google's model for Siri, that means Apple and Google are
| using their duopoly in one market (mobile OS) to enforce a
| monopoly for Google in another (model for mobile personal
| assistant AI).
| qnpnpmqppnp wrote:
| They are in a duopoly on the Mobile OS market, with no
| other significant player available. Google would be the
| sole integrated mobile AI, though there are competitors
| available if customers wanted to switch (customers for such
| products being the OS companies buying the AI services, not
| the end-users).
|
| However I don't see the link, how they are "using their
| duopoly", and why "they" would be using it but only one of
| them benefits from it. Being a duopoly, or even a monopoly,
| is not against anti-trust law by itself.
| golfer wrote:
| Is the era of Apple exceptionalism over? Has it been over for a
| while now?
| seydor wrote:
| I guess this is just a continuation of the Search deal, and an
| admission that LLMs are replacing search.
|
| I can't wait for gemini to lecture me why I should throw away my
| android
| jmacd wrote:
| This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me
| as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first
| device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years,
| laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they
| have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to
| podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice
| conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't
| just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Siri still can't play an Apple Music album when there is a song
| of the same name.
|
| Even "Play the album XY" leads to Siri only playing the single
| song. It's hilariously bad.
| billti wrote:
| Or the even more frustrating:
|
| Me: "Hey Siri, play <well known hit song from a studio album
| that sold 100m copies"
|
| Siri: "OK, here's <correct song but a live version nobody
| ever listens to, or some equally obscure remix>"
|
| Being these things are at their core probability machines,
| ... How? Why?
| layer8 wrote:
| It remains to be seen what the existing HomePods will support.
| There's been a HomePod hardware update in the pipeline for
| quite some time, and it appears like they are waiting for the
| new Siri to be ready.
| 46493168 wrote:
| It's absolutely insane that you can't say "Siri, play my
| audiobook" and it play the last audiobook you listened to.
| Like, come on.
| http-teapot wrote:
| Or when you are driving, someone sends a yes-no question
| where the answer is no.
|
| Siri: Would you like to answer?
|
| Me: Yes
|
| Siri: ...
|
| Me: No + more words
|
| Siri: Ok (shuts off)
| zeras wrote:
| This 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I suspect we'll see that; but Siri is in such a bad state of
| disrepair that Apple really needs something _now_ while they
| continue to look for micro-scale LLM models that can run well-
| enough locally. The two things aren 't mutually exclusive.
|
| The biggest thing Apple has to do is get a generic pipeline up
| and running, that can support both cloud and non-cloud models
| down the road, and integrate with a bunch of local tools for
| agent-style workloads (e.g. "restart", "audio volume", "take
| screenshot" as tools that agents via different cloud/local
| models can call on-device).
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think there's a clear boundary of "Siri-level" tasks.
| In particular, properly determining whether a task is "Siri-
| level" or not is likely to require off-device AI.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'd hope it could be the other way around. Some stuff should
| be relatively straightforward -- summarizing notifications,
| emails, setting timers, things like that should be obviously
| on-device. But aside from that, I would hope that the on-
| device AI can make the determination on whether it is
| necessary to go to a datacenter AI for a better answer.
|
| But you may be right, maybe on-device won't be smart enough
| to decide it isn't smart enough. Though it does seem like the
| local LLMs have gotten awfully good.
| layer8 wrote:
| I can see them going that route, but it would cause
| similarly annoying breaks in the flow as current Siri
| offering to delegate to ChatGPT, or on-device Siri deciding
| it can do the task but actually failing or doing it wrong.
| It certainly wouldn't be an "it just works" experience.
| dubeye wrote:
| Oh God, please do this tomorrow.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Google release hints at this being more than just Siri:
|
| > _Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration
| under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will
| be based on Google 's Gemini models and cloud technology. These
| models will help power future Apple Intelligence features,
| including a more personalized Siri coming this year._
|
| ... https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-
| annou...
| tensor wrote:
| This is actually the most important part of this announcement,
| and excellent news. I was pretty disappointed that they were
| going with an existing player rather than building their own
| models. But this implies that they _will_ continue to build
| their own base models, just using Gemini as a starting point,
| which is a pretty good solution.
| jm_redwood wrote:
| Does anyone know what Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" servers
| actually are? I recall murmurings about racked M chips or some
| custom datacenter-only variant?
|
| I'm really curious how Apple is bridging the gap between consumer
| silicon and the datacenter scale stack they must have to run a
| customized Gemini model for millions of users.
|
| RDMA over Thunderbolt is cool for small lab clusters but they
| must be using something else in the datacenter, right?
| Havoc wrote:
| They already use GCP for storage so I guess there is some
| precedent for big ties between them
| sodafountan wrote:
| Can someone explain to me how this was allowed to happen? Wasn't
| Siri supposed to be the leading AI agent not ten years ago? How
| was there such a large disconnect at Apple between what Siri
| could do and what "real" AI was soon to be capable of?
|
| Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI
| researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off
| with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn't there be
| talk within the industry that this form of AI assistant would
| soon be looked at as useless?
|
| Am I missing something?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Source: while I don't have any experience with the inner
| workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based
| automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex
| (the AWS version of Alexa).
|
| Siri was never an "AI agent", with intent based systems, you
| give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an
| intent, all of the "slots" have to be fulfilled. For instance
| "I want to go from $source to $destination" and then the system
| calls an API.
|
| There is no AI understanding - it's a "1000 monkeys
| implementation", you just start giving the system a bunch of
| variations and templates you want to match on in every single
| language you care about and match the intents to an API. That's
| how Google and Alexa also worked pre LLM. They just had more
| monkeys dedicated to creating matching sentences.
|
| Post LLM, you tell the LLM what the underlying system is
| capable of, the parameters the API requires to fulfill an
| action and the LLM can figure out the users intentions and ask
| follow up questions until it had enough info to call the API.
| You can specify the prompt in English and it works in all of
| the languages that the LLM has been trained on.
|
| Yes I've done both approaches
| didntknowyou wrote:
| i think it's good. Google has a record of being stable and
| working with large partners (govt etc) and avoids the
| controversial cult of altman.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Models are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't
| justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just
| recognized that.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I don't understand why Apple cannot implement their own LLM at
| the user phone level for easy pickings? like settings control? or
| app-specific shortcuts? or local data searching?
|
| I understand other things like image recognition, wikipedia
| information, etc require external data sets, and transferring
| over local data to that end can be a privacy breach. But the
| local stuff should be easy, at least in one or two languages.
| coder543 wrote:
| All signs are that they _are_ doing exactly that. They already
| have an on-device LLM which powers certain features, and I
| expect they will have a better-trained version of that on-
| device model that comes out with the "new Siri" update.
|
| In the original announcement of the Siri revamped a couple of
| years ago, they specifically talked about having the on-device
| model handle everything it can, and only using the cloud models
| for the harder or more open ended questions.
| spwa4 wrote:
| The question we're all waiting for ... for how many billions?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Really, Siri is an agent. Agents thrive when the subjacent model
| capabilities are higher, as it unlocks a series of other use
| cases that are hard to accomplish when the basic Natural Language
| Processing layer is weak.
|
| The better the basic NLP tasks like named entity recognition, PoS
| tagging, Dependency Parsing, Semantic Role Labelling, Event
| Extraction, Constituency parsing, Classification/Categorization,
| Question Answering, etc, are implemented by the model layer, the
| farther you can go on implementing meaningful use-cases in your
| agent.
|
| Apple can now concentrate on making Siri a really useful and
| powerful agent.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Apple and Google already have the search relationship. Makes
| sense for this to happen. Am curious what kind of data Google
| gets out of the deal.
| ftchd wrote:
| none, it runs on Apple's cloud privately
| sidibe wrote:
| And where does Apples cloud run?
| bitpush wrote:
| GCP
| dogmayor wrote:
| 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.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| That was quick: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-
| reacts-to-gem...
| asadm wrote:
| OpenAI _had it_ , they had the foot in the door with their
| integration last year with Siri. But they dropped that ball and
| many other balls.
| czscout wrote:
| Yeah, I was really expecting them to just continue the
| partnership that Apple announced when the iPhone 16/iOS 18 came
| out, but I suppose it's been pretty much radio silence on both
| fronts since then. Although the established stability and good
| enough-ness that Google offers with Gemini are probably more
| than enough reason for Apple to pivot to them as a model
| supplier instead.
| jquery wrote:
| Yeah. Super disappointing. I may end up switching to Gemini
| entirely at this rate.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I'm sure hiring Jony Ive to design hardware for them didn't
| help.
| ProofHouse wrote:
| It tells you how bad their product management and engineering
| team is that they haven't just decided to kill Siri and start
| from scratch. Siri is utterly awful and that's an understatement,
| for at least half a decade.
| runjake wrote:
| Apple has seemingly confirmed that the Gemini models will run
| under their Private Cloud Compute and so presumably Google would
| not have access to Siri data.
|
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/apple-google-fo...
| cpeterso wrote:
| Neither Apple's nor Google's announcement says Siri will use
| Gemini models. Both announcements say, word for word, "Google's
| technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple
| Foundation Models". I don't know what that means, but Apple and
| Google's marketing teams must have crafted that awkward wording
| carefully to satisfy some contractual nuance.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| Check again:
| https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2010760810751017017?s=20
|
| "These models will help power future Apple Intelligence
| features, including a more personalized Siri coming this
| year."
| runjake wrote:
| 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."
| baxtr wrote:
| Mostly likely the wording was crafted by an artificially
| intelligent entity.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Apple likely wants to post-train a per-trained model,
| probably along with some of Google's heavily NDA'ed training
| techniques too.
| locusofself wrote:
| I wonder if this will my original homepods interesting to talk to
| or if they won't provide this on older devices.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite
| easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud
| Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my
| HomePods all the time, and it's working great.
| apparent wrote:
| How do you do this on a HomePod? I could definitely see Apple
| limiting this to newer hardware, as a way to bump sales.
| bflesch wrote:
| So this surely means that in the medium term Google will siphon
| off all of the iCloud data. A dark pattern here, a new EULA popup
| for the user to accept there, and just like with copilot on
| windows the users will "allow" Apple to share all data with
| Google.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I wouldn't expect this to happen, as Apple's resistance against
| this would be too strong. The data of Google's paying
| [enterprise] customers stays private as well, so the safeguards
| are in place already.
| gehsty wrote:
| The actual transactions around this deal will be interesting -
| will Google simply withold $1B from their search deal, will they
| pay it then Applepay it back (or a split). I doubt we'll even
| know.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| given that gemini 3 pro is presumably a relatively small model it
| wouldn't be too surprising to see an even more optimized model
| fit into latest iphones. I wish we knew the data behind gemini 3
| flash because if my estimation that it's <50b is true, holy shit.
| mudkipdev wrote:
| Google has Gemini Nano for on-device capabilities but basically
| never uses it and defers to cloud models instead
| hashta wrote:
| I'm a long time Android user and almost switched to iPhone last
| year. Mostly because I use macOS and wanted better integration
| and also wanted to try it. Another big factor was the AI
| assistant. I stayed with Android because I think Google will win
| here. Apple will probably avoid losing users to their biggest
| competitor by reaching rough parity using the same models
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Google already pays Apple billions each year to be the default
| search engine on iPhones. But that lucrative partnership briefly
| came into question after Google was found to hold an illegal
| internet search monopoly.
|
| In September, a judge ruled against a worst-case scenario outcome
| that could have forced Google to divest its Chrome browser
| business.
|
| The decision also allowed Google to continue to make deals such
| as the one with Apple."
|
| How much is Google paying Apple now
|
| If these anti-competitive agreements^1 were public,^2 headlines
| could be something like,
|
| (A) "Apple agrees to use Google's Gemini for AI-powered Siri for
| $[payment amount]"
|
| Instead, headlines are something like,
|
| (B) "Apple picks Google's Gemini to run Ai-powered Siri"
|
| 1. In other words, they are exclusive and have anticompetitive
| effects
|
| 2. Neither CNBC nor I are suggesting that there is any
| requirement for the parties to make these agreements public. I am
| presenting a hypothetical relating to headlilnes, (A) versus (B),
| as indicated by the words "If" and "could"
| ericmay wrote:
| It's probably anti-competitive, but I'm not sure about your
| argument which is that Apple and Google must disclose details
| of their business relationships just because they are Apple and
| Google. You could maybe argue something like this should be a
| requirement of publicly traded companies, but the long-term
| effect there would be fewer publicly traded companies so they
| don't have to disclose every deal they make.
| willdotphipps wrote:
| Why couldn't Apple pull their finger out of their asses and make
| their own AI nonsense better then Crap GPT?
| Yash16 wrote:
| Yes, the Gemini models are really good right now--especially the
| image models. The Nano Banana Pro model looks super promising.
| I'm planning to integrate image generation into mobile apps and
| other platforms. Apple has massive distribution, but it still
| feels like they haven't fully integrated this kind of tech yet,
| so users have to rely on third-party apps to get top-quality
| results.
|
| At the moment, I'm using https://picxstudio.com to generate
| 4K-quality images with the Nano Banana Pro model, but my goal is
| to build my own app that delivers the same level of quality and
| control.
| apitman wrote:
| > After careful evaluation, we determined that Google's
| technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple
| Foundation Models
|
| Sounds like Apple Foundation Models aren't exactly foundational.
| lvl155 wrote:
| This is the sad state of Apple right now. It is ridiculous that
| they basically had unlimited access to TSMC and achieved nothing
| in AI. Management is a joke.
| throwfaraway4 wrote:
| Ask the shareholders if they're a joke
| asadotzler wrote:
| Tim Cook replaced paying customers with Wall St. That's not a
| win for any of us except Apple shareholders, a number far,
| far lower than Apple users.
| estearum wrote:
| During his tenure as CEO, Tim Cook has _added $700 million per
| day_ in enterprise value to Apple. Per day! For 14 years!
| soperj wrote:
| It's hilarious how Apple can't compete in the space and so many
| people here are just saying "Smart move by Apple" as if they had
| another choice at this point. It's not like they haven't tried.
| pretext-1 wrote:
| If they wanted to, they could throw massive amounts of cash on
| it like Google and Facebook are, with the latter poaching Apple
| employees with 200$ million pay packages:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/meta-poac...
|
| But why on earth would they do that? It's both cheaper and
| safer to buy Google's model, with whom they already have a
| longstanding relationship. Examples include the search engine
| deal, and using Google Cloud infrastructure for iCloud and
| other services. Their new "private cloud compute" already runs
| on GCP too, perfect! Buying Gemini just makes sense, for now.
| Wait a few years until the technology becomes more
| mature/stable and then replace it with their own for a
| reasonable price.
| soperj wrote:
| Why did they even have Ruoming Pang on staff? Because they
| were trying. Failing, and then saying we're waiting is
| objectively hilarious.
| asadotzler wrote:
| No, they couldn't, because all current and future ethe
| training hardware is already tied up by contracts from the
| frontier labs. Apple could not simply buy its way in given
| how constricted the supply is.
| lolive wrote:
| What happens to on-device intelligence? Does it stay a massive
| part of the Apple Intelligence offer? Or can we expect everything
| to be offloaded to the cloud?
| tolerance wrote:
| This morning I was wondering what happened to whatever
| arrangement I thought Apple had with OpenAI. In a way I think
| OpenAI is a competitor and "new money". Pairing with Google makes
| sense especially considering that this is "normie-facing"
| technology. And from what I recall, a lot of Apple fans prefer
| "Hey Google" in their cars over CarPlay. Or something to that
| effect.
| 34679 wrote:
| Apple picks [ad company's] [ai ad server] to power Siri.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Old news now I think, but good news. Except for my Apple Watch I
| have given up using Siri, but I use Gemini and think it is good
| in general, and awesome on my brother's Pixel phone.
|
| Because Apple Silicon is so good for LLM inferencing, I hope they
| also do a deal for small on-device Gemma models.
| worldsavior wrote:
| How Apple has made some of the greatest phones in history,
| amazing engineering, and a lot more, but just can't make a simple
| model to run locally on the phone when many others did?
| toroszo wrote:
| can they ask siri to fix the tahoe catastrophe please
| OJFord wrote:
| My experience with Gemini (3 Flash) has been pretty funny, not
| _awful_ (but worse than Kimi K2 or GPT 5.2 Mini), but it 's just
| so much worse at (or rather hyper focused on) following my custom
| instructions, I keep getting responses like:
| The idiomatic "British" way of doing this ...
| Alternatively, for an Imperial-style approach, ...
| As a professional software engineer you really should ...
|
| in response to programming/Linux/etc. questions!
|
| (Because I just have a short blurb about my educational
| background, career, and geography in there, which with every
| other model I've tried works great to ensure British spelling, UK
| information, metric units, and cut the cruft because I know how
| to mkdir etc.)
|
| It's given me a good laugh a few times, but just about getting
| old now.
| Animats wrote:
| Will Apple and Google merge now? That would create a new #1,
| bigger than NVidia.
|
| It would take US antitrust approval, but under Trump, that's for
| sale.
| paxys wrote:
| I wonder if we will see them take the final step and just make
| Gemini the default AI assistant on iPhone.
|
| Might sound crazy but remember they did exactly this for web
| search. And Maps as well for many years.
|
| This way they go from having to build and maintain Siri (which
| has negative brand value at this point) and pay Google's huge
| inference bills to actually charging Google for the privilege.
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